If I had known any of this on the morning that I stood before him in his basement bedsitter, complaining about the poor moral quality of my previous incarnation, it is possible that I would have been less determinedly dazzling. I can see now that he really didn’t have to take it from me. He hadn’t even received his cheque from Sharon yet. He would have been quite within his rights to have shown me the door. But the habits of a lifetime of getting things wrong prevailed with him. His confidence was shot to pieces. He took my dissatisfaction with Tommy personally; it was further proof, if further proof were needed, that the cards were stacked against him.

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Point taken.’

I wasn’t aware that I had made a point. ‘Just put me back to sleep again,’ I insisted. ‘Only this time make a better job of it.’

He looked alarmed by my expectations. ‘I’ll do what I can for you,’ he promised me, sepulchrally, ‘but please remember that I can’t change anything. I can only put you in touch with what’s already there.’

‘I think I understand,’ I said, ‘the limits of your capabilities. Let’s get on with it.’

‘Point taken,’ he repeated, motioning me to sit. He didn’t have an ounce of pride left. ‘Now close your eyes. I want you to listen very carefully to what I’m saying. Your eyes are very heavy. You are floating out into the distance. Your limbs are very …’

‘Yes, yes,’ I interjected. ‘I know all that.’

And that was how I came to be slumped in a hypnotist’s chair once more, floating out into the distance, while that part of me I could no longer call my own was back haring about not my grandparents’ Lodz or Lublin but Dorset – Victorian Dorset – of all God-forsaken places. Don’t ask me what I was doing there: nowhere in the world interested me less. Conscious, I would not even have been able to locate it on a map.

What follows is a transcription from a tape that Harry Vilbert made at the time. His confidence might have been shot to ribbons but he was still sufficiently alert to the possibility of personal advantage to be bothered with fiddling with a tape recorder while I was comatose. I think he tried to interest the BBC in what he had recorded and I can only suppose they turned him down because they were sick of him: he had badgered them for years about using action-replays to prosecute referees in the courts for criminally wrongful decisions. Later on, when he was sweet on Camilla, he made her a present of the tape – I think to put her off me. That was how I came to get hold of it; and I reproduce it now interspersed with my own recollections of what took place. Throughout my ordeal – I don’t think that is too strong a word – I retained a clear sense of who and where I was, and I never for a moment became unaware of Harry. It is possible that I was not as free then as I am now to speculate upon his motives and passions, but I am not going to begrudge myself the luxury of mingling present thought with past experience. I don’t respect verisimilitude enough, let alone Harry Vilbert, to make the sacrifice. That will teach him to have tried to put Camilla off me.