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length I was led up to my room, on the fifth floor, a partitioned-off brown cell with a naked lavatory bowl standing in a corner, I was too tipsy and tired to complain any more. Despite exhaustion and the lateness of the hour, however, I decided I must speak at once, immediately, now, to the letter-writer, my mysterious nemesis, and even called the switchboard and asked to be put through to Antwerp, but then I paused and thought better of it – I would have started straight away to shriek at her – and threw down the receiver and crawled into bed, bleared and unbathed, still wearing the underwear I had not changed since setting out half a world ago.
    I passed a restless night; the bed, as so often with hotel beds, was far too small to accommodate me and my stiff leg, and I was woken repeatedly by noises from outside, car horns and revving motorcycles and young men shouting to each other from street to street. Toward dawn the clamour abated and I fell into a doze, beset by violent dreams. I woke early, sweating alcohol, my brain beating, and rose and stumbled to the window and opened wide the curtains and squinted up between the beetling buildings at the dense cerulean sky of Europe.
    After breakfast, with renewed fuss and apologies, I was moved into a large suite on the more salubrious third floor. The rooms were spacious and cool, with floors of black marble, silken smooth. My returned suitcase stood at the foot of the bed, wearing a shame-faced look. I have a fondness for hotel rooms, the air they have of tight-lipped anonymity, the sense of being sealed off from the world, the almost audible echo of whisperings and indrawn breaths and women crying out in helpless rapture. Reclining in a mid-morning bath I concocted a picture of Miss Nemesis: a dried-up old virgin with blue-veined talons and spectacles on a string, and a mouth, with a fan of fine wrinkles etched into the whiskered upper lip, set in bitter dissatisfaction at the lost promise of her youth, when she had worn slacks and smoked cigarettes and written that thesis on Wordsworth's politics or Shelley's atheism that had so shocked and impressed her tutor at Girton or the bluestockings at Bryn Mawr. Surely she would be easy to deal with. First I would try charm, then threats; if all else failed I would take her to the top of the Antonelli Mole and push her off. Laughing, I began to cough, and felt my tobacco-beaten lungs wobbling in their cage like heavy, half-inflated, wet balloons, and the bath water around me swayed and almost slopped over. My cigarette case, another purloined trinket from the past, was beside me in the soap dish. I lit up, small flakes of hot ash hissing around me in the water. Nothing like a good deep chestful of cigarette smoke to quell a morning cough.
    I hauled myself up in a cascade of suds and immediately jarred my elbow on the edge of a glass shelf. This new pain struck up an echo in the knee I had bruised yesterday in the taxi on the bridge. I stood a moment clutching my arm and swearing. I am a bad fit with the world, an awkward fit; I am too high, too wide, too heavy for the common scale of things. I am not being boastful, quite the contrary; I have always found my oversized self burdensome and embarrassing. Before me in the misted glass of the bathroom's floor-length mirror my reflection loomed, pallid and peering I went out to the bedroom and stood by the window looking down into the shaded defile of the street, still massaging my bruised elbow. A bus went past, cars, foreshortened people. At the corner, where an angled block of buttery sunlight leaned, a woman selling flowers looked up and seemed to see me – was it possible, at such a distance? What a sight I would have been, suspended up there behind glass, a grotesque seraph, vast, naked, ancient. I lifted a hand, the palm held flatly forward, in solemn greeting, but the flower seller made no response.
    Almost before I knew what I was doing I had snatched up the telephone and