The baby is the only person that Debbie thinks is still itself (perhaps because it has so little self) although she still communicates with the rest of us robotic doubles in much the same way as she’s always done.

Debbie is now on an elephantine dose of tranquillizers which have no noticeable effect, certainly not on the strange, obsessive behaviour that she’s in the grip of – the hand-washing, the wiping of door handles and taps, the hysteria if a vase is moved so much as an inch. Perhaps these are the rituals that ward off the madness rather than the symptoms of it. ‘She should see a bloody psychiatrist,’ Vinny says crossly, loudly, to Gordon. ‘A trick-cyclist?’ Debbie shrieks. ‘Not bleeding likely!’

After a great deal of rummaging in the further corners of her brain, Eunice has come up (after a great deal of click-clicking) with her own diagnosis, ‘Capgras’s Syndrome.’ (‘Gey queer’ is Mrs Baxter’s diagnosis.)

‘Capgras’s Syndrome?’

‘Where you believe that close family members have, in fact, been replaced by robots or replicas.’

‘Gosh.’ (Well, what else can you say?)

‘Scientists believe (a contradiction in terms, surely?) that it’s a condition related to the well-known phenomenon of déjà vu.’

(Now that’s interesting.) ‘It’s to do with our sense of recognition and familiarity.’ But then, what isn’t?

‘The first known case was cited in 1923 – a fifty-three-year-old Frenchwoman complained that her family had been replaced by identical doubles. After a while she began to complain that the same thing had happened to her friends and then her neighbours and then eventually everyone. In the end she thought her own double was following her everywhere.’ (A-ha!)

Eunice rather spoils the scientific effect by dragging hard on a Senior Service, she has recently set foot on the primrose path (fittingly), where will it end? In sex and death I suppose.

What if these things are real though? What if, say, I really do have a double? Mrs Baxter, for instance, reports seeing me buying shampoo in Boots yesterday when I know for a certain fact I was in the middle of a double English lesson and, to be more precise (‘about half-past-ten, maybe, dear?’), somewhere between

‘On another planet are you, Isobel?’ Debbie asks sharply.

‘Sorry,’ I say absently. Debbie is still rattling off a list of names – ‘Mandy, Crystal, Kirsty, Patty – oh God, I don’t know, you have a go,’ she says wearily. The baby (mute for once) gazes at me as if I am indeed a complete stranger, perhaps Capgras’s Syndrome is infectious. I look deep into its vague eyes, cloudy with doubt, a little red-gold floss of hair has appeared on the top of its head.

‘Fontanelle,’ Debbie says. I’ve never heard that name before. ‘It’s not a name, silly,’ Debbie says, smug in her knowledge of neo-natal anatomy, ‘it’s the name of that soft spot on the skull [beneath the red-gold floss] where the bones of the skull haven’t closed up yet.’ I think of boiled eggs with the tops scooped off.

‘I suppose you have to be careful not to drop it on that bit then?’

‘You have to be careful not to drop it, period,’ Debbie says sternly.

I don’t know – I can’t imagine what to call it. Perdita perhaps.

‘In my car,’ he says, waving his car keys in front of my face as if to prove it isn’t a sedan chair or a donkey-cart that he’s trying to inveigle me into.

‘Your car?’ I must stop repeating everything he says.

‘My dad’s just bought it,’ he says in an inappropriately miserable way.

‘Bought it?’

‘I’ve been thinking of dropping out of medicine,’ he says, opening the car door for me, ‘the car’s a bribe to keep me at Guy’s.’

A pretty good bribe in my books. I’d stay at medical school if somebody bought me a car. Not that I’d ever get in to medical school. (‘Do they have science or reason or logic’, Miss Thompsett asks sarcastically, ‘where you come from, Isobel?’ Where would that be? Illogical Illyria, the planet of unreason.)

‘And might you? Drop out?’

Malcolm sighs and starts the car engine. ‘Sometimes I think I’d like to – you know, just take off and disappear?’ Why does everyone except Debbie want to disappear? Perhaps we should encourage Gordon to take up magic again – practise the vanishing trick on Debbie, or better still saw her in half.

