It was early afternoon and over the top of the curtain he could make out a hard blue sky. He was thinking in another language. The eerie language of the half-formed and the unsayable. He looked round the bare wainscotted walls, feeling with his eyes how the light fell. Then the room seemed to jerk forward in time. All peripheral vision was suddenly obliterated, what he could see was fixed remotely at the end of a long high corridor. He was afraid to look back towards the window lest he might find there evidence of this sudden passage towards evening. That night had mysteriously fallen. But as he looked at the shadowy perpendicular frames of the distant wood-panelling his panic grew. He felt his mouth fall. He was being swept along an indeterminable passage and could not stop himself.

“Oh, God,” he said. He gripped the chair so that he might ease the nausea in his throat. Then, slowly, he tried to loosen his grip on the armrests. He could hear each of his breaths distinctly, and as the interval between each seemed to grow, he listened intently in the pauses for the sound of his heart turning round.

He looked up to find the same blue over the curtains, to find that nothing had changed. The same blue was over the curtains, some persons – ordinary, particular – passed again, and his breathing returned to normal.

When he returned to himself it was like it had never happened. What had occurred was something without form or shape. Any words he could conjure up were inadequate to deal with this sudden loss of time and perspective.

It seemed to him, just then, that every person knew this, this loss of self, but it could not be told. It was an opening onto a non-world. He left down the book that was in his hand with extreme care. That, because of the unreality, was necessary. If he did anything too quickly he feared the reverberations that might follow. Yet it was important that he escape. He got into the Lada and sat a moment with the steering wheel in his hands. He was not sure whether he could any longer drive a car. Then he switched the engine on. He drove very slowly to a beach, fearing that any moment his sense of what lay to his left and right would suddenly be removed. He stopped the car on a bed of gravel, and with relief headed towards the breaking surf. There was another walker abroad. Jack fell into step with him. He was wearing a duffle coat and a shirt open to his waist and carried a black refuse sack. He had a genial raving eye, with smiling ducts and generous looks about him that ended in private and imbecilic tittering.

“Are you all right?” asked Jack.

The man stopped to consider the question.

“I suppose I am. I’m getting older”