“How could it be when you’re around?” Though I wasn’t sure she hadn’t overheard it somehow, I said “He wanted me to help him get you back.”

“I’m the property of no man, and I hope you told him.”

“You treated him like yours, didn’t you? Dropped him as soon as he wasn’t enough use to you.”

“He still could be. Shall we collect him on the way? I don’t doubt he’d be grateful.”

I was already regretting my response. “We agreed he should be left alone.”

Bella repelled the notion with the back of a hand, so that I thought she’d changed her mind until she said “Then take some responsibility, Patrick.”

Rather than meet this with a retort I said “You need to tell me where we’re going.”

“Take the highway north.”

“The motorway, you mean.”

“Whatever speeds us northward.”

I was unsettled by a sense that her speech kept reverting to her age. As I turned the car across the road it confronted the gap in the wall, prompting me to ask “Why have you been living here?”

“I was made to live where no man lives, to lie there until summoned. Very soon I shall inhabit your world and more besides.”

Her second comment quelled any sympathy I’d begun to feel. “And what will you do then?”

“Make them mine. Bring them together.”

While I had no idea what this might entail, it seemed ominous beyond words. I stayed silent as we headed for the motorway, and Bella was as quiet as any of my aunt’s paintings, so that I had a notion that for the moment she was no more than a token presence. I could have thought she meant to reinforce it by saying “Shall we travel with some music from my past?”

I wondered if she’d known what was waiting to be heard, because the broadcast that had just started was Purcell – The Fairy Queen. “Come, let us leave the town, and in some lonely place…” This sounded uncannily similar to my route, and I had to suppress a fancy that Bella was somehow controlling the radio, unless we were hearing the opera when nobody else could. For a while I listened to the lyrical antics of the fairy folk, which felt dishonestly remote from the behaviour of my companion, but as the characters played their Shakespearian games in the woods I couldn’t help wondering “Were you there?”

“In such a forest? Whenever you were, Patrick.”

“No,” I said, though the possibility I had in mind was just as troubling. “When it was performed.”

“I existed then and long before. He who brought me into your world did no more than contain me.”

I found I preferred not to enquire further, and regretted learning even so much. By now we were on the northward motorway. “Don’t forget you’re directing me,” I said.