I SWAM IN the public pool, washed my hair in the showers afterward and put on some clean clothes. I found a café, ordered a pot of tea and read the newspaper. I walked up Kentish Town Road and bought vegetables and salad. When I got home, they had left. I went upstairs and it was miraculous. Almost everything was gone and everything that wasn’t had been arranged neatly on a shelf or a desktop. Someone must have found the vacuum cleaner as well, made my bed and done the washing-up. There was nothing for me to do but make myself a salad, then clear up thoroughly after myself, in case someone came back to check.

THE NEXT MORNING Joe rang. He’d gone through Greg’s work stuff and most of it could be dealt with at the office. Anything personal he would drop back later in the week. There was nothing urgent. In the afternoon Gwen came around with a pile of files under her arm, all household papers. She had gone through them, reordered them and, on a piece of paper, she had written a “to do” list: people to be phoned, bills to be paid, letters to be written. She had drawn a star next to the ones that needed to be dealt with immediately. She was being Gwen to me in the way that I was being Gwen to Frances, but I couldn’t tell her that.

I didn’t check my mobile phone the entire weekend. On Sunday evening I phoned Frances and told her I wouldn’t be in on Monday. I wasn’t sure I would ever be in again, but I didn’t say so. On Monday morning I went into the workshop, put on the CD player with something baroque, and began to attend to that man’s rocking chair. I sanded it down with far too much care, not because I wanted the job to be perfect but because I found it reassuring to be doing something so physical and precise that I couldn’t think about anything else. Almost automatically, in a dream, I continued with the job, and when I woke from the dream, the chair was there, finished and perfect, almost too beautiful to part with.

When I got into the house, I rang the owner of the rocking chair and said that, after all, I had found time to mend it for him, and he could collect it whenever he wanted. Then I had a long bath and afterward I remembered I hadn’t checked my answering machine, as if I’d wanted to keep the world away, just for the moment. There was a message from Fergus. I rang him.

“Are you home?” he said.

“Yes.”

“For the next ten minutes?”

“Yes.”