And she smiled at him tenderly, thinking of the horrible ordeal of the Artificial Limb and Appliance Centre, whither she had gone to hold his hand (shocking how many black jokes about hands and arms leaped to one’s lips in such circumstances), and which had reduced Kate, not Hugo, to tears: “Not what I’m meant to be here for,” she had whispered into his jacket, furtively wiping her eyes and nose, laughing while she cried, shocked and disturbed by the queue in the waiting room, by the inelegantly phrased notices, by the jumbled heap of bright pink spare parts with which Hugo was finally presented, by the doctor’s embarrassed manner, by the patient faces of other victims, by the angry tired tears of a small waiting child (from what deformities might her own have suffered, was Hugo her deformed baby, after all?), and Hugo had said, “There, there, you can cry for me, you can be my official mourner, you do the job so well.” Hugo’s case proved to be fortunate, according to the doctor: they could fit him without a harness. Lucky Hugo to have an elbow. And Hugo was right, there was a good article to be written about the Artificial Limb and Appliance Centre. A plea for more tact, for more sensitivity to aesthetics, for small technological adjustments? She would have to do some research. Yes, a good subject, a worthwhile subject, and one right up her alley.

“I think,” said Hugo, whose mind had been moving over the same scenes, “that it will be all right for us. I don’t know why, but I think so. There’s life in it yet. What a strange year this has been.”

“It doesn’t look so bad, now we can look back on it. Nothing seemed to be happening, but perhaps it was, after all. It all seemed to be so sticky. So stuck.”

”Perhaps the world moved by while we stood still.”

“Well, it certainly wouldn’t stop for us.” Kate got up, cleared the plates, poured another glass of wine, sat down.

“You know,” she said, “for months I had this strange sensation, as if the world had in fact slipped, and I’d fallen off it. Lost my footing. I can’t explain, as though it had all tilted away from where I thought it was, and had slid away. This picture kept coming into my head, of a great dark globe rolling through the darkness at a strange angle. Though how could a globe be at an angle? A giddy feeling, as though I’d fallen off into space. The ground gone from under me.”

“A dream, was it?”

“No, not a dream, it was conscious, or rather it was one of those half-conscious thoughts that you can never quite get hold of. A thought just beyond the edge of something. Like a memory of a dream. But I don’t think I ever actually dreamed it. Though, of course, how would I know if I hadn’t? Or had?”