Carrying a child: perhaps it was a dream about Marnie, perhaps it wasn’t. If, in the doctor’s consulting room, you acknowledged a dream like that, what might you be admitting to? You couldn’t be sure. Anna therefore kept it to herself. But it was always possible to be frank about her standard dream:

The unknown  woman  lay on the black marble floor in some vast echoing space, dressed in a Givenchy gown; someone very old, unchanging but not yet herself; someone, essentially, waiting to change. Sometimes there was a kind of leaden buzzing noise, less a noise in fact than something that had seeped into you as you dreamed. Or you might hear a kind of high, distant ringing inside the floor, a kind of tinnitus at the heart of things. Sometimes there was the sense of an audience: someone – it might be you, it might be not – had started  to clean her teeth then cut her wrists in a hotel bathroom, only then looking up to find tiers of fully-booked seats stretching up into darkness like a university lecture theatre. These were deranged but self-limiting images you could throw all day like sticks for Helen Alpert to chase – both doctor and patient got plenty of exercise out of that. So today Anna began refabricating a version of the dream she had once had while Michael was still alive, in which the first false-colour imagery of the Kefahuchi Tract – a new astronomical discovery for a brand new Millennium – had seemed to detach itself from the television screen and drift up into the dark air of their Boston motel room, where it hung like jewellery in a cheap illusion then slowly faded away. By that time the room was vast.

‘So exciting!’ exclaimed Dr Alpert. As a child – eight years old and full of joy – she had loved those pictures so much that she remembered  even now the lumbering  black cathode-ray  TV on which she had first seen them. They were less pictures than promises about the nature of the world, the rewards of study.

Anna – who, to the extent that she could remember the event at all, remembered it differently – could only shrug.