‘There,’ said Paul. ‘That’s the scientific approach. How neat. How easy. How satisfactory.’

There we all stood, the five of us, surveying the triumph of commonsense. And we all began to laugh again, helplessly, even Willi; because of the utter absurdity of it. Meanwhile all around us thousands and thousands of painted grasshoppers were getting on with the work of propagating their kind without any assistance from us. And even our small triumph was soon over, because the large insect that had been on top of the other large insect, fell off, and immediately the one which had been underneath mounted him or her.

‘Obscene,’ said Paul gravely.

‘There is no evidence,’ said Jimmy, trying to match his friend’s light grave tone, but failing, since his voice was always breathless, or shrill, or too facetious: ‘There is no evidence that in what we refer to as nature things are any better-ordered than they are with us. What evidence have we that all these — miniature troglodytes are nicely sorted out male above female? Or even’ - he added daringly, on his fatally wrong note - ‘male with female at all? For all we know, this is a riot of debauchery, males with males, females with females …’ He petered out in a gasp of laughter. And looking at his heated, embarrassed, intelligent face, we all knew that he was wondering why it was that nothing he ever said, or could say, sounded easy, as when Paul said it. For if Paul had made that speech, as he might very well have done, we would all have been laughing. Instead of which we were uncomfortable, and were conscious that we were hemmed in by these ugly scrambling insects.

Suddenly Paul sprang over and trod deliberately, first on the monster couple, whose mating he had organized, and then on the small couple.

‘Paul,’ said Maryrose, shaken, looking at the crushed mess of coloured wings, eyes, white smear.

‘A typical response of a sentimentalist,’ said Paul, deliberately parodying Willi - who smiled, acknowledging that he knew he was being mocked. But now Paul said seriously: ‘Dear Maryrose, by tonight, or to stretch a point, by tomorrow night, nearly all these things will be dead - just like your butterflies.’

‘Oh no,’ said Maryrose, looking at the dancing clouds of butterflies with anguish, but ignoring the grasshoppers. ‘But why?’

‘Because there are too many of them. What would happen if they all lived? It would be an invasion. The Mashopi hotel would vanish under a crawling mass of grasshoppers, it would be crushed to the earth, while inconceivably ominous swarms of butterflies danced a victory dance over the deaths of Mr and Mrs Boothby and their marriageable daughter.’

Maryrose, offended and pale, looked away from Paul. We all knew she was thinking about her dead brother. At such moments she wore a look of total isolation, so that we all longed to put our arms around her.