At this I looked hard into Sharon’s eyes, but they were limpid. If there was a woman anywhere freer of intention I would like to have seen her. ‘And then all the wives could get up a skimmity ride,’ I suggested, just to keep it equal.

Fitz had an even brighter idea. ‘What about the mottoes inside the Christmas crackers? Imagine the kiddies’ smiling faces when they unfold the riddle in the party-hat and find, Question: Which do we live on – a splendid or a blighted planet? Answer: A blighted one. Ha! Ha! Ha!’

I had one too. ‘How about, All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.’

‘Yours wins,’ laughed Fitzpiers.

‘It’s beginning to look,’ said Sharon, after another ten minutes of this kind of jollification, ‘as though we don’t take the idea of a Hardy Christmas story very seriously.’

We didn’t.

‘And it’s also beginning to look,’ she went on, ‘as though there’s no point in my asking you to knock me a couple out for next Christmas.’ She fixed me with a long stare which I recognised to mean that she considered that I owed her.

‘A couple?’ I wasn’t arguing with the obligation, I just wasn’t certain what she wanted me to pay with.

‘One then.’

‘Sharon, are you proposing that I write you a Christmas story that you can pass off as being by Thomas Hardy?’

She sat up and drew the bed clothes up to her neck. I got the impression that she was drawing a line below which she would never again do me any favours. ‘Forget it,’ she said.

I was staggered. ‘Sharon,’ I said, ‘what makes you think that I am capable of writing a Christmas story that I or you or both of us together could foist upon an astonished world as Thomas Hardy’s?’

‘You’re always saying he writes trash.’

‘That doesn’t mean that I can duplicate it.’

‘Just hang on a minute,’ said Fitzpiers. He hadn’t been able to follow very much of this, but if Sharon knew some way of making money by counterfeiting Thomas Hardy he would be in on it if I wouldn’t. He considered himself to be a gifted copyist, and, as he later told Sharon, he had always secretly preferred parodies to their originals anyway. One of his major points about science fiction was that it was essentially a pastiche of all other narrative forms. ‘Just hang on here. Surely the three of us could in fact put our heads together and come up with a pretty passable imitation, particularly as we’re talking about a genre that we’ve all agreed he never could have mastered. We don’t need to do too good a job – in fact the clumsier we make it the more authentic it will feel.’