I told them about my near disaster, having run out of cigarettes halfway through the flight.

It was small talk. We three were earnest and a little nervous.

Miller’s assistant brought me a coffee – weak, American coffee. Miller asked me if, prior to having received their letter, I’d known anything about artificial respiration. I wondered then if I ought to tell them about you. Instead, I told them I hadn’t, and that their story interested me very much. Wolf rose from his chair and pulled down a white screen that was mounted on the wall. He then moved quickly to the film projector, and fiddled with knobs and such until it whizzed into action. Miller turned off the lights and we watched a flickering film that showed a man, topless, lying prone on a surface of wooden boards, his arms bent up along either side of his head. The victim. Visible near his head was one knee and also one black shoe belonging to another man, the rescuer, who pushed with flat hands on the victim’s shoulder blades while alternating that manoeuvre with another: grabbing the prone man under his biceps and pulling up on both arms so that his chest was raised off the wooden boards. I recognized that this was the Nielsen method of artificial respiration. The film jumped and the victim was now played by a young boy, and the rescuer, a woman. The camera panned out, giving a wider view, revealing that the demonstration was being performed outside, on a wooden dock, calm black water slipping gently along its edges.

‘You can turn it off,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

The film reel whined down to silence and Miller switched the lights back on.

‘Works, sometimes. And only if performed well,’ said Wolf. ‘But highly inferior to mouth-to-mouth.’

‘All of my data, the blood gases and tidal volumes, was taken from live volunteers,’ said Miller. He told me how he paid medical students to allow him to sedate and paralyse them in order to resuscitate them.

‘Sounds dangerous,’ I said.

‘It is. And expensive.’

‘So you want a manikin.’

‘Something pliable and humanlike,’ said Miller, ‘where you can get air right into the chest cavity and see it rise. Some sort of balloon would expand where the lungs are meant to be.’

‘It has to be female,’ I said, already imagining what she might look like.

Miller and Wolf smiled at each other. ‘We think so too,’ Miller said. ‘This isn’t for data anymore, or medical folks. This is for members of the public, for teaching. People have to feel comfortable.’

‘She can’t be too beautiful,’ said Wolf.

‘Or too ugly,’ said Miller.

‘And she mustn’t look like she’s dead. Only unconscious, like there is a chance she can be brought back,’ said Wolf. He explained that this, the notion that someone could be brought back from the edge, from that point where life tips over into death, was what attracted him to resuscitation. It’s why he became an anaesthetist. He described how during surgery, the anaesthetist dulls the patient’s vital reflexes, his breathing and circulation, and virtually keeps him alive until the surgery is finished, when the reflexes are restored, and the living body pulled back to the surface.