She acquiesced because she was kind. She didn’t believe I’d last six months. In a few weeks I’d be bored and tired. How could anyone be as interested in my ailments as her?

It took me less time than I would have hoped to settle myaffairs before the “trip.” I had a circle of male friends who came to the house once a fortnight to drink, watch football, and discuss the miseries of our work. Margot would inform them I was going walkabout and we would reconvene on my return. I made the necessary financial arrangements through my lawyer, and followed the other preparations Ralph had insisted on.

When Ralph and I met up again he took one look at me and said, “You’re my first initiate. I’m delighted that you’re doing this. You live your life trying to find out how to live a life, and then it ends. I don’t think I could have picked a better person.”

“Initiate?”

“I’ve been waiting for the right person to follow me down this path, and it’s someone as distinguished as you!”

“I need to see what this will bring me,” I murmured, mostly to myself.

“The face you have must have brought you plenty,” he said. “Didn’t you see those girls watching you at the party? They asked me later if you were really you.”

“They did?”

“Now—ready?”

He was already walking to his car. I followed. Ralph was so solicitous and optimistic, I felt as comfortable as anyone could in the circumstances. Then I began to look forward to “the change” and fantasized about all that I would do in my new skin.

By now we’d arrived at the “hospital,” a run-down warehouse on a bleak, windblown industrial estate outside London (he had already explained that “things would not be as they seemed”). I noticed from the size of the fence and the number of black-uniformed men that security was tight. Ralph and I showed our passports at the door. We were both searched.

Inside, the place did resemble a small, expensive private hospital. The walls, sofas, and pictures were pastel-colored and the building seemed almost silent, as if it had monumental walls. There were no patients moving about, no visitors with flowers, books, and fruit, only the occasional doctor and nurse. When I did glimpse, at the far end of a corridor, a withered old woman in a pink flannel nightgown being pushed in a wheelchair by an orderly, Ralph and I were rapidly ushered into a side office.

Immediately, the surgeon came into the room, a man in his mid-thirties who seemed so serene I could only wonder what kind of yoga or therapy he had had, and for how long.