‘But that fundamental bit is very small, don’t you think?’ asked Angus. ‘I can’t stop being a man, can I? But I can become a very different sort of man.’

‘Yes,’ said Domenica. ‘You could. Of course, some men do stop being men, don’t they? If one undergoes sex reassignment and takes on a female identity – surgery, the lot – then you stop being a man.’

She looked at Angus. It was difficult, if not impossible, to imagine him as a woman. It was difficult, in fact, to imagine any of the men of her acquaintance as women. And yet some men did want to become women and tried so hard, and some women wanted to be men and made a similar effort. It was not easy to empathise, but one had to. Imagine waking up every morning and feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way things were; it would be insupportable. And yet, did ordinary human empathy require people in general to believe things that simply were not true? Some aspirations were unrealistic. The middle-aged may wish to be seen as young, but did that mean that people should treat them as youthful simply because that was what they wanted? Did courtesy and consideration for the feelings of others go that far?

‘But do you ever stop being a man?’ asked Angus. ‘Or are you a woman on the outside and a man inside?’

‘Some would say those are merely social labels,’ said Domenica.

‘And Cyril might say that being a dog is merely a social label,’ Angus retorted.

Cyril did not say that, of course. He was listening to this conversation, but there had only been one word so far that he had recognised – which was Cyril. He was not sure what that word meant – it was different from walk, which he understood very well. The word Cyril meant, in his mind, that something was going to happen. It was a verb. He had no idea that it was him, that he was an object.

He waited for some further sign, but none came. So he lowered his head and went to sleep. Before he dropped off, pictures came to him, and scents too. He saw a field, and a path. He saw a ball in the air, describing an arc across the sky. He smelled something rich and exciting; rabbits, perhaps. He saw a face peering at him. He saw water at the edge of sand. He heard verbs.

47. The Symbolism of Birds

The conversation that Angus had with Domenica over personal identity was just one of the many exchanges they had on such topics. He did not have such conversations with anybody else – not with Matthew, with whom he spoke about day-to-day things, although they did discuss art from time to time; nor did he have them with Big Lou, to whom and with whom he tended to listen, rather than engage in conversation. Domenica was different; she made him think.