Later, when we returned to our hotel on Copacabana Beach and our first frozen daiquiri of the evening, I said to Dick: “I need this. We should have gone to the voodoo. That was quite an afternoon.”

“Gruelling stuff?”

“I was watching the audience. The future may be like a film festival, but which one? Yours or the one at this end of the beach? They had the eyes of tourists at a death camp, the kind of tourists who keep going back.”

“We’ve shocked you, Jim—that was worth coming to Rio for.” Delighted to catch me out, Dick glanced at me slyly over his glass. The rivalry between us, which for reasons of his own he had always encouraged, had become more open in Rio. “It’s interesting that scientific films unsettle you more than hard-core porn.”

“But pornography is really very chaste—it’s the body’s unerotic dream of itself. Your films come straight from the psychopathic ward. Imagine how you’d react if you found them in the film library of a sex criminal.”

“So…? Take a set of surgical instruments—innocent in an operating theatre, but in Myra Hindley’s handbag? You’re seeing them out of context.”

“Nothing is seen in context anymore. Switch on your TV set, Dick, and you find a murdered prime minister, a child eating a candy bar, Marilyn lifting her skirt—what sort of scenario is the mind quietly stitching together?”

“It might be interesting to know. Tell me.”

“One of Cleo’s fashion magazines showed some models prancing about in front of a blowup from the Zapruder film—the Kennedy assassination as a fashion accessory?”

“Of course. In the future everyone will need to be a film critic to make sense of anything.”

“Not a psychologist?” His remark surprised me. “Surely, you…?”

“No, I think the psychologist has had his day…”

Dick stared coolly across the crowded terrace of the Luxor, at the relaxing delegates and the photographers waiting by the lobby in hope of a passing celebrity. Despite his success that afternoon he seemed dissatisfied, as if he accepted that the epoch of popular television, in whose secure playground he had thrived, would soon be replaced by a harsher and more open world, an ever-changing media landscape in which fame was as transitory as a mayfly. Like an astronaut unable to tether himself to the moon’s surface, he longed for a stronger gravity. The need for attention had sent him bounding ever higher through the airless dust of celebrity, and there was nothing now to pull him down. He often asked me about the children’s school results, glad to hear of their success and clearly envying me my family ties. He had never married, and his women friends moved through his life like game-show panellists, cheerful, optimistic, and unremembered. Even their fascination with Dick was never enough.

*   *   *

“Dr. Sutherland—we saw your interview. Without doubt, the most handsome psychologist in Rio…”