Oh, yes, and whenever we hit one particular speed/volume combination an urbane and friendly voice repeatedly said, ‘No, don’t. Don’t. Not tomorrow. No, I really wouldn’t. Not tomorrow. Don’t, please.’

‘All quite fascinating,’ I said heavily when Eric had at last switched everything off. ‘Fascinating. It seems to me, though, that it might not be a good idea to let every Tom, Dick and Harry share this sort of, ah, recondite harmony, perhaps?’

‘Goodness, no. I only do it when I’m alone or with people of quite exceptional emotional stability – like yourself, if I may say so.’

I didn’t – couldn’t – comment on this astonishing assessment of me: I keep my emotional stability and things like that at the bottom of my handkerchief drawer, along with the vibrator and the naughty photographs, as W.H. Auden has probably already said. It was the other part of what he said that drew my fire.

‘Do you mean to say that you sometimes do this sort of thing alone?’ I asked, wonderingly. ‘At night?’

‘Goodness, yes. Often. What have I to be afraid of?’

I didn’t answer that. If he, with his qualifications, didn’t know, it wasn’t my place to tell him. I mean, I wasn’t his bloody Bishop, was I?

He was smart enough, however, to notice that I was becoming moody and he set himself to the task of amusing me, with some success. I yield to few when it comes to telling dirty jokes but it takes a seminary priest to tell a true Catholic story with the right admixture of shyness and authority. He had this art to such a state of perfection that I recall falling about a good deal.

Later, he taught me how to make and drink a ‘nose-dive’ – an art little known outside the campus of the University of Southern California, where Eric had once spent a happy semester teaching the well-nourished undergraduate girls there the full inwardness of Verlaine’s Chansons Pour Elle.