‘I’d give anything,’ she told James the cat, ‘for a night of beautiful dreams in which someone really wanted me.’

James, padding  disdainfully about  around  her legs, indicated that  he would like to go out. Anna opened  the back door  and watched him run off towards the orchard with his tail up.

A minute later, for no reason she understood,  she slipped into her shoes and followed him. He soon vanished beneath the apple boughs. ‘James?’ She left him there, listening at the small tunnels in the grass, and went to the back fence to gaze across the water meadow.

All evening  a  benign  weather  system,  stalled  over  Europe, had been pulling warm air out of Morocco to drape across the southern  counties like a shawl: it was a night that  smelt faintly of cinnamon,  prone to faint mists. The light of half a moon  lay across the field like the light in some woodcut – forgotten before Anna was young – in which the shadows of figures fell a little too strongly across the ground. Everything was roughened by that raw moonlight, especially the grass. Anna, who thought she saw a small oblique shadow make its way in quick, low dashes and pounces from thistle to clump of thistle, let herself out of the garden and went down to the river, to which everything stretched away.

The water  lay in  short  serpentine  reaches,  black  and  shiny between willow and elder. The soft earth bank, stamped down by generations of ducks, was churned  anew each morning  by excitable Labrador  dogs. Anna  stood  for what seemed a long time, like someone listening. She took off her shoes, tugged her white nightdress over her head, and, having bundled them together out of sight, waded into the river until she felt it push insistently at her upper thighs. Oh dear, she thought.  Who swims alone at night? Dr Alpert would find it interesting; Marnie  – who, seven years old, some scraps of sinewy brown nothing in a red swimsuit, had loved to be towed around in the river by her father, coming in late to meals all summer  – would judge it irresponsible. Anna took one lurching step back towards the bank, then, changing her mind again, knelt down and launched forward, careful to keep the water out of her mouth. The river accepted her. It was warmer than she expected, the current  amiable and slow. Midstream, a faint narrow track reflected the sky; but the shadows were bulky and like objects in themselves. She swam fifty yards slowly; after a further thirty turned on her back; then – arms out, feet together – allowed the stream to take her and float her along, past a line of poplars, between some darkened houses, through the village and out again.