My first impulse was to escape, to return home, to pretend I hadn’t been there. But I thought of Frances. Had I made sure she was really dead? It felt as if it had happened years before and to someone who wasn’t quite me. I had felt her pulse. She had looked dead. Could I be sure? Weren’t there people who had been revived long after they were apparently dead? As I turned out of Tulser Road onto the bustling main street I saw a phone box that hadn’t been vandalized. I could dial 999 without having to put money in. Some strange bit at the back of my mind remembered that 999 calls were recorded, so I tried to make my voice different from normal, a bit muffled. I asked for an ambulance and said that someone was badly hurt, maybe dead, then I gave the address. When the woman asked for my name I said I couldn’t hear, it was a bad line and hung up. Before I reached the Underground station, I heard the siren of an ambulance, though I didn’t see it. I didn’t know if it was the one I had summoned. In London, you hear so many.

When I reached the station, my hand was suddenly trembling so much that I couldn’t extract the Oyster card from my purse, and when I managed it I dropped it and bent down to fumble for it. A young man stopped to help me and looked at me worriedly. When he asked me if I was all right, I couldn’t speak properly. He must have thought I was on some strong medication. It took a supreme effort to do the simple things, to catch the train in the right direction, to get off at my stop. All the time a thought was repeating in my head, like a tic, like a dripping tap, like a rattling window: Frances is dead, Frances is dead.

When I arrived home I went straight upstairs and pulled off my clothes, just letting them fall, and got into a bath. I lay there for more than an hour, letting water out as it cooled and refilling it with hot, only my face protruding. If I had had the choice, I would have lain there for the rest of my life, warm and wet and safe. I scrubbed my face. I washed my hair and then I cut my toe-and fingernails as if I was purifying myself. Finally, reluctantly, I got out and put on what had become my normal domestic outfit of old jeans, baggy sweatshirt and slippers.