If Mrs Right is having an affair it will be harder to spot, so the magazines say, and they know best. She won’t buy new clothes, in fact, she’s likely to dress down so that her husband will believe her when she says she’s going to an evening class in mediaeval lute music. Unless she has a career, it will be very difficult for her to get away with it regularly except in the afternoons. Is that why so many women are choosing careers? Is that why Kinsey found that so many prefer sex in the afternoon?

I had a girlfriend once who could only achieve orgasm between the hours of two and five o’clock. She worked in the Botanical Gardens in Oxford where she bred rubber plants. It was tricky work trying to satisfy her, when at any moment a fee-paying visitor with the proper ticket of admission might require advice about Ficus elastica. Nevertheless, passion propelled me and I visited her in the depths of winter, muffled from head to foot, stamping rushes of snow from my boots like a character from Anna Karenina.

I’ve always been fond of Vronsky but I don’t believe in living out literature. Judith was deeply sunk in Conrad. She sat amongst the rubber plants reading Heart of Darkness. The most erotic thing I might have said to her was, ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead.’ The Soviets, I am told, suffer extremely from having to wear wrappings of fur when outside, only to shed down to their knickers when inside. This was my problem. Judith lived in a perpetual hot-house world of shorts and T-shirts. I had to carry my skimpy garments with me or risk a dash through the cold aided only by a duffle-coat. One quiet afternoon after sex on the wood chippings beneath a trailing vine, we had a tiff and she locked me out of the greenhouse. I ran from window to window banging vainly at the panes. It was snowing and I was wearing only my Mickey Mouse one-piece.

‘If you don’t let me in I’ll die.’

‘Die then.’

I decided I was too young to freeze to death. I ran through the streets back to my lodgings with as much insouciance as I could muster. An old-age pensioner gave me 50p for rag week and I wasn’t arrested. We should be thankful for small mercies. I rang Judith to tell her it was all off and would she return my things?

‘I’ve burnt them,’ she said.

Perhaps I’m not meant to have any worldly goods. Perhaps they are blocking my spiritual progress and my higher self continually chooses situations where I will be free of material burdens. It’s a comforting thought, slightly better than being a sucker … Judith’s bottom. I treasure it.

Into the heart of my childish vanities, Louise’s face, Louise’s words, ‘I will never let you go.’ This is what I have been afraid of, what I’ve avoided through so many shaky liaisons. I’m addicted to the first six months. It’s the midnight calls, the bursts of energy, the beloved as battery for all those fading cells. I told myself after the last whipping with Bathsheba that I wouldn’t do any of it again. I did suspect that I might like being whipped, if so, I had at least to learn to wear an extra overcoat. Jacqueline was an overcoat. She muffled my senses. With her I forgot about feeling and wallowed in contentment. Contentment is a feeling you say? Are you sure it’s not an absence of feeling? I liken it to that particular numbness one gets after a visit to the dentist. Not in pain nor out of it, slightly drugged. Contentment is the positive side of resignation. It has its appeal but it’s no good wearing an overcoat and furry slippers and heavy gloves when what the body really wants is to be naked.