We crossed our hearts.

‘Well, two years ago I read a book by a man called Konstantin Raudive. It’s a perfectly respectable book and endorsed by respectable scientists. Raudive claims, indeed proves, that he heard gentle chattering and muttering coming from the unused intervals of tape from his recorder. I had had the same experience but had put it down to the random wireless reception … er, radio?’

‘Wireless is fine with me,’ I said.

‘Oh, good. Well, as I say, I had thought it was the sort of stray reception that people get from hearing-aids and things but after reading Raudive I naturally tested it and found that even on virgin tape I still got the gentle muttering if it was played through on “record” in silence and at a nil recording level. Like Raudive, I found that if I boosted the gain when playing-back it sounded uncommonly like speech, but with quite strange intonations, odd grammatical sequences, random relevance.’

Johanna rose, excused herself gracefully and said that she really had to go to bed. She hates long words, although she is very clever. (Why do I persist in entangling myself with clever women when the only ones I find truly adorable are the transcendentally stupid, the ones whose intellects are bounded on the North by the ability to count to nine? Alas, the latter get rarer every day. ‘Il y a des gens qui rougissent d’avoir aimé une femme, le jour qu’ils aperçoivent qu’elle est bête. Ceux-la sont des aliborons vaniteux, faits pour brouter les chardons les plus impurs de la création, ou les faveurs d’un bas-bleu. La bêtise est souvent l’ornement de la beauté; c’est elle qui donne aux yeux cette limpidité morne des étangs noirâtres et ce calme huileux des mers tropicales.’ I forget who wrote that. Probably not Simone Weil.)

‘Do go on, Fr Tichborne,’ I said when the good nights were over.

‘I say, would you care to drop the “Fr” now?’ he asked. ‘The boys at school call me “Eric” – I can’t imagine why, for it’s not my name, but I quite like it.’

‘Please go on, Eric. And pray call me “Charlie”.’

‘Thank you. Well, once I got the hang of these odd attempts at communication, I found them quite, well …’

‘Mm?’

‘Interesting,’ he said defiantly. ‘Interesting!’

Trying, as ever, like Caesar’s wife, to be all things to all men, I tried to help.

‘But disturbing?’ I guessed.