I cannot deny, however, that strains were beginning to show in our private life, irrespective of our efforts not to have one. If I got too drunk at the pub or at a party I pushed Camilla in the direction of other men. I once deliberately left her alone for two hours with Harry Vilbert; and during an evening we spent with my father and Rabika Flatman at their place in Tooting – we went there after leaving a John Arden early – I actually pushed her in the direction of my father. There was nothing I could do about these impulses, they were released by alcohol or social excitation, and rose like a hot spring from molten rock. Choice scarcely entered into it. My needs were upon me. Men cannot live, you see, by bread alone.

The measure of how seriously Camilla viewed my relapse was our being in this cold and aggressively uncomfortable warehouse in the first place, sitting on old tram seats and watching the Combined London Polytechnics’ Theatre of Cruelty Ensemble performing its new adaptation of The persecution and assassination of Marat as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade – or Marat/Sade as it was called by the sorts of people who also referred familiarly, as if they’d had a hand in its writing, to The Dream. It didn’t matter how well Camilla knew the director, she would never have put us through this unless she had had another motive. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but this was her last attempt to get me to come clean about my uncleanness.

‘You just listen to this,’ Camilla urged me, prodding me with her elbows whenever she felt that someone was saying something significant. ‘And sit up straight.’

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