So what am I going to do? I asked Robin on the wall. Robins are very faithful creatures who mate with the same mate year by year. I love the brave red shield on their breast and the determined way they follow the spade in search of worms. There am I doing all the digging and there’s little Robin making off with the worm. Homo sapiens. Blind Nature.

I don’t feel wise. Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?

The facts of my case are not unusual:

The church could tell me, my friends have tried to help me, I could take the stoic course and run from temptation or I could put up sail and tack into this gathering wind.

For the first time in my life, I want to do the right thing more than I want to get my own way. I suppose I owe that to Bathsheba …

I remember her visiting my house soon after she had returned from a six-week trip to South Africa. Before she had gone, I had given her an ultimatum: Him or me. Her eyes, which very often filled with tears of self-pity, had reproached me for yet another lover’s half-nelson. I forced her to it and of course she made the decision for him. All right. Six weeks. I felt like the girl in the story of Rumpelstiltskin who is given a cellar full of straw to weave into gold by the following morning. All I had ever got from Bathsheba were bales of straw but when she was with me I believed that they were promises carved in precious stone. So I had to face up to the waste and the mess and I worked hard to sweep the chaff away. Then she came in, unrepentant, her memory gone as ever, wondering why I hadn’t returned her trunk calls or written poste restante.

‘I meant what I said.’

She sat in silence for about fifteen minutes while I glued the legs back on a kitchen chair. Then she asked me if I was seeing anybody else. I said I was, briefly, vaguely, hopefully.

She nodded and turned to go. When she got to the door she said, ‘I intended to tell you before we left but I forgot.’

I looked at her, sudden and sharp. I hated that ‘we’.

‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘Uriah got NSU from a woman he slept with in New York. He slept with her to punish me of course. But he didn’t tell me and the doctor thinks I have it too. I’ve been taking the antibiotics so it’s probably all right. That is, you’re probably all right. You ought to check though.’