Stephen felt a terrible kind of restlessness, as if columns of insects were skittering through his bloodstream. He hadn’t felt this too much, in England. At home he’d found that there were two ways of quieting it: by lying completely still and waiting for the disembodied feeling to come; or by walking. He couldn’t just lie down, now, in the street; even if he went back to the hostel there’d be people milling around and it was necessary to be alone in a room if lying down was to work. He’d just keep walking. He’d looked at the underground map at Earls Court station, on his way to meet Helena. The Tube near her house was called St John’s Wood. If he kept going downhill he’d get to the big road and then he could ask someone the way. But what way? He didn’t want to get on a train, he wanted to keep moving, keep putting one leg in front of the other. Abruptly he turned around. He didn’t want to be heading back towards the hostel, he wanted to go in the other direction, up the hill. That would be better, he was sure of it.

All the streets looked the same. There were white houses with big windows and he could see in through some of them, to rooms where people lived. He saw a piano in one, a tall vase of flowers on a polished table in another. Long bookcases and gilt mirrors above mantelpieces. He guessed it was a rich neighbourhood, here. Some of the houses had overgrown hedges, so he couldn’t see in, but others were separated from the pavement by only a low wall. He could see straight through some of them, through the street-facing window to the far side of a room, where there were windows which looked over the gardens at the back. It was strange to him, to imagine that people’s whole lives went on in these rectangles. Kids came in from school with their bags, men and women kissed or argued or had friends over. But the rooms were quite bare, mostly. They didn’t seem very homey.

Stephen decided that if he turned right and then left, that would be a good system: that would get him somewhere where he needed to be. After a handful of turns, he came to a bigger road. There were shops and buses and people with little kids in buggies. He turned left here. He kept going until there was a right-hand turn and then crossed the busy street to get to it. He walked for an hour or so, not thinking of time. The buildings were different now, tall and solid and made of red brick; they looked more like apartment buildings. It seemed as if he had been walking uphill all the way.