Palliser Wentwood, Six foot two in his socks, with his shoes (Guardsman's shine) parked tidily under your bed, and a long lean, highly serviceable body therein.
Honey-tongue, good company, fit for any circumstance from the high table to the pub. Many minor talents - the ability to dance any step, to vault a horse and swing from the parallel bars, the capacity to doctor a cow and conduct a fluent auction, to sing loudly the tenor part of most Welsh hymns. To drain a swamp and grow the most splendid vegetables.

Now with these manifest talents, what can a man do?

As a young man, the line was clear: - marry a rich woman, that was the ticket. Fortune had been kind, and put in his path Salomé - delightful, steely enough to follow him to the end of the earth, and copiously endowed with wealth. Nature and society had smiled upon him then. Surely they must do so again? As a young man it had been necessary to put himself about to find Salomé, and once found, work had been required to win her. Once again it was necessary to put himself about, but the course was now more cluttered. With wife, daughters, mortgages and grey hair.

He had one last scheme. It had been in his head for some time, but it seemed the last resort, and he had rejected it more than once.

It was bull semen that had brought Theodora Potts - twenty-six, blond curls, blue eyes, white smile, doctorate in veterinary science, little and neat as a sea-horse, - from Melbourne to Bridgwater station. She was to study with the great Dr Jenner Ransfield...

From the moment the terrible old car turned down the drive of Nightingales farm, Theo saw that she was not in any place she had imagined herself to be, nor could she convey anything of what she found - the texture of the air, the atmosphere, the graininess, grimness, peculiarity, constraint, derangement. She had no words to do it, nor was it possible to explain to those cheery folk living their wide open lives in the sun the existence of this parallel universe. It was as if by crossing the world she had dropped through into another version, where people spoke and acted in recognisable ways, where trees were trees and cars were cars, but as if interpreted by another advertising agency using the same specifications.

Genista's jolly crowd of friends all agreed on one thing - that she was the sanest person in the world, and knew her own mind. It was only this, some asserted, that kept her married to that womanising serpent; it was this, according to others, that kept Crawford interested in her now that her looks, at their best idiosyncratic, had faded, and middle age crept spiderlike across her skin. Genista understood perfectly well why she and Crawford were still married to each other, but this was the one piece of information she did not pass on to her concatenation of friends all over the world - or her cattery or claque or coven in Crawford terminology. As opposed to your harem, seraglio, flock, or gaggle of groupies, rejoined Genista, who liked a good crossword, and laughed.

'You wish to go the Faust,' Crawford repeated, not attempting to argue.

It was Genista's palpable sanity that made her behaviour that evening, both at the opera house and afterwards, all the more remarkable. Genista had never done anything unpredictable before. Their marriage was founded upon her sanity and his little indulgences - it was a pact, a binding covenant of mutual agreeability, a quid pro quo of his charm and money and sexuality for her strength and humour.

He forgot that some treaties have expiry dates.

My doctoral supervisor was the handsomest man in New Zealand, so all his ideas were good ones.

And this is how, in the summer of 1976, the awkward bookish girl that was Robin Stokes, an elongated, half-baked Audrey Hepburn, with a boy's body and a puzzled expression in her brown eyes, paralysed by shyness, and pathetically unkissed, landed up in a hotbed of sex, religion and marijuana - a virgin, an agnostic, who had never smoked so much as a cigarette in all her twenty years.