In fact I took the spool of undeveloped film to a little place I’d sometimes whiled an idle hour away in at the Piccadilly end of Soho. I had planned to be quite casual about it – I wasn’t asking for a service they weren’t offering – but I confess I panicked the minute they wanted my name and address. What did they want those for? To give to the Vice Squad? So that they could send around the boys to beat the identity of my model out of me? The only name I could think of that wasn’t mine was Humbert Humbert. ‘Yes, that is e. .r. .t,’ I said. ‘Yes, e. .r. .t both times.’ I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I felt as if I had descended all at once and for ever into the ranks of the criminally insane. ‘One hundred and eleven the Rue Morgue,’ I said. ‘Yes, that’s g. .u. .e.’

I got out quick smart, clutching my little yellow receipt, and spent the next three days in agony, wondering whether I’d delivered Sharon into the hands of the Mafia. I fully expected, when I went back, to see her photographs on the cover of every magazine on the racks; and you won’t be surprised to learn that I was even a trifle disappointed to see that they weren’t. The transaction was not completed without one small hiccup, however. When I presented my receipt I was shown into the back of the shop where someone imitating Peter Ustinov imitating a mafioso delivered me a moral lecture – a homily I suppose you could call it – on the rights of women in the film processing industry not to have their sensibilities outraged. It seemed I hadn’t warned them at the desk what I was bringing in, and Sharon’s negatives had gone in one bag and not the other. I said I was sorry. Around the walls of this sanctum were ranged magazines promising scenes of even greater abandon and bestiality than were available in the front showrooms My censor looked at me without smiling. I could see that he had sisters in convents all over Sicily whose honour he would cut me into tiny pieces to protect. He took a packet from his inside pocket and spilled the contents on to the table before us. Sharon! Sharon this way, Sharon that way, Sharon the other. ‘Pretty diabolical,’ he said, and he muttered something else that sounded like, In vero disgustoso, ripugnante, stomachevole.

I looked around the room again and then returned to the man’s expression of pure distaste. Along with all the other things I felt, I felt a kind of pride. It wasn’t everybody that could nauseate the Mafia.