My route home took me through relatively undamaged areas that were free of roadblocks and time-consuming diversions. My elderly neighbour Fred Curtis was out mowing his front lawn and gave me a cheery wave as I turned into my driveway. He stopped his labours and came over. My heart sank - Fred could be very talkative and hard to get away from; but he had always been a good neighbour and very kind to me, so I owed it to him to be sociable. Besides, I’d left a spare set of my house keys with him, just in case, so I needed to get them back from him.

“Been a few more aftershocks while you were away,” he told me. “Some of yer crockery fell onto the floor, an’ I swept it up. I hope there’s been no other damage.”

I had already noticed fresh cracks in the concrete driveway, and Fred’s news made me apprehensive about what I might see when I got inside.

“What’s the water situation?” I asked.

“We still gotta boil any from the tap before drinkin’ it,” he said glumly. “But they had ten-litre containers o’ spring water in the supermarket, so I gotcha a couple before they ran out. Ya’ll find ’em in yer kitchen.”

“Bless you, Fred.” I gave him a quick hug and a peck on the cheek, then turned to unpack my stuff from the car.

Once alone in my house, I was tempted to open Fenella’s email message straight away; but I can be self-disciplined sometimes, and this time I wanted to ensure that I would be able to spend as much time as necessary to read and ponder about what Fenella had written, without the distraction of outstanding major chores waiting to be done.

First I went on a tour of inspection to see what if any new damage had occurred. After sweeping up my broken crockery, Fred had left the debris on a piece of newspaper on my kitchen table so that I could see what had been broken; it was just a cup and saucer, a glass and a couple of plates that I had left to dry on the bench beside the sink. Elsewhere, apart from some small cosmetic cracks in wall plastering, everything seemed to be intact.

Maintaining my self-discipline, I unpacked, put the clothes I had worn into the washing basket, laid out the clothes I’d need for my return to work the next day, fixed myself a lunch of tuna and lettuce salad sandwiches and a beer, took a chicken casserole and a pottle of cooked rice out of the freezer to thaw for my evening meal, then at last sat down with my tablet to read what Fenella had written.

What I found began with a story that appalled me – a tale of bigotry and sexual abuse, though not abuse of the kind that conventionally goes by that name.

Fenella had been the only child of intensely religious parents for whom expressions like “the world, the flesh and the Devil”, “sins of the flesh” and “burning in hell” actually meant something concrete. They were active members of an evangelical church congregation that, while not a cult, was nonetheless very tightly knit.

In spite of what her parents and their co-religionists sought to inculcate into their kids, Fenella and her friends in the church community seemed to develop a healthy curiosity about sex and awareness of its pleasurable possibilities, together with sufficient smarts to hide their erotic explorations from parents and others who would disapprove. By the time they were thirteen, Fenella and two girlfriends in particular, Helen and Liz, had formed a tight triangle of passionate friendship and surreptitious lesbian experimentation.

Unfortunately, unbeknown to the other two, Helen had begun to keep a diary in which she recorded their activities and pleasures in very explicit detail. Worse, she had started taking it to school with her, where it was found in her desk by another girl in their class, Valerie, who had become jealous at being excluded by the trio. Valerie not only stole the diary; she also took to gleefully sharing its contents with her own friends. It was not long before knowledge of the diary spread to adults in the church community. Valerie’s parents confiscated it and handed it to the church leadership.

The ensuing scandal traumatized Fenella and left an impact that lasted for years thereafter. She was stigmatized as the ringleader of the three, as the source of her friends’ “corruption”. In addition, her parents, having been pilloried as being responsible for allowing their daughter to fall into ways of “abominable sin”, visited on her the full weight of their anger at being thus shamed. On pain of ostracism, they were ordered to submit her to treatment by a pair of self-proclaimed “therapists” who professed to be able to “cure unnatural fleshly desires”. The “treatment” went on for two years, and all Fenella wrote about it was: “I can’t begin to describe what they did to me”.

(I broke down in tears of rage and anguish and had to stop reading at this point. It was nearly half an hour before I felt calm enough to be able to continue.)

