Dick sat in the armchair beside me, the tape recorder on his lap. Its spools still turned in opposite directions, but none of the tape had become entangled. As the light in the garden grew more intense I was struck by the remarkable lustre of Dick’s hair—some overeager makeup girl at the studios had fitted him with a shoulder-length toupee of copper fleece. Light coursed through its filaments, and I wanted to warn Dick that his viewers would see every fevered mole and freckle in his cheeks. The blood raced through the enlarged capillaries, turning his hands and face into a set of inflamed maps.

Stifled by the seething room, I stood up and stepped through the French window. I walked across the garden, my feet sinking through the electric haze that lay over the grass. The stones in the rockery shone like gems set in jeweller’s velvet, and the soil in the flower beds was warm with the glow of compost giving life to itself.

My arms and legs were dressed in light, sheaths of mother-of-pearl that formed a coronation armour. I looked down at the simple headstone that marked the grave of Henry’s Dutch rabbit, waiting for the creature to reconstitute itself from its own bones and lollop through the glowing grass. In the waking dream of this illuminated garden, time and space no longer pressed their needs. The contingent world was rearranging itself, and serial time was giving way to simultaneity, as Dick had promised, where the living happily consorted with the dead, the animate with the inanimate.

I waited for Miriam to appear among the trees. She would walk in this garden again, while Alice and Lucy played with their younger selves and I met the youthful husband I once had been. I looked back at the house, but Dick had vanished and his camera stood on its tripod beside my empty chair. Charlton Road ran through a nave of light towards the river, and I assumed that Dick had gone to collect the children, telling them of their new playmates waiting for them at home.

I followed the pathway around the house. The silver envelope of my car floated in the drive like a tethered blimp. My neighbour approached with her elderly retriever, whose frayed coat and white muzzle glowed like a lion’s. Shepperton lay before me, a town of matadors and their families dressed in their suits of light. The traffic moved down the high street, the cars exchanging their vivid auras. A helicopter crossed the river, its blades throwing silver spears at the great elms.