‘Everyone seems to have my life mapped out for me,’ Malcolm says while I root around in the glove compartment for something to eat. Not even a mis-shapen mint. ‘Do you want to go home?’ he asks as we stop at a set of traffic lights.

‘Not really,’ I answer vaguely, in case he has something better to offer (East of the Sun, West of the Moon).

‘You could come to the hospital with me, I’m going to visit my mother.’

‘That would be lovely.’ As far as I’m concerned, as long as I’m with Malcolm we could go and visit a morgue, or a crypt, or the pits of hell.

In the absence of chairs, we stand like awkward bookends by Mrs Lovat’s pillow. Her head’s the only part of her visible, a bit like a character from Beckett and her hair looks like a collection of well-used Brillo pads. ‘Hello,’ Malcolm says, bending over and kissing her gently on the cheek. She bats him away with her hand as if he’s a large fly. She seems to have swallowed a couple of the Brillo pads judging by the sound of her – more of a rasping kind of bark than a dulcet dying tone. But then she is an ogress, so what do you expect, and, after all, I remind myself, she is dying.

‘Who’s this?’ she croaks. ‘Come here, come closer, is this Hilary?’ and she grabs my arms with her claw and yanks me nearer with a strength you wouldn’t expect from someone at death’s door.

She doesn’t recognize me at all (‘Well, of course not!’ Mrs Baxter exclaims. ‘You used to be an ugly duckling and now you’re a—’ She hesitates.

‘A beautiful swan,’ I prompt her. But we all know what ugly ducklings grow up into. Ugly ducks.) ‘I thought you said she was pretty?’ Mrs Lovat says accusingly to Malcolm and then sighs and says, ‘I suppose she’ll have to do.’ For what? Some kind of maiden sacrifice to restore Mrs Lovat to health? But no, for she appears to be bequeathing me her son on her death-bed – ‘Take him,’ she says carelessly, from somewhere inside the crisp white sheets of the hospital-bed. ‘Look after him for me, Hilary, someone has to.’

I laugh nervously and begin to explain that I am not Hilary – the cancer has obviously begun to nibble her brain by now – but then it strikes me that I quite like deputizing for Princess Hilary so I close my mouth and instead stare at the shape of Mrs Lovat’s body under the pale-blue hospital counterpane. Perhaps she’ll conjure up a priest from inside the bedclothes and marry us so that when Malcolm finally realizes I am not Hilary it will be too late.

Mrs Lovat seems quite big for someone who’s being eaten up, although if you look closely you can see that there isn’t actually a definite outline of legs. That would be a strange thing, wouldn’t it, if diseases started at the feet and ate their way upward? I suppose the head would get pretty vociferous as time went on.

It seems churlish to upset a dying woman – none the less it is a little presumptuous of his mother (if not unnatural) to be handing him over so eagerly to the first person she sees. And although I want him, do I really want to look after him? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way round? (The head suddenly floats before my eyes, Help me …) My stomach is rumbling embarrassingly loudly but there is nothing to eat, unless you count Mrs Lovat herself, of course.

‘Have you got anything to eat, Malcolm?’

‘There’s an apple in my jacket pocket, I think.’ How intimate a thing it is to place your hand inside someone else’s pocket – and have the bonus of pulling out food as well, a lovely rosy-red apple the kind that in another plot would be smeared with poison. But not this one. ‘Thanks.’

We stop at the fish and chip shop in Tait Street – this is more like it – and eat our pokes of chips parked up on Lover’s Leap, a hill from which no Lover has ever Leapt, certainly not in living memory. In the memory of the dead it may be different, of course.

From Lover’s Leap there is a panoramic view of Glebelands and the surrounding countryside – the great industrial valleys to the west, the wild moors to the south, the pastoral hills and woods to the north. In the daytime the sky is so big here that you can see the curve on the great ball of Earth. In the dark, at our feet Glebelands twinkles like an earthbound constellation.

