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closed her eyes. I stood up quickly and leaned over her in consternation, but it was all right, she was still breathing. I prised the cigarette cautiously from her fingers and crushed it in the ashtray. Her hand fell away limply and settled palm upward on the sheet. She began to say something but instead her mouth went slack and she suddenly emitted a loud, honking snore and her legs twitched under the bedclothes.
    I am never at ease in the presence of sleeping people – that is, I am even less at ease with them than I am when they are awake. When I was married, I mean when I still had a wife and all that, I would have preferred to spend my nightsalone, though of course I had not the nerve to say so. It is not so much the uncanny element of sleep that disturbs me, though that is disturbing enough, but the particular kind of solitude to which the sleeper at my side abandons me. It is so strange, this way of being alone: I think of Transylvania, voodoo, that sort of thing. There I sit, or, worse, lie, in the dark, in the presence of the undead, who seem to have attained a state of apotheosis, who seem so
achieved
, resting in this deeply breathing calm on a darkened plain between two worlds, here and at the same time infinitely far removed from me. It is at such moments that I am most acutely aware of my conscious self, and feel the electric throb and tingle, the flimsiness and awful weight, of being a living, thinking thing. The whole business then seems a scandal, or a dreadful joke devised by someone who has long since gone away, the point of which has been lost and at which no one is laughing. My wife, now, was a prompt if restless sleeper. Her head would hit the pillow and swish! with a few preparatory shudders she was gone. I wonder if it was her way of escaping from me. But there I go, falling into solipsism again, my besetting sin. God knows what it was she was escaping. Just everything, I suppose. If escape it was. Probably she was in the same fix as me, wanting a lair herself to lie down in and not daring to say so. To be alone. To be at one. Is that the same? I don’t think so. To be at one: what a curious phrase, I’ve never understood exactly what it means. And I, what must I be like when I sleep, as I occasionally do? Something crouched, I imagine, crouched doggo and ready to spring out of the dark, fangs flashing and eyes greenly afire. No, no, that is altogether too fine, too sleek: more like a big, beached, blubbery thing, cast up out of the deeps, agape and gasping.
    What was I …? Aunt Corky. Her room. Afternoon sunlight. I am there. The cigarette I had crushed in the ashtray was still determinedly streaming a thin, fast, acridwaver of blue smoke. I waited for a while, watching her sleep, my mind empty, and then with leaden limbs and pressing my hands hard against my knees I rose and lumbered quakingly from the room and closed the door without a sound behind me. By now the patch of parti-coloured light from the big window on the landing had moved a surprising distance and was inching its way up the wall. It is odd how the exact look of that afternoon glares in my memory, suffused with a harsh, Hellenic radiance that is sharper and more brilliant, surely, than a September day in these latitudes could be expected to furnish. Probably I am not remembering at all, but imagining, which is why it seems so real. Haddon was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, stooped and unctuous and at the same time sharply watchful. ‘She is a handful, yes,’ he said as we walked to the door. ‘We were forced to confiscate her things, I’m afraid.’ ‘Things,’ I said, ‘what things?’ He smiled, a quick little sideways twitch. ‘Her clothes,’ he said; ‘even her nightdress. She had us demented, walking out of the place at all hours of the day and night.’ I smiled what must have been a sickly smile and nodded sympathetically, craven as I am, and thought with a shiver,
Imagine, just imagine being him
.
    It