Those months and months she’d sat by his darkened bedside – the hours she’d prayed – it was strange now to see the vision of ropes and the bottles under the bed – who was the woman who’d done that? Was it her? Was there another Enid, living another life without another son, who still held her only boy in her arms and prayed? Who was passionate, and lively, and so full of strength that she’d dragged chairs and hauled limbs and thrown bottle after bottle of medicine far out into the river? Whoever she was, she was gone. This Enid, the Enid in front of the bookcase – she looked at her hands to be sure she existed – this Enid had two sons, and one had blotted out the other. This Enid had a husband who’d thrown her book on the fire and said that if she ever went near Fagus with that cultish, vicious nonsense again he’d take all the children away from her.

He’d improved though, hadn’t he? She saw it sometimes when she caught sight of him, hobbling about on the lawn like a toy that needed oiling; a wobbly toy in a world of almost darkness. At least she didn’t treat him like an abandoned pet, a stray they’d taken pity on, patting his head like Douglas did, as if she liked him but didn’t know what to do with him. At least he wasn’t slumped in a darkened room any more.

She’d missed the bit when he’d stopped lying down most of the time and become a child who was got up and dressed every day. Her body had got so heavy and unwieldy she’d stopped climbing to the nursery. She’d become the lumpen mound in a bed – they’d swapped places – and when her body began its deflation to normal size, her head became so heavy, or was it her heart, or her limbs or her eyes – she couldn’t make it out – that bed remained the only safe place to be. She was too dense and fogged to be anywhere else; all she wanted to do was sleep. It was an effort just to stand here, looking at the books. She kept finding herself in places like this, staring at something, completely devolved of the reason. That’s why being with anyone was so exhausting. She had to keep remembering to look as if she knew what she was doing.