‘It was wrong of Marnie to do this,’ she said. ‘It was controlling.’ Then, feeling she had been disloyal, tried to explain: ‘I don’t want tests. I don’t want to know these things about myself. I want just to live my life until it’s over. Marnie is the wrong generation to understand that.’

‘Neurologically, Anna, you’re very sound. You should be relieved. There are signs of a couple of tiny strokes. Otherwise you’re fine.’

But Anna – who had feared all along things would go in this direction once Marnie lost her patience – remembered Michael Kearney, trembling in her arms in his paralysis of anxiety, and could only repeat, ‘I don’t want to know things like that about myself.’ Helen Alpert identified this, perhaps correctly, as a defensive stubbornness; baffled, they stared at one another in silence again until Anna shrugged, looked at her watch, and said: ‘I think my time’s up.’

‘Is there anything else?’ the doctor said.

‘My cat is bringing home the internal organs of exotic animals.’

‘I meant, really, if there was anything else you remembered about the dream.’

After Anna had gone, the doctor leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes tiredly.

Helen Alpert was a tall woman, given to skinny jeans and soft leather coats, whose career had begun in the psychology of chronic pain; veered during her troubled second marriage into PTSD and trauma management; and finally come to rest in private consulting rooms by the Thames in Chiswick, where she facilitated the inner lives of mid-range production executives from the surrounding BBC enclaves. Perhaps ten years younger than Anna, she had made her home on the opposite side of the river in one of the quiet streets around Kew Green. Mornings, she jogged by the river. At weekends she wandered the Gardens or drove her temperamental first-generation Citroen XM to a cottage in East Anglia, where she trudged up and down the shingle beaches in the rain and ate pea mousse with Parma ham & shallot dressing, followed by roast breast & confit leg of squab on puy lentils with parmentier potatoes and jus, at the local Michelin-starred pub conversion. Despite or perhaps because of this regime, she remained single. She had been treating Anna Waterman for three years. It was slow going. They had layered up this peculiar dream of Anna’s until it was a rich and satisfying fiction, but not one that offered an easy reading of itself; and they had never seemed quite suited to one another.

Now, knowing Anna to be too young to have worn 1960s Givenchy, the doctor assumed the garment to be a symbol of the parent, entering the words, ‘The unthought known?’ into Anna’s case file and emphasising them heavily.

Then she leafed back through the file, parts of which were easier to understand than others.