I put my knuckles into my mouth and bit them. They are scarred to this day. I remember that I tried to picture Sharon as she spoke. How she was sitting. The position of her hands and legs. And I wondered if that was mischief in her voice or pique. Was she letting Fitzpiers see that she was a trifle put out by all the other women who had been granted a prior peek at whatever he was about to show her?

His reply was confident and complimentary. ‘I can’t think of anybody else I’d rather show it to,’ I swear I heard him say.

Sharon’s laugh rang out again. I accepted that by now Fitzpiers must have seen her tonsils. I picked out the unmistakable sounds of a chair being pushed back, a footfall, the teeth of a zip slowly separating. And Sharon’s voice, with laughter still in it, wickedly slangy: ‘In that case you’d better bring it over here and give me a dekko.’

I clung swooning to the bannisters.

For a moment I thought I might have passed out indeed, lost an hour of my life, because the next thing I heard was the sound of turning pages and Sharon reading, as if from an essay or a lecture, ‘Thermo-nuclear time, as perceived in extremity by any one of J.G. Ballard’s isolated protagonists, can be paralleled in Thomas Hardy by the minute accretions of the past that go to form and determine the present for all of his tragically modern and therefore entirely un-free heroes; that scene where Henry Knight (literally benighted) clings to a Cornish cliff and stares into the mystery he shares with the merest fossil creates a frisson that is quintessentially Ballardian…’ But then it dawned on me that this was only a blind, a ruse, a trespass on my credulity; that Sharon and Fitzpiers were faking an SF seminar, speaking words that had no meaning while they were all the time hideously entwined. Certainly there were one or two dreadful things that Sharon couldn’t possibly be doing to Fitzpiers while she was reading aloud from his paper, but there was no limit to the number of dreadful things he could be doing to her. I felt let down. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I felt betrayed. It was absolutely against the spirit of the thing that I should be deceived. It wasn’t necessary and it wasn’t fair. There was supposed to be something in this for everybody.