Naturally, I wasted no time procuring the photographs of Mrs Flatman that Mrs Lisberg had taken. It had never once occurred to me to doubt that they would, in due course, be developed, laughed over, and stashed away in those drawers which I was in the habit of regularly searching anyway, every time the Flatmans asked me round to baby-sit. In the course of the last year I had gone through the Flatman’s personal belongings with a toothcomb, and although there had been a few things worth lingering over – items of Rabika’s underwear, the odd holiday snap, inexplicable bits of pink rubber tubing which I took to be part of the mystery of marriage – I never felt that my fervent anticipation had ever been properly repaid. But now I knew what I was looking for and I didn’t expect to be disappointed. Even the search was part of the excitement. No sooner had the shooting-brake pulled out of the drive than I was down on my hands and knees turning up carpets and looking under mattresses. And if Mrs Flatman had come back early because she had forgotten something, and found me with my trousers round my ankles, and up to my elbows in her lingerie – well, that would have been part of the excitement also.

I suppose I must date from this period the growth of my affection for pornography. To this day I cannot walk into a newsagent’s and see those rows of men’s magazines without remembering the sweet furtive trance in which I went about for weeks, oblivious to all else, until I at last found Rabika’s photographs. And whenever I hear the argument advanced that pornography degrades women I recall the moral condition to which this search reduced me. But don’t think that you detect any grievance in my voice when I insist that pornography exists primarily to degrade the looker: I was getting what I wanted.

And of course the record was, once I had found it – Rabika frozen for ever on the crossbar of her hammock, Rabika dumped for all time in her garden wheelbarrow – more shocking than the actuality. From the context, those photographs isolated the gesture; from the meandering innocence of flux, they plucked the wicked promise of the moment; from the self-pleasing grace of a frolic, they stole the titillation of a pose. I had found what I wanted all right and I had come to know, already, the superior prurience of art over life.

But I had trouble getting Monty Frankel to see it my way.