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narrow-faced man standing before him, he knew at once who he was.
    Lidia is here . A statement, not a question.
    Who are you? Why do you want to see her ?
    Then there she was, standing behind him, the child, as so often, in a crook of her arm. It’s all right. It’s fine .
    But he could not believe that it was all right, fine. Reluctantly he moved aside. Why, why ? Why had he failed to stand his ground? He was often to ask himself that question.
    We are going for little walk together .
    He gripped the cretonne curtain in one hand and gazed down to the steep street. The man did not help her with the pushchair, as he himself would have done, but merely stood watching her as she struggled to manhandle it down the steps. But he took over from her as soon as she had eased it through the gate. He then began to push it down the hill towards the sea. Oddly, Lidia walked not beside him but behind him. For a moment she halted and looked up at the window and the old man could see – or thought he could see – the beseeching terror and anguish on her face.
    But when they at last returned – all through their absence he had kept his frozen vigil at the window – the two of them were pushing the chair together, just as he and she had so often pushed it together in the past, their hands often touching, and she was talking, smiling, laughing, as was the tall, dark, narrow-faced man.
    I’m sorry. Very sorry. But I think it best if we go back with my husband .
    Oh, do you really think so? Are you sure ?
    I think it best .
    But not now, not at once !
    Better. Yes. I’m sorry. You are so kind, always so kind .
    They would be taking the train. Might they leave the pushchair and some other things until they could return in a day or two? Her husband would borrow a van from a friend of his.
    Well, yes, of course. If that’s what you want. Of course .
    He never saw them again. He never heard from them again. Elsie said that they had vanished from the flat two or three days after their return to it. She made enquiries of the landlords, of the other tenants, and of the Pakistani owner of the store at the corner. But no one had any information. Perhaps they had moved to Brazil. Perhaps to Hungary. Those were the usual surmises.
    But it’s so odd !
    Yes, it is odd. I hope the poor thing and the baby are all right . Elsie eventually told him that she had spoken to the police. But
    they had been ‘unhelpful’.
I was unhelpful too. I should have done something . He thought
    that but did not say it.
    A ferocious gale battered the seaside town all that night. By turns he slept, half-slept, and lay awake. What am I doing in this tiny boat without any oars? It’s dark and what ought to be water when a wave crashes over me is not water but blood. I feel sick. Seasick, life-sick. Will no one rescue me ? That was one dream. He awoke from it to reach out for the glass of water by his bedstead and gulp from it. His throat and mouth felt parched. Then, soon after, still awake, he had to urinate. He remembered, with a terrible pang, how Lidia would leave a glass of water by the vast bed every evening and how she would each morning empty the chamber-pot and scour it out with something that made it stink no longer of urine but, even less agreeably, of carbolic. Why is that it is only in works of fiction and in accounts given by patients to psychiatrists do dreams have a coherent, consequential logic, however perverse ?
    Once more he drops off, as over a cliff into a boiling sea. Whose room is this that I’m about to enter? Oh, it’s the attic! And why am I so terrified of turning the doorknob? But I must, must, must. The light switch. I can’t see a thing. Yes, up, not down. I remember that. The sudden glare from the overhead bulb – or is it the sudden terror that I feel? – makes me close my eyes tight shut. Open them, must, must. Blood glistens everywhere. It makes zigzag patterns on the walls and