I did what I was told, these being the first words that Camilla had addressed to me since we’d left the party. As I’ve demonstrated before, I’ll do anything for harmony.

‘The heathen temple, you mean?’ The young de Sade was beside himself with intellectual ardour. ‘This is the place Jonathan has been trying to hire to put on a performance of Nng on midsummer’s day. He reckons it’s pretty ironical that the authorities won’t give him permission when all he wants is to restore it to its proper use.’

‘Its proper use?’ (That was me.)

‘Jonathan says it used to be a bronze-age theatre.’

‘Was that before or after it was a prehistoric space station?’ That was me again. I could be pretty cutting with enthusiastic youngsters. Particularly when I was in an ambiguous relation to their enthusiasm for my wife. ‘Actually,’ I went on, ‘it was used for synchronising solar and lunar phenomena. It was able to divide the year into precise halves, quarters, or even eighths, by means of highly sophisticated solistical alignments.’

In fact I didn’t believe a word of this and suspected that Jonathan might well have been right – Stonehenge looked to me as though it had been a place for hippie happenings for the last three thousand years. But I wasn’t going to admit as much to a couple of kids.

‘I favour a more sepulchral/symbolic function myself,’ said Camilla.

I didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Either way it’s pretty uninteresting,’ I said. ‘Shall we get along now?’

‘Oh no, oh please let’s look around it now we’re here,’ the two boys pleaded together.

I didn’t want to be a killjoy but I had to offer it as my opinion that at two in the morning Stonehenge was unlikely to be open to the public. Camilla though, much as she clung fervently to her right to close her own establishment whenever the fancy took her, was not one to accept the closure at any time of what belonged properly to the nation. On many an occasion she had got me to accompany her over the walls of Dundagel castle in the moonlight, and it was almost impossible for her to pass a property appropriated by the National Trust and not want to make a symbolic trespass on it – to claim it back, as it were, and if only fleetingly, from the new feudal landlords. ‘Come on boys,’ she said tonight, although it was only the Department of the Environment she was taking on, ‘I’ll get you in.’

I felt suddenly very sick in the stomach. ‘Camilla, there’s wire all around it,’ I reminded her.

But she was already half out of the car. ‘So what? Pierre’s an acrobat. You saw him leap out of that bath. He can get us over.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not breaking into Stonehenge,’ I insisted.