Later, as I recovered from my reading, I lounged beside Sally and the children on the grassy slopes behind the concert stage. The entire terrain of trees and meadows resembled the aftermath of some harmless and cheerful Waterloo. Bodies lay in the long grass, singly and in pairs, as if they had fallen on the field of battle, while the survivors sat in their square below the stage, many of them wearing the scarlet tunics, gold braid, and epaulettes of the classic English regiments. I envied them all their mastery of make-believe. I had wasted my own youth dissecting cadavers and training to be a military pilot, trying to match myself against the realities of the postwar world. But the 1960s had effortlessly turned the tables on reality. The media landscape had sealed a Technicolor umbrella around the planet and then redefined reality as itself.

Drowsy on the warm wine, I thought of myself on the swaying platform above the crowd, bellowing into the erratic microphones. Giant fragments of amplified prose had toppled away through the air like sections of a glacier. No one had heard a word. My dreams of Mrs. Kennedy’s sexuality had boomed across the placid downs, unsettling the grazing cattle a dozen fields away.

“It was a Surrealist joke—on me,” I told Sally, shutting my eyes to the humiliation of it. “Not the kind that Duchamp or Tzara would approve of…”

“You were wonderful. Wasn’t he, pixies?”

“Yes!” Their eyes were opening to a new world far richer than anything Shepperton could offer.

“Sally, the whole thing was absurd.”

“So? Nothing matters anymore. Jackie Kennedy, Vietnam, flying to the moon—they’re just TV commercials.”

“And what are they selling?”

“Everything you need—pain, fun, love, hate. You can make anything mean anything. Only the pixies matter.”

She seemed restless with me, smoking an endless series of joints that left her eyes blunted. Wine bottle in hand, she spent the afternoon striding around in her long gown, her neck and breasts turning pink in the sun, blond hair like a white whip that she flicked from one shoulder to the other. The festival, which celebrated nothing except itself, already bored her. She wandered away from us, and an hour later I found her in a quiet field beyond the car park. She was running with a family of horses, a black mare and two foals, driving them round and round the field, her hands happily slapping their haunches, her eyes lit with some memory of childhood.