When she woke, it was late. The cat was out again. She drank a glass of water and went to the garden window. The summerhouse seemed quiet. And yet the dreams she had had! She went out and, standing barefoot on the lawn, worked her toes into the damp turf to wake herself up. ‘James!’ she called. A great beam of off-white light struck out from somewhere behind the house – like the sweep of headlights as a car turns in off the road into your drive, but silent, frozen and prolonged. Or like a huge door opened: light squared-off somehow, sharp-edged, looking for something to reveal, in this case the thousands of cats boiling across the water meadow towards Anna’s home in an alert, silent rush. Every one of them was either black or white. They poured into the garden, parting around the summerhouse, and up towards Anna, of whom they took no more notice than the garden furniture. On and on they came like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, pouring out of the meadow, pouring away behind the house. Anna, deep in explicatory failure, had no way of placing herself with regard to this event: she did not in any sense know what she felt about it. Now she winced away and tried to climb the garden fence. Now she waded directly into the stream of cats, and stood with tears of pure delight streaming down her face, feeling them flow around her, bringing with them the warmth of their bodies, also a close, dusty but not unpleasant smell – until suddenly the light turned itself off and the garden was empty again. She stood for a moment wiping her eyes and laughing. Then she went back into the house and left a message with Dr Alpert’s answering service: ‘Helen, I don’t feel I want to carry on with our conversations. I feel as if I would rather take charge of myself again.’

She left a similar message with her daughter. ‘I’m not sure I can explain. I’m just not such hard work for myself as I used to be.’ She searched for something else to say. ‘I saw a lot of cats in the garden this evening!’ Since this didn’t seem to approach the facts, or give any feeling of the rest of her day, she added: ‘And, Marnie, I met someone, but I don’t know if you’ll like him.’