She came across a cinema and went to see the film. It was meant to be funny, and sometimes the old-age pensioners in the front rows laughed querulously. How unlike the Scarabae they were—how much younger. Cracked and bent, warped and wounded. Pitiful. The Scarabae were not pitiful. Not even Sylvian on his pyre.

Rachaela left before the film ended.

The church clock and her watch gave evidence it was five o’clock. Thursday was almost done with. She braced herself with the idea of Friday now. She felt a little sick when she thought of it. A tearing of the strong cord. A scissors-cut. When the train pulled out the parting would occur. How would she feel then. My prison. Gone to earth.

In the evening Rachaela carefully packed the new black bag with the sparse items of her getaway. Then she went out again and ate a watery spaghetti bolognese at the café. The wine was like vinegar and did not help her to eat, but it made her quite tipsy for half an hour, during which half-hour all the recent events became funny. This passed into depression in time for bed.

She tried to read the paperback but real life was omnipresent and she could not suspend her personal consciousness.

Did Adamus know she was gone? Had they told him? How had he reacted? Probably with relief. It was all a ritual, something the house coerced him into doing. Those singeing moments before the fire—had she imagined that as his intent, or was this the ritual too? How could she think of him as a father—he had never been one. He was a stranger, and the phantasm of her daydreams. It was her fault. She had provoked it. If it had happened.

She slept and dreamed of Sylvian under the sea, full fathom five, with fish swimming in and out of his eyes. The dream was peaceful.

She woke up and saw the sense of what they had done. He was dead. What they did to his body did not matter. And anyway they had cremated him. Very hygienic and modern. After all she was running away not from the burning on the beach, or from the man and what had been about to happen with the man, but only from the constriction of the house. Running actually from security. Her clothes and radio and books left behind. Like a six-year-old leaving home.

It was Friday.

She had paid her bill yesterday evening. Now she had only to rise and dress and go.

She did not want breakfast, her stomach churning. She drank some water, which tasted of chemicals, visited the uneasy bathroom, and was ready.

At a quarter past seven she went out into the street.