“And what about you—mentally, maybe?”

“Sally, that was long, long ago.”

“Not for him. Car crashes bring it all back for David. They mean for him what bullfights mean for everyone else—sex and death … Jim, you didn’t mind me going off with him? He’s your oldest friend, in a way it’s not like my picking someone you didn’t know.”

“I suppose that’s true…”

“I love the pixies. They helped me to grow up. And you. Now you’re writing all the time, and I’m so busy with things…” She spoke softly, as if to herself. “Everyone changes, and we’re always moving away from each other. Just for once I wish we could all stand still and remember the way things were. There’s so much happening, and I want to be part of it all. I want to live everyone’s dreams, be right inside them…”

“Sally, you are. But—”

“Jim, I’ll always let you fuck me.”

She brushed her ungroomed hair, aware that I might not always want to. Her fingers fiddled with her scarred upper lip, where she had been punched by a casual lover, an evil-tempered underground filmmaker. Looking at her, as she bravely tried to draw herself together, I realised how much she had lost any centre to her life. Shepperton had been the axis of her carousel, where she had warmed herself by the cheerful calliope she had helped to play with my children; but she had moved away to the whirling lights and the rushing air far out on the rim. I was too dull for her, too immersed in the children’s games and homework, too steeped in the tumblers of whisky and soda that cheered me and calmed the world, a tradeoff that Sally found too limiting. She needed the world to rush up to her like the waves seething around her waist at Brighton beach.

We drove on, crossed the Marylebone Road, and strayed into the maze of old commercial properties off Camden High Street. As Sally fumbled with the rearview mirror, I sensed that she had deliberately lost her bearings, as if waiting for someone to find us. I searched the skyline of derelict buildings. The Arts Laboratory had moved into a one-time pharmaceutical warehouse; its open concrete decks were the perfect setting for its brutalist happenings and exhibitions, its huge ventilation shafts purpose-built to evacuate the last breath of pot smoke in the event of a drugs raid.