‘This young man,’ said Camilla, laughing and trying to disengage herself from his attentions, ‘has been attempting to persuade me to drive him and his friend Pierre – that’s Marat, Barney; you know, the one in the bath – to Exeter, where Pierre has got a cousin.’

I didn’t want to spoil anyone’s fun. Or keep cousins apart. ‘Well why not? We can drop them off on our way back tomorrow,’ I suggested.

‘I’ve already offered them that. They seem to want to go tonight.’

‘Tonight?’ I looked at my watch. It was well gone eleven. Then I looked at Camilla who was high coloured, and at de Sade who was still trying to bite her neck, and at Pierre who had just ambled over in a smart blue suit and a stiff white collared shirt. ‘I suppose it’s not impossible,’ I said. ‘If we left right away.’

Camilla threw me an icy glance. ‘Barney, you know you hate driving on motorways at night.’

I consulted my watch again, as if logistics were all that were on my mind. ‘I guess we wouldn’t go that way at this time,’ I mused aloud. ‘We’d have to take the A303 and the A30 down through Andover and Yeovil. It’s longer, but we’d see more country.’

‘Barney, it’s the middle of the night. We wouldn’t see anything.’

‘J’aime beaucoup la campagne,’ said Pierre.

For some reason that settled it for me. ‘We’ll have to leave right now,’ I told them.

The bright and boyish de Sade made one more dive for Camilla’s throat and let out a loud halloo of jubilation. Marat/Pierre did a backward flip. Together they were breaking down the artificial barriers of mere language. So was Camilla. She eyed me steadily. There was an interrogation in her look which I had to answer. But since none of us was going in for verbalizing I merely shrugged my shoulders. And I refused to meet her gaze.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘On your own head be it!’

[4]

It must have been getting on for two o’clock when Camilla ordered me to stop the car. She had been twisted round in her seat for the whole journey so far, encouraging our multilingual, parti-coloured, but wholly youthful passengers to prattle on about themselves. They were none of them helping me with road signs or looking out for police or paying the slightest attention to the countryside I had kindly offered to drive them through. That is until my headlights picked out that great unsightly tumble of stones, that heap of Druidical litter, which no day or night time traveller on this road can pass by without comment or curiosity.

‘What monstrous place – quel endroit affreux – is this?’ Pierre asked.

I increased pressure on my accelerator.

‘It’s Stonehenge,’ announced Camilla with authority. ‘Slow down, turn left, and stop the car, Barney.’