And then one hot afternoon, after a darts session at Sam Hall’s had been brought to an end by Mrs Frankel’s incessant coughing and retching, and Sam Hall himself, unable to bear it, had run from the house to the security and quiet of his gallows, I went up to my bedroom, automatically looked out of my bedroom window, and saw Rabika Flatman, not alone and prone and listless in the sun, as I would have expected her, but very much alive and energetic and cavorting with her best friend, Elkie Lisberg, in the children’s paddling-pool – each of them, sweltering and frivolous, wearing only the bottom half of a bikini and absolutely nothing else and daring the other to pose for the sorts of photographs that I believed you could only ever hope to get your hands on if you knew a man who knew a man who’d been to Cairo.

It goes without saying that I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I even felt warmly towards Mrs Frankel whose asthmatic attack I had to thank for my not being somewhere else. But I also knew that such fortune was precarious, that Mrs Lisberg might at any moment remember her laundry, that the sun might go in, that Mrs Flatman might look up. I kept very low and stayed very still beneath my window, and yet from this position and without missing so much as a millionth of a second of the action, I was somehow able to take off all my clothes. Don’t ask me why I did this. I swear it was not with the intention of doing anything to my penis. I suppose I just felt better with it out. And indeed the only time I touched it was to slap it down after I had noticed that it had crept up above the window sill and was still rising of its own accord, as if charmed out of a basket, and threatening me with imminent exposure.