A man stood before her. He was suddenly there. He was very tall, dark, held in a void, faceless.

Rachaela started and her entire body went to water. Then the man was gone. There was only another tree.

‘Pardon me,’ said a voice. He was by her side, short, in a black overcoat and a woollen hat. She thought he would beg money, but instead he said to her: ‘Mr Simon is very anxious that you call at Lane and Soames.’

‘Who are you?’ said Rachaela.

‘A friend of Mr Simon’s.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘But you must go, you know.’

It was usual to be obedient to authority, to obey a legal letter. But Rachaela left her bills unpaid until the threats began. She ignored the money-envelopes stuck through the door for starving children and the sick.

‘Go away.’

She did not run. The green ended at a pavement and the lamp filled the fog with an impenetrable vortex of light.

The dark man stared at her. He had a foreign face and gelid eyes. Would he attempt violence?

‘You go,’ he said, ‘to Mr Soames.’

And then he turned and slid into the fog.

Rachaela crossed the road and a boy cycled suddenly by like an apparition.

She climbed the steps and unlocked the door.

The fog smurred into the bleak hall, over its stone floor and the dusty table with letters. She feared to see a second letter lying there, but there was only a telephone bill, not in itself to be dreaded, for she never phoned anyone, the phone had come with the flat or she would not have bothered with it.

Rachaela took her bill and let herself into a tiny space crowded by stairs.

A year ago she had had a cat, a black round cat which was too lazy to come to greet her. But the cat was old and had died in her sleep. So Rachaela had found her one morning on her bed. Rachaela had wept for loneliness, but so far the ghost of this first cat, which she sometimes glimpsed about the rooms, had precluded obtaining another.

Nothing therefore awaited Rachaela but the usual walls, cream-washed by the landlord, and a floor carpeted by him in a faint beige.

Rachaela’s great bookcase, crammed and crowded by books, many of which now stood and leaned along the wall, did not remind her of the shop. Yet it was her connection to books which had suggested that form of employment. Before the bookshop she had done many flimsy things, served tables in a café and counters in a fabric shop, other things like these.

It was cold. Rachaela turned on the electric fire, a fixture also supplied by the landlord, ugly but warming. She drew the beige curtains against the curtain of the fog. Even this room was touched by it, it had seeped in like pollen or gas through a hundred camouflaged cracks of the house.