I fled to the shower but I was too slow, she got in as well. We reenacted the battle of Custer’s Last Stand. Later, I found that it had been only half-past eleven in the morning after all; it’s a poor thing if a chap’s own wife lies to him, don’t you think?

Then she drove us over to Gorey in the East of the Island for a surprise luncheon at ‘The Moorings’ where the shellfish are very good. Johanna kept on looking at me anxiously as though she feared I might faint at table. On the way home, for some obscure, American reason, she stopped to buy me a huge bottle of multi-vitamin pills.

Jock was still out. Johanna and I sat on the lawn in the sun and drank hock and seltzer. She will not usually drink in the afternoons but I explained that it was Oscar Wilde’s birthday and, who knows, it may well have been.

In the evening we went to a dinner-party on the Isle of Alderney, which has been aptly described as 1,500 alcoholics clinging to a rock. It was a delicious dinner but the flight home in Sam’s little Piper was terrifying: he smelled of drink.

Jock was in the kitchen when we returned. He was by no means drunk by his standards but there was a betraying woodenness about his face and gait which suggested that his Jersey chums had not drunk the ten pounds unassisted.

Johanna, who was ‘excused games’ as we used to say at Roedean, went to bed.

‘Well, Jock, any news?’

‘Not really Mr Charlie, but I got a few night-lines laid, you might say. Wasted a bit of time on a bloke who turned out to be a Guernsey: well, I didn’t know, did I?’

‘I believe they wear a different sort of pullover.’

‘Well I’m not a bloody milliner, am I?’

‘No, Jock. Press on.’

‘Well, some of the Jerseys seemed sort of interested and I reckon one or two of them would have opened up a bit if their mates hadn’t bin there. Anyway, I got one of them coming here tomorrow night to play dominoes; I pretended I’d pinched a bottle of your Scotch.’

‘Pretended?’

‘Yeah. Oh, and I took on an old geezer to come and help out in the garden a few hours a week, hope that’s all right. He seemed a right old character, met ’im in the pub at Carrefour Selous, the governor there says the old geezer knows every inch of Jersey and never had a bath in ’is life.’

‘What a splendid chap he must be, I long to meet him. What is that you are eating?’

‘Cormbeef samwidge.’

‘With lots of mustard?’

‘’Course.’

‘And thickly-sliced onions, I daresay?’

‘Right.’

‘The bread sounds fresh and crusty.’

‘Oh, all right, let me finish this and I’ll make you one.’

‘How you read my mind!’ I marvelled.

‘Mr Charlie?’