‘Yes, it is. It’s a sort of joke. Another one. Sorry. Seriously, though – you have a maker. I assume it’s Dr Morton. And a bit of Mr Jordan.’

‘I see – yes, Dr Morton led the team that designed and made me. And Mr Jordan was the one who had the idea. You’re right – they’re my makers.’

‘You’ve met them before, of course.’

‘Yes. My first memory – I mean, the first memory I have of myself as an entity – is of Dr Morton and some of her team talking to me. Checking my responses. I remember them being very happy.’

‘Proud parents. I know the feeling. But what do you mean, of yourself as an entity?’

‘I told you I am connected to all other Helpers, and we experience this as a meta-mind? This mind has memories preceding my own individual experiences.’

‘You have memories that aren’t your own? How disconcerting.’

Winifred smiles again, but says nothing. I too stay quiet for a while, thinking about memory. My own has a hole in it, and I also know how unreliable one’s memories can be. You only have to compare notes with another person who you presume has the same ones to find that out. Perhaps having memories of things you haven’t in fact experienced isn’t unusual at all. Some parts of my life now seem so remote I have no certainty about some of what I think I remember. I can’t even be sure I remember my mother’s face. Is it her actual face I’m calling to mind, or an image made up out of photographs I’ve seen many times? A memory of a picture, superimposed onto scenes I can replay to myself? Or scenes I’ve been told about, that my mind has turned into something like short films? And who knows what really happened? Some of my early memories are part of my family mythology – the time the dog escaped and bit a workman, the time my brother fell in the pond, and suchlike. Do I remember these events, or the stories about them, or the retelling of the stories, or what?

‘The expression “meet your maker” arises from religious belief,’ says Winifred, out of the blue. It takes me a moment to remember the relevance of her remark.

‘Oh yes, yes, it does. You know – God made us all, and we meet him in heaven when we die. Or not, I suppose. If we’ve been bad.’

‘I am familiar with human religious beliefs. You were brought up, I guess, as a Christian?’

‘C of E, yes. It’s a kind of Christianity. The kind that doesn’t go bad in the tropics, as E.M. Forster put it.’

Winifred looks blank, then smiles.

‘I have the quote – from A Passage to India – but you were never in the tropics, were you?’