‘It’s like –’ Malcolm suddenly says, furrowing his handsome brow in the effort to find the right words for something, ‘it’s like you’re just pretending to be yourself – and there’s a completely different person inside you that you have to hide.’

‘Really? Not a completely similar person dogging your footsteps then?’

He gives me an odd look, ‘No – someone inside that you know people aren’t going to like.’

‘Like a fat person hiding inside a thin one? And anyway, everyone likes you,’ I point out to him, ‘even Mr Baxter likes you.’

‘That’s just the outside me,’ he says, staring through the car windscreen. There is nothing (perhaps) between us and the Northern Star. He should count himself lucky that people like his outside person, people don’t like Charles inside or out. He puts an arm round me (exquisite bliss) and says, ‘You’re a good friend, Iz,’ and gives me the last chip.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘best be getting back, I suppose.’ There is to be no kiss then, let alone any Leaping. ‘Right then,’ I say, disguising my disappointment. I am Patience on a monument. How long will I keep my passion silent? Until my tongue is cut out and my silver-scaled sardine tail is turned into awkward, unwieldy legs? Perhaps not quite that far.

‘Where’s Debbie?’

Vinny snorts with malign laughter. ‘Standing guard over the corner-cabinet probably.’

Vinny’s right, Debbie is monitoring the contents of the china-cabinet in the dining-room. ‘The second I turn my back,’ she says resentfully, indicating a pair of Worcester plates and a Dresden shepherdess, ‘they all move around.’

‘Really?’

‘But they’re not stupid – the minute anyone else comes in the room they don’t budge an inch.’

This surely isn’t part of Capgras’s Syndrome? ‘You don’t think they’re close relatives or anything, do you?’

She gives me a look of profound disdain. ‘I’m not a complete idiot, Isobel.’ But can she tell a hawk from a handsaw? That’s the question.

She stalks off, forgetful of the wailing baby, and takes a duster and polish from somewhere about her person (soon it will be white rabbits) and starts rubbing the doorknobs. Again and again. And then some more.

‘Are you OK, Audrey?’

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘There’s nothing you want to … well, tell me?’

‘No,’ she answers and turns her face away. (‘That lovely shawl you knitted,’ I say conversationally to Mrs Baxter, ‘you know, the one for your niece in South Africa? Did she – er – like it?’

‘Oh, I don’t think she’s got it yet,’ Mrs Baxter says. ‘I sent it surface mail because the baby isn’t due until next month. It takes for ever,’ she adds, although it’s unclear whether she means the mail to South Africa or the gestation of a child.)

Certain things dawn on me slowly. For one – the strange ‘Autumn Leaves’ patterned stair-carpet has been replaced with an older and old-fashioned one – red, figured with blue and green (much nicer) – and the stairs have suddenly sprouted brass stair-rods – ‘sprouted’ may not be the correct verb for the sudden appearance of stair-rods, but what is? Apart from ‘rain’, of course? I pause on the landing to try and work this one out. The new flock wallpaper has also disappeared and been replaced with a heavy anaglypta, painted magnolia above the dado – long gone under Debbie’s regime – and dark green below.

I must be in the past. Just like that. But is it my own past? I cast around for clues, will I see my younger self coming out of a room? (Perhaps that’s how we get doubles? Bring them back from the past?) A noise makes me look back down the stairs. A young woman (not me) has just entered the hallway and is now coming up the stairs. Judging by the way she looks – low-waisted dress with a handkerchief-point hem above her thin ankles – I must have pitched up around 1920.

She walks past me, quite oblivious to my presence (thank goodness she doesn’t walk through me, that would be unnerving) and races up the stairs to the attic. Curious, I follow her into my own room – which is my room and yet not my room – where she sits at a heavy Victorian dressing-table and peers at her reflection in the mirror. She seems to be getting ready for a party, judging by the dress – a hand-made turquoise silk, scattered with big rosettes in the same material, astonishing in its ugliness – and the number of rejected outfits strewn around the untidy room.

