‘Did you?’ He took praise, I noticed, as toast takes butter. He absorbed it, through his skin, as though it were his by custom and by right. I had never seen so much self-content. He actually admired parts of himself – his fingernails, his shirt-cuffs, the knot he’d tied in his shoe-laces – while he talked to us. He was not a close friend of Camilla’s, but they’d been students together and kept more or less in touch. Once or twice a year he would send Camilla a postcard from somewhere exotic, always showing a painting rather than a view, and describing in the manner of Keats rather than in the manner of Lawrence what he had perceived about the customs of the natives, the quality of the light, and above all, of course, the state of the indigenous theatre. I formed the impression, even before I met him, that he communicated with his friends only when he was in the very pink of conceit, and that friendship for him was therefore something he chose to sound whenever he wished to congratulate himself on how far he had travelled. In this he was the very opposite to me, who saw old friends as a kind of guarantee of fellowship in disgruntlement. ‘How are you?’ ‘Vile. How are you?’ ‘The same’ – was my idea of camaraderie. But Jonathan didn’t know where to begin when Camilla asked him how he was – the subject was so epic.

I left them to their congratulations of him and went to talk to some of the actors. Duperret, the Girondist Deputy, turned out to be a second year economics student, and Charlotte Corday, whose nipples I felt I knew better than I knew Camilla’s or Rabika Flatman’s or come to that my own, was a secretary in humanities. The three of us conversed for a while about the new excitement that could be felt at all levels throughout the British theatre, but I drifted away when they started to tell me how daringly experimental Jonathan was. It was part of that very experimentalism, I discovered as I circulated, that Jonathan should have given parts in his production to foreign students temporarily domiciled in England. Apparently none of the lunatics was a native English speaker and even Marat came from Martinique. Jonathan wanted to suggest that the language of madness is universal, a couple of Dutch boys explained to me.

A half an hour later, after dancing had started and the wine going around in little plastic cups had run out, I came upon Camilla, pinned into a corner and being what I suppose one would have to call nuzzled, by the actor who’d played de Sade. He was younger without his make-up than I had realized, fresher faced, leaner. Fresher mannered too. My presence didn’t seem to abash him in the slightest.