When we left he confided: “She’s right for you, Jim. Just what you need.”

*   *   *

Although Sally depended on me, in most respects I was her pupil, and the most important lesson she taught me came at the New Year’s Eve party that she held at her flat in Bayswater. For some reason the place always unsettled me, filled with the debris of Sally’s past, like those abandoned houses in wartime Shanghai where clock-time had been suspended for a little too long and one returned to be confronted by the invisible stranger of one’s younger self. I strolled around the Persian carpets stained with wine and cigarette ash, past the sofas with their unwashed covers reeking of stale incense, and thought of my children asleep in Shepperton as the middle-aged baby-sitter read her travel guide to British Honduras.

Yet the next day Sally would be washing Alice’s hair and helping Lucy to stitch a miniature wardrobe for her trolls. Now she reeled about, amphetamines in her left hand, between the Marat/Sade posters and the blown-up photographs of Diane Arbus dwarfs, shrieking at Peter Lykiard as he arrived with a po-faced Japanese artist who had recently filmed their buttocks.

Sally proudly held my arm, hiccupped, and left a fleck of vomit on my shoulder. She recovered with a flourish, cleared her mouth into a glass of wine, and kissed me happily on the lips.

“Jim, I’ve found some wonderful crepe de chine! Lucy’s going to adore it…”

She careened away, swinging from shoulder to shoulder like a gymnast on the overhead rings.

*   *   *

Shortly before midnight, remembering the baby-sitter, I decided to leave for Shepperton. Searching for Sally, I pushed my way through the noise and smoke. Couples embraced among the unwashed dishes in the kitchen, and a party within a party was taking place as six guests camped on Sally’s double bed. Two acolytes of the Japanese artist were taking a shower together in Sally’s bathroom. I searched the other bedrooms and the second bathroom, filled with her friends’ art-school lumber, and then glanced into her little dressing room.

When I reached the door Peter Lykiard asked me for a cigarette, clearly trying to distract me, as if I were a child about to stray into the adults’ bedroom.

“Sally’s busy, Jim—before I forget, I wanted to ask you about this Waffen SS film. Dick Sutherland is keen to do a presentation…”