She’s rather plain to look at, but there’s something attractive and open about her expression – the kind of youthful optimism that seems to have passed by me and Charles – and Audrey too, come to think of it. She sits looking at herself for quite a long time and then suddenly loosens the chignon of hair at the nape of her neck and picks up a big pair of dressmaking shears that are sitting on the dressing-table and with one awkward cut, relieves herself of her hair.

The result is a disaster but she tidies it up with the shears into a rough approximation of a flapper bob and ties on a squaw-type headband of sequins and looks at the result with some pleasure. An indistinct voice floats up the stairs with the message that Mr Fitzgerald is here for her and growing impatient.

When she leaves the room, I’m close on her heels. Down on the landing she almost trips over a little boy – seven or eight years old, cute in his little sailor suit – who gasps at the sight of the shorn locks. She ignores him. We reach the downstairs hallway, the girl is ahead of me, walking into the living-room, met by a scream from someone invisible. ‘Your hair! What have you done to your hair, Lavinia?’ and an uncertain male voice (Mr Fitzgerald, I suppose) saying, ‘Good God, Vinny, what on earth have you done to yourself?’

Vinny! I would never have recognized our aunt in this young girl. It just goes to show. The Arden of Vinny’s youth is much nicer than the one we inhabit today, it smells of lavender and roast beef and gleams with modest wealth. I’m about to slip into the living-room behind Vinny when an extraordinary thought strikes me – the little boy at the top of the stairs – the handsome, blond little sailor-boy – must be my father!

I turn round and run back up the stairs – but too late, the Autumn Leaves are already carpeting the stairs and the young sailor-boy is coming out of the second-best bedroom with tired eyes and thinning, greying hair and our ridiculous doorstep baby dribbling milky vomit on to his Shetland pullover. ‘Hello, Izzie,’ he says with his despondent smile, ‘what are you up to?’

‘Not a lot,’ I say with enforced cheerfulness. If I told him the truth he would never believe me. Soon we will all be in the hands of the trick-cyclist.

‘How can you possibly know that? Where did you find it?’

‘On the first landing, in that dish on the window-sill.’ I know the one he means, a little Spode box with a lid on, but I’ve looked in there many times and there’s never been so much as an eyelash, let alone a lock of hair. ‘Maybe it’s materialized out of thin air,’ Charles says eagerly. ‘It’s like finding clues, isn’t it?’

‘Clues to what exactly?’

‘Her,’ he whispers as if we might be overheard. ‘Where she is.’ A lock of hair, a powder-compact, a twice-lost shoe and a strange smell – not much of a map. In court this evidence wouldn’t add up to a mother. It would add up to madness. I refuse to even touch the lock of hair. I don’t want a black curl, I want the whole Eliza, quick and breathing, an entire person inside her skin, the hair growing from roots on her head, the veins throbbing with robin-red blood. Why can’t I go back and find her?

I’m trying to write an essay on Twelfth Night – ‘Appearances can be deceptive: discuss’. I like Shakespeare’s masquerading heroines, his Violas and his Rosalinds, if it came down to it I’d rather be one of them than a Hilary. If I was a Viola I would have a Sebastian to twin me, one face, one voice, one habit, but two persons (an apple cleft in two). Perhaps incest wouldn’t be so bad if it was with someone you were so close to. Malcolm Lovat, for example.

I’m reminded of Mr Primrose – Rosalind and Ganymede, Viola and Cesario – in the same body. I suppose it’s all a matter of perception really – what you see depends on what you think you’re seeing. And anyway, how can we tell if what we’re seeing is real? Reality seems to go out the window when perception comes in the door. And, if it comes right down to it, how do we know there’s such a thing as reality? Dearie, dearie me, soon I will be as solipsistic as Bishop Berkeley. Do I even know who I am? ‘To thine own self be true,’ Gordon says occasionally (although not lately). But to which one?

Twelfth Night, I write with a sigh, with some difficulty because of the gloves, is about darkness and death – the music and the comedy only serve to highlight what lies beyond the pools of golden light – the dark, the inevitability of death, the way time destroys everything. (‘But, Isobel,’ my English teacher, Miss Hallam, protests kindly, ‘it’s one of his lyrical comedies.’)

