Don’t think about it, she told herself. Let the camera do its work. Abstract your mind. Notice that Harold Thorby has no part or lot in this; repent the fact that since your accident you have held him suspect. Notice that in no case are both husband and wife involved. Up at Puddler Pond on Midsummer Eve, Wesley Baines must have broken one of the inviolable rules. Eric Frisby is here, but not Edith; Freda Tharkell, but not John. Miss Benson is not here; you could have trusted her. The Mavericks are innocent. Berta Creek is here, and Baxter, and Juliet Reeve – oh dear, so young, so pretty and so clever, tragic beyond all words. Worse, far worse, than I ever dreamed. . . .

In a moment she would be crying. I must take a more academic view, she thought. Is it the drug which renders them capable of such sustained and varied performance? One has always known about prostitutes . . . but theirs is the passive role. What aphrodisiac can make men . . . And if one were not seeing it with one’s own eyes, could one believe that old Granny Rigby . . .?

I’ve had enough of this, she thought sickly. It could, in any case, be only a prelude. She tried to recall the figures the kind young man in the shop had given her; so many feet of film which ran for so many minutes. Did he mean in the taking or in the screening? Best to be on the safe side anyway.

She lowered the camera, wondering as she did so whether the rutting mob out there would mind, would be ashamed to know that their . . . antics had been recorded. Or would they have the courage of their convictions, and say, This is our ritual. We don’t criticize yours. Nobody compelled you to watch!

She was oddly, almost comically, aware for the first time of the ambiguity of her own position. They had so far done no harm to anyone but themselves. They were adulterers and fornicators, but the worst you could say about them, really, was that they were nudists who practised a form of free love. And she was Peeping Tom, whose motives could be very suspect. Ethel, her chief concern, wasn’t even here. But she will come, the voice in her mind assured her. This, too, is a preliminary.

That brought to her mind an awareness of her own physical exhaustion. Moving very softly, she went to the stairs and sat down.