At that the connection broke. A dark figure appeared in the internal doorway, and after two or three quietly bad-tempered attempts a wheelchair was pushed into the room. Its occupant had deteriorated since Anna last saw him getting into a cab in front of Carshalton station. One corner of his mouth was drawn up rigidly; his bald head, exhibiting the deep uniform tan of ten days on some abandoned Almerian beach, shone with ulcers. He entered sitting upright in the chair – ankles crossed and knees apart, one hand performing an unwittingly hieratic gesture at the level of his chest – but fell forward almost immediately against its restraining harness of broad nylon webbing. His head dropped slackly to the right – this brought into sharp relief the tendon at the side of his neck, and offered his left ear to the white cat on his shoulder, which, as if it had been waiting for just such an opportunity, adjusted its balance; purred; licked inside the ear with precise delicate motions. All the time Anna had been in the house, he had been there too, slumped in some other empty room, his liver-coloured underlip drooping and one blue eye open in the heat. The harness, with its central quick-release mechanism, looked too robust for any forces the movement of a wheelchair might produce; while the seat itself had bulky, over-engineered qualities, like something in a now-obsolete experiment. She knew she should have recognised him all along. Perhaps she had. Had he recognised her? Impossible to tell. Underneath her amnesia the memory itself lay swaddled. It was the unthought known, always tucked carefully away, a self-deception under a self-deception. How could he have grown so old? The telephone began to ring again, the white cat jumped on to the table and walked about fiercely. There in the water light of the unreconstructed dining room, the Mexican box glimmered like tarnished silver: the dark figure behind the wheelchair reached over to pick it up.

That was enough to send Anna out of the garden, stumbling down the side passage, hurrying away from 121, The Oaks to the relative sanity of the suburban afternoon, all the rest of which she spent wandering confusedly about, up one long street and down the next, heat ringing around her from cracked paving, until she emerged blinking and puzzled, hard by Carshalton Ponds. The High Street lay uneasily under the sun, full of excavations – shallow, affectless scoops, the product of underpowered machinery and half-hearted plans, fenced off behind a long maze of red and white barriers, which, like the cars in the street, resembled plastic toys pumped up to appeal to some infantile aesthetic.

A room the colour of a headache, she thought. And why had the window once been covered with roasting foil?