And two, three hours later, after the cocktails and the guffaws, the quite astonishingly dirty stories, the more or less concealed pinching of other wives’ fannies, the steaks and the pie; while The Girls – as Mrs Strunk and the rest will continue to call themselves and each other if they live to be ninety – are washing up, you will hear Mr Strunk and his fellow-husbands laughing and talking on the porch, drinks in hands, with thickened speech. Their business problems are forgotten, now. And they are proud and glad. For even the least among them is a co-owner of the American Utopia, the kingdom of the good life upon earth – crudely aped by the Russians, hated by the Chinese – who are none the less ready to purge and starve themselves for generations, in the hopeless hope of inheriting it. Oh yes, indeed, Mr Strunk and Mr Garfein are proud of their kingdom. But why, then, are their voices like the voices of boys calling to each other as they explore a dark unknown cave, growing ever louder and louder, bolder and bolder? Do they know that they are afraid? No. But they are very afraid.

What are they afraid of?

They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flashlamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won’t fit into their statistics, the gorgon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinking blood with tactless uncultured slurps, the bad-smelling beast that doesn’t use their deodorants, the unspeakable that insists, despite all their shushing, on speaking its name.