A few days later, prone to weep suddenly after a debilitating session in Chiswick with Dr Helen Alpert, Anna wakes to moonlight and Moroccan air, with a feeling that someone has just spoken. She enters the river, and the world is suddenly unknown and unknowable. Everything is so full of mystery as she walks back that magic night, to find the summerhouse on fire again! Beneath the sound of the flames, she’s sure she hears a voice. It calls her name, but all she can say in return is:

‘Michael? Is this you?’

So it went, every time Anna tried to communicate. ‘Anna!’ she would shout. ‘Listen to me! Don’t go in the summerhouse!’ But Anna seemed so dull. She was always so obsessed with herself. You couldn’t get her attention, and that was what made you so impatient, the farce of shouting, ‘Anna! Anna!’ until you were hoarse.

In addition, physical limitations seemed to apply. The past was clear enough to see, but you felt as if you were engaging with it from too far away. Sometimes speech failed completely, and Anna could make herself known only in other ways, via the weather, for instance, or showers of emotionally-charged objects. It was as if the universe she now inhabited had suffered brain damage, and was experiencing a confusion not between different senses but between different states of energy and matter. She was reduced to a kind of practical synaesthesia. She was reduced to the use of theatre, metaphor, symbols and emotions. She tried eveything, but remained an epiphenomen of her own life, a figure distantly semaphoring tragic news from a hill. She made a nightly beacon of the summerhouse, but her earlier self didn’t get the message. She made a dozen or so copper-coloured poppies spring up on the Downs in the morning sunshine, but the language of flowers simply didn’t work as well as the language of language, and after a while Anna saw that her efforts were only making things worse.