He turned to a fresh page, smoothed it and wrote, upper left, the number of the page and then, across the top, his own name, William Swann. He dipped his pen—then hesitated. In the middle air of the office, suspended there like a web or a picture drawn in rain, he seemed to see his wife’s back as he had seen it on the previous night when, standing in the doorway of the dressing room, he had watched her get free of her corset and drag her shift over her head. On the floor by her feet was a basin of water for her to wash herself with and she had sat on the bed and leaned down to it. She had thought herself alone and he had spied on her, his own wife, by the light of the two candles they had carried up from the floor below (a third candle left in glass by the window for her brother’s sake). And on the skin of her back—it had taken him a good half-minute to realise what it was—he noticed the marks her corset had left, a print of the lacing eyelets running like two columns of zeroes either side of her spine. He had not seen such marks before. In their marriage now—now and for a long while—he met his wife dressed or in darkness; he was not familiar with her nakedness, certainly not since the twins were born. The marks, a strange tattoo, had startled him. In truth they had troubled him, as though they were a sign he was supposed to read and understand, and he had felt the urge to go to her, to reach across the bed and erase them, perhaps with his mouth. Yet he did not. He could not have said why. It may have been the chasteness of her washing, the way she touched herself with the water. Or else it was worrying about that candle downstairs, burning unattended . . .

He was lost in this, his vision (and how he longed to have a truly spiritual vision, something he might share with the minister), when he heard the scrape of the street door being opened and he looked over, angry at the intrusion, and troubled to have it come in the midst of what now felt like a species of idleness.

The door was behind a curtain. The curtain rippled. He heard the door shut. And then a strange thing. He could not be certain of it but he thought he heard the bolt being pushed home.

He stood behind his desk. “Who is it?”

A man came round the curtain. He seemed to slide round it. A man in a long coat, the coat dark with rain.

“Cats and dogs out there,” said the man, wiping the water from his face. He walked to the desk and stood facing William across its surface.