'I'm sorry that it is so small and dark… perhaps we should…'

'No, no, I don't mind,' she said, in the cool jaunty way which was so much hers; but she was looking at the bed with longing, and I knew she had found her refuge, hers, here it was at last. 'It's lovely,' she said. 'Oh yes, you don't believe me, you don't know what…' But she left the possibility of an explanation of what she had been experiencing, and waited, her whole body expressing how she wanted me to leave.

'And we'll have to share the bathroom,' I said.

'Oh, I'll be ever so tidy,' she assured me. 'I'm really very good, you know, I won't make a mess, I never do.'

I knew that if I were not in this flat, if she did not feel she must behave well, she would be between the blankets, she would already be far away from the world.

'I won't be a tick,' she assured me. 'I must get tidy. I'll be as quick as I can.'

I left her and waited for her in the living-room, first standing by the window looking out, wondering perhaps if fresh surprises were on the way. Then I sat down, rather, I imagine, in the attitude of The Thinker, or some such concentrated pose.

Yes, it was extraordinary. Yes, it was all impossible. But after all, I had accepted the 'impossible'. I lived with it. I had abandoned all expectations of the ordinary for my inner world, my real life in that place. And as for the public, the outer world, it had been a long time since that offered the normal. Gould one perhaps describe that period as 'the ordinariness of the extraordinary?' Well, the reader should have no difficulty here: these words are a description of the times we have lived through. (A description of all life? — probably, but it is not much help to think so.)