‘Peter, I want to be frank with you. Yours is not the kind of case we should be dealing with at One World. We had one similar, a man who made a remarkable recovery, but he was not as advanced as you are. Now they seem to think we can just take all their hopeless causes and perform miracles with them. It’s not like that. God, that it were so easy. Ah, dear God, that it were.’

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped a dewdrop from the end of his nose.

‘Let me put it another way,’ he said. ‘Our techniques are under observation and there’s much pressure on us to succeed. By that I mean we must be seen to cure. We have our critics, and there are those who praise us. But, as ever, it is the damning voices which ring out loudest. Do you follow me? Peter, can you understand what I’m saying? What I’m saying is that you may well hold a vital key to our future. They are watching you, bound to be, and they’ll want to see you progress. For us, my boy, you might try a little. Do as we ask, search your inner resources, look beyond your limits, and do something to help yourself. Do you trust me? Do you?’

He nodded to himself, and muttered, ‘Yes, I think you do.’ Then he wheeled me back to the house.

In the days that followed I gleaned more of my surroundings and particularly my fellow residents who numbered about twelve or so, though a precise count was difficult since two girls I took to be twins were in fact triplets, and their divided and coupled appearances made counting intolerably difficult. And they spent much of their time flitting noisily about in pursuit of each other’s company, changing their clothes many times in the course of a day, often wearing each other’s garments. Another woman, a compulsive drinker of water, would swallow so much that she vomited, projectile fashion, often the length of a room, after which she would dutifully fetch a bucket and mop to clean up the mess, quietly and without fuss. A man sat in a corner of one lounge pulling tufts from his hair, examining them in his palm before rolling them into soft balls which he pushed into a small cloth bag he carried everywhere with him. There was another man, the Major, a tall, slim, handsome type who seemed out of place among the others. And the rest were ordinary psychiatric sorts, crazy by degrees, that I had already met before; that is, I knew their ailments better than my own, their various madnesses having occupied other shells in other places of refuge I had haplessly frequented. Mostly I saw them at meal-times since they seemed to disappear for great parts of the day to places in the house or outside where I understood some of them did some kind of work.