What brought Fenella’s ordeal by “therapy” to an end was her parents’ death in a car crash, and her subsequent adoption by her mother’s older brother John Hazelhurst and his wife Amy. They shared none of her parents’ beliefs or attitudes, and had been increasingly concerned about what was being done to her. They were a caring and loving couple, about whom she wrote with fondness and gratitude, and they did what they could to undo the damage that had been done to her still-growing sexual self, but the scars had already run deep beyond their ability to bring healing.

Had her parents lived, they would probably have done all they could to “protect” her from a university education. John and Amy recognized and treasured her potential for academic brilliance and made considerable sacrifices to ensure that she had every opportunity to develop it.

By the time our paths crossed, the intervening few years had done little to repair and untwist her injured and conflict-ridden sexuality. She longed for female sexual contact, yet the prospect of it revived the trauma of those early teen years and drove her to shrink back, just as she had suddenly frozen when my caresses crossed a threshold of intimacy beyond which, despite intense desire, she could not bear to go. I can’t, she had moaned, I wish I could… Now I could see why.

Oh my poor darling Fen…!

(Here again I had to stop reading again for a while and take a dose of one of my customary cures in times of emotional turmoil. I drew my bedroom curtains, lay down on the bed and, with eyes closed, let the music of J S Bach imprint its sweetness and its magisterial order on my soul. By the time I had finished listening to his Concerto for Two Violins, the long-remembered pain of Fenella’s rejection of me had been soothed if not completely healed by the balm of understanding.)

After staying on to complete a linguistics MA at Massey University, Fenella went to Paris for five years on a doctoral scholarship at the Sorbonne, where she researched the life and work of an obscure socialist poet who had been active in the French Resistance but had ended up, after a period in the ghastly farce of the “model” concentration camp of Theresienstadt, in one of the last batches of Jews to be gassed at Auschwitz. Her sex life during that time continued to be a struggle against the legacy her parents had left her - attempts to satisfy her naturally strong sexual appetite with men alternating with tentative encounters with women that always stopped short of consummation - but one in which she made some gains, emerging with a determination to free herself from the shackles of her past.

One of the people Fenella got to know in the course of her studies played a significant part in her struggle.

Claudine Moulin, besides being descended from a relative of a French Resistance leader who had known and worked with the poet she was researching, was also a lesbian psychosexual therapist, whose offer of treatment she accepted. She eventually broke off the treatment when she saw that Claudine’s principal aim was not to liberate her to enter into relationships with other women but rather to possess Fenella for herself; looking back on her revolt against that attempt to corral her she saw it as a milestone in her own progress – an assertion of her will to be sexually free.

And now her story reached a decisive turning point, with the entry into the narrative of Pilar Díaz Fernandez, the tanguera of Buenos Aires, who in Fenella’s words “taught my heart to dance as well as my body.”

I didn’t need to go to her Facebook page to visualize that statuesque woman in the photograph.

Back in our student days I had known Fenella to be a keen dancer, but had never known her to have any specific interest in Latin American dancing, let alone tango. But once she landed in Buenos Aires, the music and the dance hooked her and turned into a passion - in more senses than one.

Her arrival there was the result of an invitation by the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the University of Buenos Aires, where a linguistics professor had come across a reference to her MA thesis while doing a literature search on the internet. And it was Professor Caballero and his wife who introduced her to the Buenos Aires tango world in which she was to meet the woman who all but literally danced her into bed.

It was as if the dance, and the music, atmosphere and culture that were inseparable from it, were vital elements that her body and soul had been waiting for all her life. So completely did she surrender to this new addiction that before long she was attracting compliments wherever she went dancing and was eagerly sought as a partner by men and women alike.

Pilar was an habituée of one of the dance clubs Fenella frequented. One evening she introduced herself to Fenella during a break between dances, bought her a drink, and sat her down at a table on the edge of the dance floor. She complimented her and expressed pleased surprise at a foreigner being so seemingly at home with Argentina’s national dance. And then…

“She spoke quietly,” Fen wrote, “and she never forced herself on me, but right from the start I felt there was something compelling about her. Whether on or off the dance floor she had this incredible combination of earthiness and elegance, passion and poise. You couldn’t call her beautiful in a conventional sense, but I found her devastatingly attractive. I knew instantly that I wanted her, and I knew from the moment she casually touched my bare arm that she wanted me and was going to have me – that it was just a matter of when and how, not if.