If I could go back in time (which I can, of course, I know) and meet Shakespeare, I could ask him to verify my reading of the play. That would be a surprise for Miss Hallam – ‘Yes, Miss Hallam, but Shakespeare himself says that the carpe diem theme of Twelfth Night is, by definition, a morbid one …’ Of course, Miss Hallam would just think that I’m off my head.

I look out of the window at the bare black branches of the Lady Oak, scrimshawed against the ivory of a tea-time sky. Troops of crows are racing the twilight to reach the shelter of its branches. The rooks settle themselves quickly into the branches of the tree and when the last wing has been rustled into position and the last caw has faded beyond an echo, you wouldn’t know that the tree is full of birds unless you’d stood there yourself and watched them disguise themselves as black leaves.

Soon it will be the year’s midnight and I can feel the solstice blues coming on me. And the rain it raineth every day. I should be out amongst the Christmas lights of Glebelands, sitting in the Three Js Coffee Bar – even a milky coffee and a Blue Riband with Eunice would be preferable to this melancholy. I am made of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

I sink down on my back, cocooned in the eiderdown, drugged by boredom and cold, and comfort myself with imagining that this is St Agnes Eve – any minute my dream lover (Malcolm Lovat) will cross the threshold and ravish me and carry me away from this dreariness. On cue, there’s a knock at my bedroom door.

‘Come in,’ I shout hopefully, but it’s no dream lover, only Richard Primrose, standing in the doorway, shuffling his feet (a strange concept) nervously as if he needs to go to the toilet. ‘How did you get in here?’ I demand, startled by his extreme ugliness.

‘Your mum let me in,’ he says, aggrieved at being accused of breaking and entering.

‘My mum?’ I reply, startled for a moment until I realize he means the Debbie-mother.

‘Congratulations,’ Richard says awkwardly.

‘On what?’

‘The baby.’

‘The baby?’ I’m not at all sure we should be congratulated on the baby, its screams are even now bouncing off the flock wallpaper on the staircase below as if someone was about to cut it up and put it in a pie. ‘Is that why you’re here?’

‘No,’ he says gruffly and wrinkles his nose at the smell of sadness. ‘I was wondering if you wanted to go out?’

‘Go out?’ I echo blankly. (It’s pouring with rain, why would I want to go out?)

‘Go out,’ he repeats peevishly, enunciating the words loudly and clearly as if I might be a foreigner. Or an idiot. He’s staring so intently at a point behind my left shoulder that I turn round to see what, or who, is there. Nothing and nobody, needless to say.

‘Go out,’ I repeat cautiously. ‘Do you mean [surely not] on a date?’

‘Well,’ he says, looking sullen, ‘we don’t have to call it that if you don’t want to.’

A wave of mild hysteria begins to roll over me. ‘What shall we call it then? A fig? A prune?’ Richard flushes in an unattractive way that highlights his rampant acne and unexpectedly lurches towards me and pushes me down on my bed. He’s surprisingly heavy, he must be made of some dense alien material, I can feel the air being squeezed out of my lungs. He kisses me, if you can call it that, in a disgusting, slurpy, slippery kind of way, trying to push his tongue up against the portcullis of my teeth. Where’s a time warp when you need one? Or the Dog? Or a woodcutter?

When Richard’s tongue discovers my gums he starts getting very excited and he has to shift his position to accommodate a body part that’s swelling faster than yeast, giving me an opportunity to free my knee and jerk it into his bulky groin. He rolls off the bed and on to the floor, clutching his detumescence, before scrambling up and, spitting, ‘You bitch, I was going to invite you to a party, but I wouldn’t now if you paid me,’ and turns on his heel and stomps downstairs.

‘Drop dead,’ I shout after him. The unbelievable cheek of it – I would sooner have an amorous relationship with the Dog than Richard. Indeed, it makes you question why bestiality is so frowned upon and yet sexual intercourse with someone like Richard is considered perfectly normal.

