Her first husband had spent much of the previous night running away from her, until she cornered him in King’s Cross at a cheap hotel. In the dream Michael hadn’t looked much like himself. Neither of them had looked much like themselves, in fact. But Anna had felt exactly as she felt then, when she was young and he was still alive: exhausted and angry. ‘You’re always afraid!’ she tried to convince him. ‘You’re always hiding from me!’ Once in the hotel room together they fucked again and again in a blind panic, as if both of them were trying to avoid thinking about something else. After that, events moved themselves on with the usual kind of dreary predictability. Her husband became agitated and ran away again while she was asleep, leaving a note in which he talked of his ‘great discovery’. In the final lobe of the dream, Anna found herself lying alone on a cold, black, reflective surface – this time she described it to Dr Alpert as resembling a hotel bathroom floor – in an echoing space the nature of which she couldn’t describe at all. It was very tall; it was ‘dark and light at the same time’. She had a sense of dread. She couldn’t see much; she could see everything, but she didn’t know what any of it was. She felt as if she was changing into something.

‘And is that what you remember most clearly from the dream?’

‘Oh no. I remember the frock I was wearing. Is that absurd?’

‘Not entirely,’ said Dr Alpert, although she thought it was.

‘It was beautiful.’ Anna frowned intently for a moment, as though, if she focused, she could have the frock in front of her. ‘Givenchy, from the early 1960s. The most marvellous grey, in some shiny fabric like satin. I can’t say more than that.’ She blinked at Dr Alpert. ‘Did Givenchy ever make anything like that? Does that sound like him?’

‘Just to pick up on an earlier point,’ the doctor said, ‘I wonder what you mean when you say that your guilt is “like a ball of eels”?’

‘You see, I’m not really talking about guilt. Not at the moment.’

‘Perhaps not.’

Recognising this as a difference of opinion, the two women stared at one another thoughtfully. For now there didn’t seem to be a way around it. Anna fiddled with the clasp of her bag. After a minute or two she offered:

‘I’m afraid I forgot to bring the test results you asked for.’

Helen Alpert smiled.

‘Please don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Your daughter had the hospital copy them to me. She was worried you might lose them on the train.’

And she slid the documents, three or four sheets of printout in a plastic sleeve, across her desk. Anna, whose history of lost documents was extensive, pushed them back without looking at them.