“She said she’d been watching me develop my dancing skills, and had noticed that I danced differently with women than with men – that with a woman, whether I was leading or following, my movements were more confident, more free, fluent and flowing, and that I always seemed to be enjoying myself more. Then she looked me straight in the eyes and asked me if I also had sex with women as well as dancing with them.

“I think if anyone else had asked me that question, so out of the blue like that, I might have got up and walked away. But with her, even though I didn’t yet know her name, it just seemed to be a natural continuation from what she had been saying before…

“I said I hadn’t done. She raised her eyebrows in obvious surprise, then said, with a quiet smile, 'But you want to, don’t you?' And all I could do was nod helplessly.

“She stood up, held out a hand in the conventional way a man invites a woman to tango, and we danced together, with her leading me. And the wordless communication from her body to mine was simply indescribable. So much more than just technique. She had me making moves that I’d seen and longed to try but hadn’t dared to. It was as if I’d somehow melted into her and we’d become one.

“We stayed together after our first bracket of dances. When the next one started she said: ‘Now you lead me.’ She was taller than me, and I thought this was going to be a bit challenging, but she knew how to make it work. And I led her, with a confidence I had never felt until that moment. And this time I felt her melt into me. I can’t find words for how marvellous that felt.”

I had to stop reading again, but this time it was because the image of Fenella and her lover-to-be in each other’s arms was taking hold of me and I was feeling myself also start to melt, with the quickening of pulse and breathing, the first electric currents of arousal running through me, the tingling of my nipples, and the growing wetness between my thighs, that could only lead to one conclusion.

I returned to my bedroom and quickly undressed. I got my trusty rabbit and lube out of their drawer in my nightstand, and spread out on the bed the large towel that I keep handy – just occasionally I squirt quite copiously, and I had a feeling that this might be one of those occasions.

Sometimes I like to take time and make leisurely love to myself before getting down to the nitty-gritty. I begin by letting my hands wander caressingly over areas of my body that are not directly erogenous, savouring the sensation of skin brushing against my palms and fingers, and only gradually working towards a concentrated focus on my sexually sensitive places. But now my need was urgent, and this was going to be a quick, greedy, intense, down-and-very-dirty bout of self-fucking.

For starters I drizzled lube onto my breasts and nipples and gave them a through going-over with hands and fingers, which got my clit twitching and my cunt dripping. Then, without more ado, I set to work with my rabbit, and within minutes my first orgasm sent me bucking and screaming and gushing.

I switched the rabbit off, slid it out and enjoyed sucking and licking it clean while a long series of delicious orgasmic aftershocks surged through me. Then I fished out my favourite penis-shaped vibrator, lubricated it thoroughly with my own cunt-juice, gently inserted it into my arse and turned it on to vibrate at its lowest setting. I slid it out and back in repeatedly, turning it this way and that, gradually increasing the penetration and the speed and strength until it was deep inside me and sending wave after convulsive wave of pleasure through my whole body. By this time I had four fingers in my cunt and was pounding my clit with the heel of that hand and shrieking like a banshee on steroids. It must have been at the third or fourth orgasm that I pulled my fingers out of my cunt to release a hot, pulsing, jetting fountain.

Shaken to my very core, I dozed after this intense self-ravishing. It was early evening by the time I was fully awake again.

I wondered what Fenella might be doing at this time. Would she be preparing for the next day’s work, cooking herself a meal, doing some other routine chore about the house? Curled up with a drink while watching TV or reading? Might she have been thinking about me…perhaps writing me another email…or might she even have been pleasuring herself as I had been doing? The more I wondered, the more keenly I wanted to know.

I got up lazily, showered, decided not to dress again in the clothes I had been wearing, and instead put on my sexiest négligée. Then I punched her home number into my cellphone.

She answered after just a few rings.