I quit my position at the top of the stairs, paced the landing a few times to restore feeling to my limbs, then I headed for the bathroom. By climbing up on to the lavatory seat (a Jewish lavatory seat, so extravagantly fringed and furnished that it was a sin to sit let alone do what I was doing on it) and putting my head out of a tiny leaded window I could just look down over a side passage on to the flags of which the shadows of anyone in the living room were always thrown. It wouldn’t be possible to see all the details, but you’d get the general idea. I heaved myself up and hung out. A huge yellow moon, indifferent but not incurious, looked down with me. For the second time in one evening I almost swooned – so far out of myself and Finchley did I seem to travel, so tiny a speck was I above the roof tops amid the peering stars. On such a night a centurion might have looked out from ancient ramparts and followed the direction of a swerving serving girl; with similarly beating hearts did the Reddleman and Gabriel Oak creep about moors and pastures, feeding on exclusion, harmonizing scopophilia with the great pulse of Nature.

As for the shadows – they were distinct and still and separate. They were not only not together, they were not even close.

Unable to determine whether it was relief that made me ill, or disappointment, I lowered myself and sat for a while among the deodorizers. Fields of flowers had been slaughtered to keep the air sweet in this little room where Sharon saw to it that there was always a choice of coloured tissues but that the waters always ran blue. The thought of Sharon as a homemaker overcame me with nostalgia and nausea mixed. And it reminded me that one of the likely reasons for those shadows keeping such a formal distance was Sharon’s concern for the carpet. For a moment, Sharon and Fitzpiers figured in my imagination as a star-crossed pair of lovers who had no place, where they didn’t have to worry about the furnishings, to go. I had left them to do whatever they wanted in the living room, forgetting that the living room, with its new anaglyptic wall coverings and its underlay the price of Qum, was the last place that Sharon would have wanted to do anything but dust. If I was going to be really good about this – and God knows I wanted to be good – then I was going to have to give them greater freedom. I was going to have to give them the run of the house. It didn’t matter where I went. I could always sleep in the gutter.