‘Well, I can’t even tell you that much,’ said Annabel. ‘There’s my day-to-day life, and then a sort of panic which I’ve always been terrified of reliving. Then, I’m here, lying on a mattress and everything feels perfectly normal.’

‘Wars aren’t like that. There are bombs and air-raid sirens.’

‘There wasn’t a war. Not where we were, at any rate. Of course, those were troubled times, but educated people said that we hadn’t lived in peace for a very long time.’

‘We were invaded by another country.’

‘Or Martians!’

They were as ready as ever to burst out laughing and I began to understand that it wasn’t out of stupidity or hopelessness, but as a means of survival.

‘So why would they have taken us to another planet? What use could we be to them?’

‘Clearly none at all,’ chipped in another. ‘We’re still on Earth. Fifteen or twenty years ago—no, less, you can tell from looking at the child—when we were locked up, there was a purpose, they were keeping us in reserve for something. And then a file got lost, the admin workers made sure no one found out, and they carried on guarding us and keeping us alive, but no one was responsible for us. We’re the result of an administrative blunder.’

‘But sixteen hours! That doesn’t explain sixteen hours!’

‘And it’s ridiculous that we can’t find any pattern in the guards’ routine. My memories of before are fuzzy, but I’m sure we worked regular hours. We even had to clock on.’

‘Once, only once since I’ve been counting, the young guard stayed nearly eleven hours at a stretch, pacing up and down around the cage. By the end, he looked drawn and pale, but he didn’t complain. I’ve never seen him looking impatient,’ I said.

Our conversations followed these lines, going over and over the same ground. Attempts to recall the early years of imprisonment were fruitless. Apparently, the women had slowly emerged from an inner fog to find themselves accustomed to the strange life they led. There was no suggestion of a rebellion. They’d had husbands, lovers and children. As a result of being too afraid to think about them because it was so painful, they’d forgotten almost everything. But they didn’t try to shut me up, because they were horrified at having lost their own history. Anthea gradually became convinced that they’d been drugged.

‘Look at us, look at how we live. We have been deprived of everything that made us human, but we organised ourselves, I suppose in order to survive, or because, when you’re human, you can’t help it. We made up new rules with what we had left, we invented a code. The eldest pours the soup into the bowls, I supervise the sewing, when there is any, Annabel reconciles those who squabble, and we have no idea how all that came about. We must have been living in a dream for a long time and when we woke up, we’d adapted to the situation.’