‘Och, don’t worry [“dinnae fash yersel”], I’ll make time.’ What will she make it from – the fabric of time itself, or will she unravel it and knit it up anew?

Then suddenly the whole conservatory is filled with a weird green light, a fluorescent neon green, coming from above. The green light is moving, passing over the house, descending to hover over the garden. It’s like a huge green jellyfish, pulsing with energy. White lights like arc lights seem to move around at random inside it, causing it to pulsate more. The Dog, ears flattened as if it’s flying, crouches on the tiled floor and whines.

I can feel the green light flooding me, filling me with the warm static feeling that comes from thunder and sunlamps – not ultra violet, but ultra green. My mind begins to feel extremely agitated, as if it’s full of large, angry wasps buzzing around in a frenzy trying to escape. The smell of rotten eggs invades the conservatory.

I feel dizzy, gravity isn’t working properly for me, I’m going to become detached from the ground, rise up like a slow rocket, out of the hole in the conservatory roof. I forget to breathe. My whole body is being sucked up into the green jellyfish, I’m several feet off the floor.

Then, shockingly, it’s gone, disappeared – absolutely and completely – as if it was never there. The night is black again, the conservatory dismal. I look down and one ancient cactus has turned green and quick and a scarlet flower like an angel’s trumpet is slowly opening at the end of a spiny finger. I reach out to touch it and prick my own finger on a spine.

I leave the conservatory, it doesn’t feel like a dream, the steps I take seem real, the air is cold and I’m very tired. What was that? The past? The future? My people from another planet come to take me home? Surely if an alien spaceship had just spent several minutes hovering over the house someone else would have noticed? I pass Charles’ room, I can hear him snoring soundly. Poor Charles, what he wouldn’t give for these experiences. What I wouldn’t give not to have them.

If time isn’t always going forward – which apparently it isn’t in my case – then fundamental laws of physics are being broken. What about the Second Law of Thermodynamics? What about death, if it comes to that? Experimentally, I drop one of Arden’s old flower-sprigged plates on the kitchen floor where it smashes nicely. ‘What are you doing?’ a harassed-looking Debbie asks, an even more harassed-looking baby slung over her shoulder.

‘I’m just watching this plate.’ (Debbie, of all people must surely understand this.) ‘I’m conducting an experiment to see if time can move backwards – if it can, then the pieces of this plate will rise up and re-form.’ But the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds good and the plate remains in pieces on the floor.

‘You’re mad, you are,’ Debbie says, stuffing the rubber teat of a bottle into the baby’s mouth.

‘You’re one to talk,’ I say before having to rescue a choking baby. I haul it all the way up to my room and feed it lying on my bed while attempting a critical analysis on one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I don’t suppose this is how he imagined his readers. If he imagined them at all.

Mrs Baxter has had to make several adjustments already to the pink dress. ‘I swear if I watch you long enough I can see you grow,’ she grumbles pleasantly, letting the hem down for the second time. The dress has just made the transition to my body from the tailor’s dummy that stands guard in the corner of Mrs Baxter’s bedroom. When it was worn by the dummy it looked reasonably presentable, but on me it doesn’t look right at all somehow.

I look like a huge pink amoeba, grown to fill the whole of the cheval-mirror. Mrs Baxter, on her knees at my feet, says something unintelligible through a mouthful of pins and then starts to choke and spit all the pins out like a hail of Lilliputian arrows or a shower of elf-shot.

She cocks her head to one side like a deranged spaniel and says, ‘I thought I heard Daddy’s car.’ She shakes her spaniel-head. ‘But it’s not. I’m as mad as a mushroom, I really am. I’m growing quite dottled, I’m such a bag of nerves.’

A bag of nerves. What a truly dreadful expression that is. And what kind of a bag? A handbag, such as Mr Primrose’s Lady Bracknell might have carried? Or a soft sack (a bag of frayed nerves), like a dead cat’s body?

