She was in a fragile state. She was still feeling tired after her long plane journey. (There had been a four-hour delay and they had arrived at Heathrow at three in the morning.) She had also drunk champagne on the plane, which she shouldn’t have done. She was a poor drinker. She should have resisted the Roscoes’ well-meant attempts to cheer her up. And why had she needed cheering up? Well, she had been depressed. She had burst into tears. That hadn’t had anything to do with her marriage. She had convinced herself that she could never possibly put pen to paper again.

‘Unleashed,’ she said aloud. ‘Nonsense.’

But the dark cloud wouldn’t go away. Tired. That was it. Terribly tired. That was the reason. When she was tired she became subject to odd fancies, like a pregnant woman – a proclivity she did not always succeed in keeping well under control. It had all happened before. The fact that she was going back to work tomorrow morning and had to write a report for the club committee by the end of the week didn’t help either.

Antonia sat down and listened to a Haydn sonata. She managed to persuade herself that that was the salve she had needed. (Haydn’s common sense had ‘penetrated’, was how she thought of it.) She then glanced at the twenty pages of the novel she had started writing and thought the whole thing implausible in the extreme – rather silly, actually. She had got the premise of self-imposed amnesia – of repressed memory that turns out to be false memory – from an article she had read in The Times, but she didn’t seem to have been able to do much with it. Did people behave like that? Did people think like that? Did that sort of thing happen to people? Why had she chosen a subject she knew nothing about?

Exasperated, she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pushed the pages in. The bottom drawer was the one she opened only when she wanted to get rid – no, to half get rid of something. It contained various discarded papers. She was waiting for it to get full before she made a bonfire in the back yard and burnt its contents. (Not an entirely rational thing to do, but then she had to admit she wasn’t an entirely rational person.)