Thrilled and apprehensive about being on her way to spend the weekend with her new lover, she stared out of the train window at the stammering suburbs, the football fields, the back gardens, the industrial estates, the little patches of wood aspiring to rural life, some bulbous silver graffiti on a brick wall, the double speed and double clatter and sudden intimacy of a train passing in the opposite direction – it looked as if London would ramble on until it finally had to be drowned in the sea. She had to recognise that she was crazy about Francis, mad about him: it was hard to find a phrase that made it sound like a good idea. Crossing over into another person’s subjectivity, if such a thing were possible, was always fraught with excitement and danger. For a start, there had to be a person on the other side, not just an assembly of fragments, occlusions and self-deceptions; and then it was essential not to leave too much of oneself behind in the hectic rush towards the shining lake that all too often turned out to be a mudflat shimmering with excited flies. Even without the hazards of confusion and anticlimax, it remained a logically impossible transition. How could one ever truly enter into another subjectivity? And yet the impossibility seemed pedantic in the face of the imagination’s capacity to sense another way of being. She often felt ephemeral connections spring in and out of existence between her mind and other minds, but it was not often a temptation to turn those rainbows into more durable bridges. Her desire to do so now, on so little evidence, was like a kind of seasickness, pitching her between groundless bliss and groundless despair, between a fantasy of happiness and a fantasy of losing the happiness she didn’t yet have.