I was happy to see them both, even though their island hideaway had been the setting for Miriam’s fatal accident. Watching Sally whooping around the children, I realised how strong a memory she had left me of herself. Casually she filled the nursery with scented smoke that had the children’s nostrils flicking like butterfly wings. She regaled them with baffling word games, concocted elaborate family histories for the tribe of plastic trolls that were their latest craze, scandalised them with media gossip from the television world, where she now worked as a news programme researcher. Anyone within range was treated to her eccentric comments on the Vietnam War, Carnaby Street fashions, the latest outrage committed by President Johnson and the British police. She was full of anecdotes about Dalí, whose entourage at Port Lligat she had penetrated, and his voyeuristic delight in watching young couples have sex, without making clear whether she altogether disapproved.

Only when her last amphetamine tablet began to wear off would she become scratchy and silent, rubbing the coolness from her eyes until she could take her handbag and a glass of water upstairs to the bathroom. But I always looked forward to seeing her. She excited me in the way that Miriam had done, and I envied Lykiard his close hold over her wayward imagination.

The 1960s were tailor-made for them. In his office at the Arts Laboratory the pipe-smoking Lykiard logged onto his wall charts the latest outburst of psychedelia, the newest drug craze or exhibition of concept art, like a contented meteorologist registering a summer of unexpected cyclones. Exhibitions of Vietnam atrocities, posters advertising a self-mutilating cabaret performer or an Artaud revival moved beneath his tolerant eyes as if he had put aside all emotion or even, conceivably, not yet experienced this rare condition. For him the end of the world, the imminent nuclear Armageddon against which protestors marched on every weekend, would merely be the ultimate happening, the audience-storming last act in the theatre of cruelty.

Sally, at least, still kept her feelings, though jammed into the wrong pigeonholes in her mind. She thrived on the volatile landscape of the mid-sixties, which made a virtue of psychic damage. Mediated by the TV documentaries which she helped to edit, the civil wars in Algeria, Vietnam, and the Congo became a never-ending group catharsis, a psychological life-support system into which she could plug between her amphetamine highs. Trying to sort all this out had brought her to Shepperton. In Sally’s mind, a near-addicted Scotch drinker blessed with an ox-like liver and three children seemed a model of almost churchgoing rectitude. Once she had offered me her flat tin of amphetamine tablets, but then quickly withdrew them as if tempting me with the fruit of the second forbidden tree.