How could I manoeuvre her away from Lykiard? Her large, ramshackle apartment in an expensive Bayswater block was a museum of unmet needs. Dusty photographs of her mother, sitting stiffly in the garden of some private mental clinic near Boston, hung side by side with stills of jack-booted parade-ground troops from Triumph of the Will.

“Gorgeous men … just so glamorous,” Sally commented wistfully, settling her icy heroes next to a magazine profile of Israeli kibbutz sentries, her other sexual dream. She attended Ouspenski seminars, had taken a parachute jump at Elstree Flying Club, loathed her department-store tycoon father, yet treasured her schoolgirl letters from him and wore his old silk smoking jacket as a dressing gown, inhaling the ancient odours of sweat and tobacco like healing balm. Naïvely, I asked if they had committed incest. “I wish we had,” she mused nostalgically. “Jesus, I wanted him to—I know what a deprived childhood really means…”

All the way to Brighton she played happily with the children in the back of the car. Was she, I wondered hopefully, trying to make herself one of my daughters? After ten years of Miriam’s level common sense it was difficult to hunt the zigzag contours of Sally’s mind. The Hell’s Angels guarding the entrance to the concert site were wearing her beloved black leather and death’s-head insignia, but she gave them scarcely a glance.

We parked behind a tower of steel scaffolding high enough to launch a space vehicle and walked through the buses and location vans to the performers’ canvas tent. Lykiard was holding court with his Arts Laboratory groupies—intense young women, concept artists all, with the intimidating stares of gangsters’ molls. Anyone over thirty was a race enemy, and having three children instantly marked me down for retribution. Sally’s presence gave me a temporary laissez-passer, to be revoked, I was made to feel, at the slightest betrayal of such bourgeois inclinations as wanting an ice cream for the children or a hygienic lavatory. Lykiard informed them that I would read a text celebrating the perverse sexuality of President Kennedy’s widow, and there was a momentary flicker of interest behind the heavy shades, soon replaced by a stony hostility. Class assumptions and exclusivities survived strongly amid the rock amplifiers and Warholiana.

Between the sudden bursts of rock music, as the engineers wired their circuits, the children were whispering to Sally.

“Me too,” Sally agreed. Entrusting the picnic hamper to Lykiard, she spotted a sign behind the stage, on which was printed FREE TOILET. An arrow pointed towards a wood of beech trees. Like characters in a Magritte painting, people wandered in a dislocated way among the trees, whose trunks steamed with urine. Burroughs hovered briefly into view, as formal as an undertaker in his natty suit.