Harold’s collapse caused cuts to his knees and hands, and bruising on both elbows. The woman who rescued him had spotted his fall from her bathroom window. She helped Harold to his feet and retrieved the contents of his plastic bag, and then she supported him across the road, waving at traffic. “Doctor, doctor!” she shouted. Inside her house, she led him to an easy chair and loosened his tie. The room seemed sparse and cold; a television had been angled on top of a packing box. Close by, a dog was barking behind a closed door. Harold had never been comfortable with dogs.

“Did I break anything?” he said.

She said words he couldn’t understand.

“There was a pot of honey,” he said, more panicky. “Is it still in one piece?”

The woman nodded and reached for his pulse. She covered his wrist with her fingertips and stared into the middle distance, as if seeing shapes beyond the walls, while she counted under her breath. She was young, but her face had a scraped-back look, and her jogging trousers and sweatshirt hung from her body, suggesting they belonged to someone else. A man, perhaps.

“I don’t need a doctor,” Harold said with a hoarse whisper. “Please don’t call an ambulance or a doctor.”

Harold didn’t want to be in her house. He didn’t want to take up her time or get close to another stranger, and he was afraid she would send him home. He wanted to speak to Maureen, but he was also afraid he wouldn’t know what to say without troubling her. He wished he hadn’t given in to his fall. It had been in him to keep going.

The young woman passed a mug of tea, offering the handle so that he wouldn’t burn his fingers. She was saying something else but he couldn’t make it out. He tried to smile as if he had understood but she kept looking at him, waiting for his reply, and then she said it again, with more volume and less speed: “What the fuck were you doing out there in the rain?”

He realized now that she had a thick accent. Eastern European maybe. He and Maureen read about people like her in the news. They came over for the benefits, the papers said. Meanwhile, the dog was increasingly sounding not like a dog and more like a wild beast. It was hurling its full body weight against its temporary imprisonment, and sounded in danger of biting at least one of them when free. You read about dogs like that in the papers as well.