It was deep night when he woke and for a moment or two he was utterly lost. Then he realised he must have turned in his sleep. He had been facing outwards but now could see the uncertain coastline of another sleeper. The rumpled blanket, a pillow, a head. Cornelius? No, not Cornelius. Emily. He tried to get her into focus. The moon was gone but there was a residue of light in the air, enough to establish a nose, a hand up by her chin, her brow. She was closer to him than he could easily explain, as if the mattresses were moored like boats in a pool and had swung on their lines. Her face was like folded cloth; then, a moment later, it was a mask in which, free from detail, from all animation, he could plainly recognise the family face: spare, handsome, inward. The father’s face? The mad saint of Shoreditch? He gazed at her, his regard, he thought, that of a philosopher more than anything . . . warmer. He gazed, was lost in gazing, seemed hardly to know any more who was gazing, when it occurred to him that the gleam at the centre of her face was, in fact, the gleam of her eyes.

She was looking at him. She must be. Or else she was sleeping with her eyes open. And who does that?

He shut his own eyes, opened them again. He wanted to be sure. He looked, pushed the dark aside with his looking. He was sure. His heart thudded. He was close to laughter. He had done, quite innocently, what he would never have dared do knowingly. And what did she think of it? This man, this newcomer, lying within reaching distance, staring at her? And because it was night, deep night, and everything had softened, all shapes and truths on the cusp of being other shapes and other truths, he began, with no effort of conscious invention, to imagine things that pleased him. It began with a vision of touching—his ghost arm stretching out, his ghost hand, the feel of her face, the shock of her breath on his fingertips. Then outwards, onwards, rushing ahead (it was the work of seconds) to a tableau in which he stood with her in the drawing room of the house in Somerset receiving callers. May I introduce Miss Emily Frend of Shoreditch? In his picture of them they looked young, unmarked by life. Themselves, but themselves made good. There was nothing wrong with her eyes, nothing amiss with his hearing. Then being served at table by Nell. And Tom fitted out as a kind of footman. Tom in a powdered wig and buckled shoes! The dining room would need redecorating of course. Fifty years since anything was done there. The bedroom too? Something from Bath, something modern. Plain? Stripes? Was green a good colour for a bedroom wall?