‘I’d keep it as one big space. Every so often you’d come upon a bit of carpet, some chairs, a bed. My furniture! I’d encourage the trains to keep running,’ she decided, the way you might say: ‘I’d encourage birds to visit the garden.’ She thought  for a moment. ‘Just for the company. But Clapham would no longer be a stop. People would have to understand  that.’ She smiled and sat back expansively in her chair, her body language that of someone who, having made a very fair offer, expects a positive response.

Helen Alpert smiled too. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that you were happy with your own house now?’

Anna nodded. ‘Less unhappy,’ she agreed.

The doctor made a note. ‘And Marnie?’ she enquired. ‘How are you getting on with Marnie?’

Around the bathroom  issue, and the deeper issues represented by it, Marnie  and  Anna  had  developed  a kind  of considerate wariness. Marnie had phoned the next day, anxious to apologise. In return, Anna sent a card, a kingfisher bursting out of the water with a small silver fish in its beak. Next time she arrived, Marnie brought flowers, a thick bunch of white stocks, blue delphiniums and sunflowers which they made into an arrangement  together. One of the sunflowers was left over so Anna put it in a jug in the new bathroom.  Every time she went to the loo she felt light and warmth pouring from it, and found herself full of the slow, lazy happiness  she had  been used to as a child, before things  went wrong. The problem with Marnie, Anna had begun to suspect, was that for her nothing had ever really gone wrong.

‘I’m not sure Marnie is as grown up as she thinks she is.’

The doctor  left a pause in case Anna wanted to develop this insight, then when nothing further emerged, enquired:

‘And the dreams?’

‘The dreams are a nightmare.’

In the last few days she had seen everything. Half the time she hadn’t even been sure she was asleep. In the dream she could be most certain of – the one in which she was most clearly dreaming – she was up on the Downs again, viewing herself from outside and slightly above: a woman  carrying a child’s empty coat across her arms as if it were the child itself. This woman was bent forward from the waist, looking into the middle distance at the white chalk paths, then down again at the coat. Her expression was one of neither joy nor musing. Skylarks sang. Hawthorn trees clustered on the hillside below. People appeared and disappeared on long, rising horizons. There were tiny blue flowers in the turf. Quite slowly, she passed out of the picture, vanishing over one of the immense skylines of the Downs.