“Good-bye then,” I said in those most cold and distant polished tones of mine, those tones of a speakerine manquée, and I got out. I slammed the heavy door behind me and turned away, and started to walk towards the exit. I was already handing in my ticket when he overtook me. He caught hold of my elbow from behind: it seemed the kind of thing that had happened to me a dozen times before, as indeed in minor ways it had, but this was the apotheosis of all such occasions, this was the event itself.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” I said, shaking him off for the sake of human dignity.

“I just thought I’d try it and see,” David said, handing in his ticket to the collector. The collector told him that he had got off at the wrong stop, to which David replied with some rude rejoinder, which would have annoyed me had I been in a state of annoyance. Then we pointlessly wandered out together, into the shabby car park in front of the station; we ended up leaning against a railing under a street lamp. The next thing I said was:

“That’s the last train to Tonbridge tonight, you know.”

“I can walk,” said David.

We stood there, under that lamp, not looking at each other, for a long time. Those minutes, however long they were, were the most extraordinary of my life: I cannot think back to them without writhing with some emotion, nostalgia perhaps, or pride that I went through them, or despair at the consequences of such terror and such expectation. I myself, the surface of me, felt calm and dead and white in that unnatural glare, and the part of me that was not me, but just any old thing, the inside of me, the blood and muscle and water and skin and bone of me, the rubbish, was blazing away, shuddering like some augur’s sacrifice. I have never been so frightened in my fife, and perhaps the whole of my effort since has been nothing but a struggle to repeat that fright.

“I never asked you your name,” he said.

“You could have asked me on the train.”

“I could. But I didn’t.”

“You haven’t got any more cigarettes to give me for telling you.”

“I’ll buy you a hundred then, in the morning.”

That was the kind of thing that I liked to hear, and I said straight out, “My name is Emma Lawrence.”