The emptiness struck again. It seemed, as he stood in the cold back room of the bar, all the props that had been used to preserve the illusion had been withdrawn. The emptiness seemed perpetual. Yet he felt something would give, something would break the cycle and allow them to be their natural selves again. Even if that self was diminished.

He wanted to beg forgiveness but did not know how. He must wait for her letter to arrive. He sat down. He got up and phoned Eddie. “Look,” he said, “forget all about what I said.”

“I will.”

“You didn’t tell her?”

“No.”

“Sorry about that, Eddie.”

He thought some form of death was approaching, one that he would survive, and after that he would know his limitations. Whatever he expressed now would be visited on him later in some recess of his mind. He stood and looked at his hands. They were pulsating again. He smelled the damp from his clothes. The corridor was forming.

The next day he woke to a land with no horizon. He found that the whole house and landscape was reduced to a mere dot in time. He did not think he could survive one minute. Then he survived the minute only to find that the clock had begun another. And then he knew, with a sense of furious sadness, that this would be followed by another minute, and another, and throughout each one he would be like he was now, only worse, for each second would – though the same in the mathematical sense – have increased in psychical length.

He was trapped within ever-increasing particles of time that were the same in shape and distance and size, and yet their interior was endless. His despair became greater than ever his passion had been. His mind was making each second into an eternity.

He was gripped by single hallucinations.

A dog, his dog, vomited a wad of fat on the doorstep of the house. It lay there steaming.

He wrote to Catherine. Please come back to me. I want you. I am sober, he wrote.

He dropped the letter off in Corrloch and went into O’Malley’s bar and bought a bottle of vodka. He walked across the fields with the dog and lay down on the old bed.