A taxi roared into the Charing Cross forecourt and pulled up next to him with a squeal of brakes. Dazzled briefly by the sunlight dancing in the raindrops on its bonnet, he seemed to lose sight of her. In a trice, she had reached in close and tucked the paper deftly into one of his jacket pockets. When he looked up, she was gone. On the paper he found not a letter but an address in Cambridge, written in blue ink as old as himself. He brought it close to his face. Reading it seemed to exhaust him. When the folds gave way, and it fell into lace in his hands, he redirected the taxi, caught another train and went home. There, depressed, worn out, unable to convince himself of the need to unpack his bag, he realised that he had memorised the address without wanting to. He tried to work. He sat dealing cards until it got dark, then—perhaps in a bid to remind himself of the triviality of all this—prowled from bar to bar, drinking restlessly, hoping to meet Inge Neumann and have her tell him with a laugh:

“It’s just a bit of fun.”

Next afternoon he stood in the rain where the paper had led him, across the street from a substantial old suburban house, detached, three or four storeys high, in gardens half-hidden behind a wall of attractively spalled red brick.

He had no idea why he had come.

He stood there until his clothes were soaked, but made no move to leave. Children ran up and down the street. At half past four there was a brief increase in traffic. As the rain cleared and the afternoon light shifted west, the brickwork took on a warm orange colour, and the garden wall seemed to recede a little, as if the street had widened; at the same time it seemed to stretch, becoming taller and longer. A little later, the woman in the wool coat waddled into view, breathing heavily and wiping her face. She crossed the road and, walking straight through the wall, disappeared.

“Wait!” gasped Kearney, and flung himself after her.

He had the sense of penetrating something membranous which clung elastically to his face. Then he heard a voice say: “It was amazing to them to discover they had always been in the garden without understanding it,” and knew for certain that the inside and the outside of everything are always a single, continuous medium. In that moment he believed he could go anywhere. With a shout of elation he attempted to fall forward in all possible directions at once; only to find to his dismay that in the very exercise of this privilege he had selected one of them.

Odd items of furniture remained in the house, as if some tenant hadn’t quite abandoned it. It was cold in there. Kearney went from room to room, stopping to examine an old-fashioned brass fender, a wooden ironing board folded up like an insect in a corner. He thought he heard people whispering in the rooms above; a laugh cut off by a sudden intake of breath.