By that time, Anna’s parents were plaques on a chapel wall somewhere in East Cheshire. She had no friends. The Millennium was over, the fireworks had gone out. Everyone else seemed to know what they wanted. Back in London, she bought a self-help manual and taught herself to eat again. She entrapped Tim Waterman and, still confused but with a growing sense of self-preservation, set about reducing the chaos in her life. Waterman was a kind and successful man whose work often took him abroad. The first time he went away, Anna found she could cook. She put on weight, toyed with the Women’s Institute and, discovering a gift for flowers, the Prettiest Village competition. Tim, who had known her briefly during the Michael Kearney era, seemed calmly amused by it all. She brought up their daughter with care, the best humour she could manage, and a real sense of the worth of that.

But everything, Helen Alpert reminded herself as she put away the file and locked the consulting room door behind her for the day, is language.

Pushing her old car west along the Thames through heavy evening traffic, she recalled Anna’s description of ‘fucking in a blind panic’ with her first husband. ‘In fact I always quite liked sex to be that way,’ Anna had added. ‘It made it seem more central somehow, a means of saying something urgent about yourself. The problem was always what could happen next.’ Then, when Helen Alpert raised her eyebrows at this, Anna laughed suddenly and advised: ‘Never do anything unless you’re lost or on fire, Doctor. Otherwise how will you remember it?’ Balked by the Mortlake roundabout, gazing vaguely at a thick red sunset behind layered fringes of trees, Dr Alpert wondered how she could make sense of this except as bravado. Anna Waterman had reinvented herself with the century: now she was discovering that Anna Selve remained the disordered substrate beneath it all. Whatever had drawn her to Michael Kearney underlay everything else she had made.

In her repeating dream, in her fear of neurological disease, in her increasing sense of the instability of her life – in her denial of all of that – her original disorder had found its voice again.