Morrison shied away. “Look,” he said, “do you mind if I get some clothes on?”

“Which room are they in?” she asked suspiciously.

“The bedroom,” he said.

“That’s all right. That room’s all right,” she said.

Contrary to his fear she made no attempt to follow him in. When he was dressed he returned to find her sitting on the floor with a piece of paper. “We have to complete the circle,” she said. “We need the others.”

“What others?” He decided she was overtired, she had been working too hard: she had deep red blotches around her eyes and the rest of her face was pale green.

“I’ll draw you a diagram of it,” she said. But instead she sat on the floor, jabbing at the paper with the pencil point. “I wanted to work out my own system,” she said plaintively, “but they wouldn’t let me.” A tear slid down her cheek.

“Maybe you need to talk to someone,” Morrison said, over-casually.

She raised her head. “But I’m talking to you. Oh,” she said, reverting to her office voice, “you mean a shrink. I saw one earlier. He said I was very sane and a genius. He took a reading of my head: he said the patterns in my brain are the same as Julius Caesar’s, only his were military and mine are creative.” She started jabbing with the pencil again.

“I’ll make you a peanut butter sandwich,” Morrison said, offering the only thing he himself wanted right then. It did not occur to him until months later when he was remembering it to ask himself how anyone could have known about the patterns in Julius Caesar’s brain. At the moment he was wondering whether Louise might not in fact be a genius. He felt helpless because of his own inability to respond; she would think him as obtuse as the others, whoever they were.

At first she did not want him to go into the kitchen: she knew the telephone was in there. But he promised not to use it. When he came out again with a piece of bread on which he had spread with difficulty the gelid peanut butter, she was curled inside her coat in front of the fire, sleeping. He laid the bread gently beside her as if leaving crumbs on a stump for unseen animals. Then he changed his mind, retrieved it, took it on tiptoe into the kitchen and ate it himself. He turned on the oven, opened the oven door, wrapped himself in a blanket from the bedroom and read Marvell.