Mr Baxter’s baleful presence is watered down in the Baxters’ bedroom – a cut-glass ash-tray and a copy of the Reader’s Digest on his bedside-table and a pair of neatly folded blue-striped pyjamas on the left-hand pillow are the only indications of his presence. I can’t imagine what it must be like lying so close to ‘Daddy’ every night. Mrs Baxter’s own night attire – a pink brushed-nylon nightie – sits demurely on the right-hand pillow and a pair of pink furred slippers (‘baffies’) are parked by the side of the bed. The rest of the bedroom is sprigged and ruched in a very feminine way that must really get on Mr Baxter’s own nerves.

Mrs Baxter pins up my hem. ‘Look at me,’ she says, catching sight of herself in the mirror, ‘I look like a tattie bogle.’ She does look a bit of a mess, her hair needs a shampoo and set and her make-up is patchy, as if she put it on in the dark. It’s not helped much by the red marks on her cheekbones – like Iroquois war-paint – where Mr Baxter has punched her. ‘Silly me, I walked into a door,’ she adds, fingering her war-paint. ‘I’ve really let myself go, haven’t I?’ she says, regarding her reflection sadly. (But where has she let herself go to?)

‘There,’ Mrs Baxter says, as she puts the last pin in place in the hem of the pink dress and I twirl round to view myself, filling the cheval-mirror with whirling pink roses (for an uncomfortable second I am reminded of the young Vinny’s turquoise party dress). My mother should have been here, handing out fashion tips – telling me that pink isn’t my colour, that the roses are too full-blown and that I need a tight belt at my waist to make me look shorter. ‘Very nice, dear,’ Mrs Baxter says instead.

When the fitting of the pink dress is over we go down to the kitchen to eat cakes that are appropriate to our madness. Mushroom cakes – little pastry cups filled with sponge and topped with coffee buttercream, the butter-cream scored with a fork to look like gills and a marzipan stalk stuck in the middle. Mrs Baxter doesn’t, thank goodness, attempt to model a cake on the Death Caps that have spawned beneath the Lady Oak.

I take a cake to Audrey who’s sitting in the living-room, by the fire, with a listless look on her face. She looks at the little cake as if it was poisonous and whispers, ‘No, thanks.’ The baby’s wailing drifts on the cold wind from Arden and Audrey flinches. ‘Audrey … what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ she says miserably. (‘And … um …’ I say helplessly to Mrs Baxter, ‘how much does it cost to send a shawl surface mail to South Africa?’

‘Dearie me,’ she says with a puzzled little frown, ‘I’m not sure – it was Audrey that took it to the post for me.’) I suppose in the hatch and brood of time it might all come right.

‘I thought the baby would make everything all right,’ he mutters (I don’t think that’s how babies work), ‘but it’s just made it worse.’ Tenderly, Gordon lifts the baby from its pram and murmurs, ‘Poor thing,’ into its red-gold floss. He carries the baby upstairs and the next time I see it is through the half-open door of the second-best bedroom where it’s sleeping peacefully with the Dog lying guard by its cot. (The Dog is very subdued since it time-travelled.) We really should take it back to where it came from, or at least return it to the baby shop and explain it’s been sent to us by mistake.

As we walk along Chestnut Avenue, a very weird thing starts to happen. Every time we walk towards a lamppost, the light starts flashing on and off. When we’ve passed it, it stops flashing – and the next one ahead of us begins to flash instead. On-off-on-off.

We stop-start along Chestnut Avenue, testing each lamppost, trying to work out some pattern. Are they signalling something to us? Is my body interfering with the national grid in some way? (My body electric.) Or Vinny’s? I explain to Vinny that the doors of perception are hanging crazily off their hinges these days.

I am at odds with the material world – every day confirms some new alienation. Perhaps I am from another planet, I think glumly, as we approach the church hall, and my alien compatriots are trying to send me morse code via the streetlamps.

Wearily, I pick up the bottle and plug the baby with it.

Instead I can feel his gaze through the gloom as he says in a flat voice, ‘I killed your mother.’

‘Pardon?’