‘I’ll drive you to the station in the morning. Goodnight, Anna.’

Why was I phoning? Anna asked herself. When no answer came, she went to the kitchen door and looked out. Mist had pooled two or three feet deep in the rough pasture between the garden and the river. Above it, she could just make out a line of willows. She called the cat; offered him rabbit-flavoured food; took herself to bed, where her dream woke her as usual at ten past four in the morning, soaked to the skin and with a kind of leaden buzzing in her ears. It was less a sound, as she often tried to explain to Dr Alpert, than a feeling. ‘It’s a feeling from the dream,’ she would say. It was a physical sensation. ‘I’m not even sure it’s me who’s feeling it.’ She struggled out of bed, weary and ill, and went downstairs to get water. Grey light was creeping in round the edges of the kitchen blinds. She thought she might have another look at the organs – or whatever they were – in the dish, but they’d gone. James could easily have jumped up on the counter and eaten them, but Anna felt they’d simply melted away. There was a drop of liquid left. It looked enough like ordinary water to be tipped down the sink. She decided not to use the dish for food again.

Every night since Michael walked into the sea, Anna had gone out to call in a cat, fetch a chair from the lawn to save it from the damp, look up at the stars. Wherever she lived it was the same. Each night it had been the same dream.

She thought: I was phoning for someone to talk to.

Next morning she truanted on Dr Alpert, changed trains at London Victoria and made her way down through the postal codes until, the other side of Balham, she thought she recognised the way the streets curled and dovetailed across the swell of a hill. ‘Orchid Nails’, read the signs outside the station: ‘Minty Pearls Dental Clinic’. Anna descended from the train and wandered thoughtfully along staring into the windows of empty houses. She had no plan. She favoured quiet residential avenues and a particular kind of four-bedroom mock-Tudor, with laurels and a slip of driveway to one side of its front garden. The shabbier a place looked, the more likely it was to hold her attention. By mid afternoon she thought she might be in Sydenham Hill. She had covered miles under the enamel light, trespassed on the hard standings of a dozen middle class homes. She was exhausted. Her ankles hurt. She was lost. It wasn’t the first time she had done this.