“By the way,” Werry said, “I didn’t tell the folks at home — that’s May and Ginny, and my boy Theo — anything about you. Anything apart from the official story, that is. Thought it better just to keep things to ourselves. It’s simpler that way.”

“You’re probably right.” Hasson mulled over the new information for a moment. “Didn’t your wife think it a bit odd when you produced a brand-new cousin out of thin air?”

“May isn’t my wife — not yet anyway. Sybil left me about a year ago, May and her mother only moved in last month, so it’s all right — I could have cousins all over the world, for all they know.”

“I see.” Hasson felt a throb of unease at the prospect of having to meet and cohabit with three more strangers, and it came to him once again that he had joined the ranks of life’s walking wounded. The car was now speeding along a straight highway which cut through immensities of sun-blinding snow. He fumbled in his breast pocket, produced a pair of darkened glasses and put them on, glad of the barrier they set up against the pressures of an unmanageable universe. He shifted to an easier position in his seat, cradling the unwanted bottle of whisky, and tried to come to terms with the new Robert Hasson.

The deceptively commonplace term “nervous breakdown’, he had discovered, was a catch-all for a host of devasting mental and physical symptoms — but the knowledge that he was suffering from a classical and curable illness did nothing to alleviate those symptoms. No matter how often he told himself he would be back to normal in the not too distant future, his depressions and fears remained implacable enemies, swift to strike, tenacious, slow to relinquish their grip. In his own case, he appeared to have regressed emotionally to relive the turmoils of adolescence.