‘On fire again,’ thought Anna. ‘How tiresome.’

This time it presented as a whole series of buildings: it was a sixteenth-century windmill on the Downs, a Dickensian lapboard cottage as tarry as an upturned boat on a beach, a Palladian folly collapsing into the Pagan site on which it stood. These structures slowly replaced one another in a shifting field of view. They loomed and shrank, as if they were approaching or receding. Each arrived not simply with its own architectural style but with its own style of mediation, from hard-edge photographic to St Ives impressionist, from construction-paper silhouette to matchstick hobbyist Gothic. One minute it was a woodcut of a summerhouse, with static flames; the next, impasto rubbed on with someone’s thumb.

Pausing only to remove Kearney’s computer drive from the recycling bin, Anna went out and stood in the orchard, barefoot, naked, quiet, no longer sure what age she might be.

‘Whoever you are,’ she said reasonably, ‘I don’t know what you want.’

As if in response, the summerhouse cycled through a few more versions of itself, becoming in succession a Tarot card (the Tower, always falling, always in flames, index and harbinger of a life in transit); a canonical firework from someone’s vanished childhood, a ‘volcano’ wrapped in red and blue paper, pouring out pink-dyed light, smoke, showers of sparks, thick dribbles of lava; and a sagging fairground marquee, with scalloped eaves and pennants in many different colours. Cartoon bottle-rockets fizzed into the air behind it, bursting in showers of objects which toppled back to earth with inappropriate noises – plastic crockery that rang like a bell, an Edwardian railway train pumping out the sinewy sound of pigeon wings in an empty industrial space – folding themselves up and vanishing even as they fell. These objects smelled of leather, frost, lemon meringue pie; they smelled of precursor chemicals. They smelled of Pears Soap.