If he wanted work, he might as well deal with the mess Anna had made of the bathroom. He looked strong enough.

The next day, waking in the startled recognition that she had dreamed one of Anna Waterman’s dreams, Dr Helen Alpert threw a single worn item of Mulberry soft luggage into the rear seat of the Citroën, cancelled her appointments for the near future and closed the consulting room. By four that afternoon, having used up almost a fortnight’s fuel coupons, she was in Studland on the Dorset coast. There, despite the sea wind, the smell of salt, the herring gulls sideslipping in and out of the turbulent air above Great Harry rocks, she found that the dream wouldn’t be shaken off.

In it, all her belongings had gone missing from an old-fashioned writing bureau she was using, while, crammed into its hidden drawers and on to its complicated little shelves, she found items the thief had left in return. These stale wrapped sandwiches and bits of half-eaten fruit made her as anxious as she was disgusted. She was afraid he might come back at any moment. The place itself was shabby, half-exterior – the ground floor, possibly the only floor, of a gutted house still in use during some long, slow crisis, some failure of human or political confidence. The doorways had no doors. The windows, though intact, were uncurtained. It was always raining. Damp had got into the furniture – mainly cheap veneered cabinets and shelves from which the varnish had been bleached by sunlight and use – and the walls were covered with fibrous, scaly-looking, ring-shaped blemishes. Looking up at the wall beside a doorway, Helen saw that a slightly more than life-sized vulva had emerged from it like a crop of fungus. It wasn’t quite the right colours. The labia had yellow and brown tones, and the startling rigidity of a wooden model. A body was attached, but less of that had emerged from the wall. It was still emerging, in fact, in very slow motion. She felt that it might take years to come through. And while the vulva clearly belonged to an adult, the body was much younger. It still had the fat little belly and undeveloped ribcage of a child. The vulva presented in the same vertical plane as the wall, but the body and the face were somehow foreshortened and leaning back from it at a wrong angle for the anatomy to work. At all points it was seamless with the wall. She couldn’t see much of the face, but it was smiling. In the dream, Helen began to make a shrieking sound, full of the most appalling sense of grief and horror. She could hear herself but she couldn’t stop.