Suddenly Ingrid was hard to take in. It was too much – this strange place, the mood of it, as if there was disaster ahead and darkness behind, and this was a point at which you could glimpse it all, but not make sense of it—

And then I saw her, clear as day, as if she was standing there.

Just a little girl, perhaps six or seven years old, with fine fair hair cut in a bob with a fringe that was in need of a trim, dressed in school uniform: polo shirt, skirt, little white socks, Velcro-fastening shoes. She was holding a pencil with a yellow teddy-bear eraser on one end, and as I watched she slowly rolled it to and fro between her hands, but she wasn’t watching what she was doing. She was looking at me.

She was studying me without either surprise or suspicion, as wide-eyed and innocent as a baby. Her mouth was slightly open and there was something completely otherworldly about her. I knew at once she wasn’t dangerous or malevolent. If anything, she gave off a kind of unselfconscious sweetness, as if it wouldn’t even occur to her to do harm, or that she could do anybody harm if she wanted to, or that anyone else might want to harm her.

‘Paula’s child is severely disabled,’ Ingrid told us. She sounded like a judge passing sentence in a TV movie, all fake seriousness and self-importance, as if what she was saying was some kind of necessary service to society. ‘Retarded. In my young day, they would have called her a moron.’

The little girl vanished as if she had never been. The room suddenly darkened and was as stifling as if all the air had been sucked out of it.

And then I was really frightened. Not by the little girl I’d just seen, and had glimpsed on several occasions before. No: what scared me was what I’d heard in Ingrid’s voice. That condemnation. Revulsion. Hatred, even. That was the abyss, and it was infinite and it was everywhere and all around me.

Then the pain started.

It was as if I’d been stabbed through the eyes. As if someone had positioned a spike by each one and hammered it through the thin bone of the sockets to my brain. But even as the pain took hold I was conscious that it was only an echo of what someone else had felt.

I thought I was going to be sick, right there on Ingrid’s expensive carpet. I managed to say something to excuse myself and stumbled out and somehow made my way to Ingrid’s bathroom.

The pain was now almost unbearable. It was like having had someone scrape around inside my brain, as if my skull was the shell of an egg someone had pierced and stirred with a straw. But it wasn’t just the pain that hurt. All the words I could have used to beg for help had been taken from me, and the power to remember them had been put out like a light.