At about this time, a further change came over my life. The money from Jeddah began to breed, convulsively. While I slept, or was drunk, or made love, or smoked a Benson on the porch, my money worked and, as far as I could tell, for greater reward than I did. I felt a regret: the lightness which comes with empty pockets, the airy, tremulous sense of self which had been mine throughout my teens, the alienation from even the fabric of commercial society, its street corners and bullying office blocks and lighted shops, was now lost to me, possibly for ever. I felt obscurely disabled. It was as if the subject of my enquiry, while relieving me of labour and care, were also mocking me.

In analysing this new situation, I thought perhaps there was some quality about my labour from 1978 to 1980, some particular virtue that gave it uncommon power in commanding the labour of others. I once accosted a man in the South Seas who was planting some taro root; he told me that this action, which took up a full twenty minutes of a rainy morning, was enough to keep his family in food and grog and cash for a year. No doubt at the depths of every rentier’s existence, from duke to retiree, there is the faint shadow cast by some dead labour, but it is lost in the glitter of possession and present income.