I recommend that at one time or another in a busy life devoted to marital, extra-marital or premarital copulations everybody ought to do a little Peeping Tomism. I tell you it sure looks different as a spectator sport. It has to be one of the funnier things man does.

Not that I was out there in the bush laughing. Nor enjoying myself hugely as he filled her glass and she filled his and they clinked their glasses in a soft toast and drank. No. What I was as a matter of fact thinking of was going to the nearest fire-box and smashing the glass and turning in at least a three-alarm fire call. I thought of telephoning a sheriff’s substation and reporting a burglary. My house had been broken into.

They exchanged smiles: they exchanged kisses; he fondled her knee; he bent forward tenderly and kissed the woolen swell of her breast. My wife has undistinguished tits. It was grotesque: that this comedy of hands tongues knees should be causing me this suffocating anguish. That it should push me so close to the edge of an obscene madness.

I couldn’t hear anything: I tried lip-reading. It didn’t do me any good to say to myself that I’d clothed fed housed the bitch inside. One doesn’t feel betrayed. Or cheated. One may say that to oneself but I don’t think that betrayed is the word for what one feels. I think the thing that was driving me mad crouched there in the bush outside his window was that some sort of parody seemed to be going on. So I, once, had stroked her leg, bent down and kissed a stockinged toe. Manipulated my tongue so thrusting it into her mouth. It was that sort of mirrored obscenity that was doing it to me. I could feel a scream begin to accumulate in me.

I was hidden from the street. Her back was toward me. She squatted with her weight on her right buttock her right arm supporting her at a stiff angle to the floor. She had the glass it was a long-stemmed wineglass in her left hand. I could see her profile. Her lips looked faintly swollen, her eyelids heavy. He was full-length on the floor on his elbows cupping his wineglass in both his palms his head above her skirted thighs. He had thin fair hair, a thin narrow face. Now suddenly he sort of snaked himself forward on his elbows, an Indian in the tall corn, still holding the wineglass cupped and put his mouth to the swollen wool of her sweater at precisely where the invisible nipple was. This time he kept it there. He chewed on this gently for a while then as gently bit it then not as gently demonstrating a rising passion pushed his face deeper into the soft expensive wool. It was a cue, a signal, the flare sent up in the night. Her chin went up. She put her head back. Her short hair fell away from her skull. She closed her eyes in a modest ecstasy. He nibbled for a while. Apparently he decided that the taste of even good English wool had its limits. He withdrew his mug. He carefully put the long-stemmed wineglass down. With his left hand he rolled up the front of her sweater. There was her suntanned abdomen the waistband of the skirt tightly ridging it. His right hand expert covert and sure went about her to make its way under the sweater to unhook her brassiere.