‘Well, I’d like it to be wooden,’ Anna said. ‘But less like a garden shed than a beach hut. Or if it was brick I would want it wainscoted.’ White  wainscoting  to  shoulder  height,  then  dove grey paint above. Bare floorboards painted the same grey. One good-size window behind  curtains  of heavy, off-white linen featuring thin vertical stripes in ice-cream colours; a similar curtain across the door to keep out the draught. No pictures on the walls. That’s all she saw, really. Her imagination ended there. Obviously there’d be a bed, a chair; they wouldn’t take up a lot of space. Nothing that forced itself on you, she thought, although perhaps a bedspread or a rug, something bright that captured the eye. ‘I’d like a shelf or two of books, but no more.’ A lot of books would pass through her room but not many would stay. ‘If I couldn’t have a view of the sea from the window, then I’d want a quiet garden which perhaps belonged to someone else but they never used it. I would know them but I wouldn’t be involved with them. When I think,’ she said, ‘I see it mainly as autumn  or spring. In winter I would hope to be somewhere else. Somewhere warm.’

She was describing the summer house, she realised, or an idealised version of it. She was imagining how she might end her days there. She began to cry. She couldn’t stop. ‘I feel such a fool!’ she said.

Helen Alpert watched her for some moments,  a satisfied expression on her sharp features. Then she pushed the box of tissues across her desk.

‘Take as many as you need, Anna,’ she recommended.

The rest of the day Anna was prone to weep suddenly for no reason; on the platform at Clapham Junction, at home in front of the TV news. Exhausted by the effort of it, she went to bed early, and dreamed she could feel a needle penetrating the inside of her gum. It was a sensation difficult to interpret: not painful so much as certain and invasive. She knew that if she thought  about the needle, it would go in elsewhere too. Wherever her concentration was, there it would go. She would feel it slipping into her chest, high up; feel it touch the collarbone – not prick, but just touch it – on the way out, just momentarily  rest against the bone as it was drawn past. She had no idea why this was being done to her, although she believed it to be her own fault. Saliva filled her mouth as if she could taste the needle – as if the taste of it was a branch or possibility or consequence of the feel of it. That thought made even more saliva come. She woke up to moonlight – tireder than ever and convinced that someone had just spoken – and went down to the kitchen.