I took a turn around the garden, not knowing what to do. I felt poignantly towards myself. Back in Tooting I had found my father and Mrs Flatman more than ever mutually engrossed. I had noticed that Rabika had bites on her neck and carried her arm in a sling and walked with a slight limp. ‘We’ve just bought a hammock,’ she had informed me, while my father was paying for my motoring gloves. I tried to imagine Camilla on her bed, with her toes erect, and wondered how far apart, at this very moment, the left toes were from the right. Finally, too tired for prepositions, I went back into the lane and passed the second half of the night exactly as I’d passed the first, in the front seat of Camilla’s draughty old MG.

Camilla didn’t address a single word to me for three days. On the fourth she delivered me a simple warning. ‘Don’t ever do that again!’ Something in her voice told me that she wasn’t referring to my having spent the night in her sports car.