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failure.’
    ‘It is not their fault. But it is better not to wish for too much.’
    ‘I’m amazed – full of admiration but also puzzled – by the way you can be so accepting of everything. Do you never think of packing a suitcase, running off and not looking back?’ I am so desperate for an answer that I no longer worry about giving offence.
    ‘Sometimes, yes.’ She seems to be struggling with her inner self. ‘But only at night.’ She stands and wipes her daughter’s face with a damp cloth. ‘And you must not feel sorry for me. I have so many happy things in my life. Small things that are no longer small. The sounds Anna makes when I rub her skin with lotion or when I scratch, you know, like a mouse behind her knees. Jörgen, myhusband, he said it was just the gas in her stomach: the air in her throat. But I know it is so much more.’
    ‘You’re very brave.’
    ‘If you knew me, you would not say that. I am frightened of so many things. But, most of all, I am frightened of my Anna dying. I used to be frightened that I would die before and leave her on her own. But not any more. I know it is selfish. I know I am a bad woman –’ She brushes aside my protests as casually as she did the flies. ‘But she is my life; without her, I could not go on.’
    ‘Madame!’ The woman starts as an official in a navy sash summons her into the building with a flick of the wrist that cuts through the confusion. She releases the brake on her daughter’s chair, ready to wheel it inside. Then, confident that we will never meet again, she leans towards me and whispers: ‘Most of all I am frightened of the pills, the pills I give Anna to help her sleep … that, when she is sleeping for ever, I will take them for me. It is then that I will know that my life is no longer worth living. It is then that I will turn my heart against God.’
    She makes her way inside and I resist the urge to ask for an address or a number or even a name that might compromise the essential anonymity of our association. I shuffle up the bench, soaking up its residual warmth, while moving one step closer to my goal. I watch while entrants are selected seemingly at random until, at last, the all- powerful finger beckons me and I walk into a long low room, dominated by a row of green-and-white curtained cubicles, resembling a municipal swimming pool. I take a seat to the right of the door between an albino girl, surrounded by shopping bags, noiselessly saying her rosary, and a gnarled nonagenarian with filmy eyes and a toothless smile. Every few minutes a glowing woman emerges from one of the cubicles and a replacement is ushered in. I strive to empty my mind of worldly concerns but find it filling with more speculation about the men’s cubicles than at any time since school. Is Vincent in there filming, his innocent camerawork later to be subverted by a lethal voiceover? Is Richard behaving? I pray that he will be neither prurient nor coy, dipping one toe into the icy water and refusing to venture further, when a woman in a damp T-shirt printed with a portrait of the Virgin leaves the extreme right cubicle and the attendant summons me.
    I enter the cramped space to find five women in varying states of undress. In semaphored French, the attendant tells me to strip to my bra and pants and then slips out through a second curtain. I smile encouragingly at my Slavonic-featured neighbour, who sits hugging her chest in a vain attempt to hide the rolls of flab that spill over her knees, but she seems so wretched that I turn away, taking off my jumper and skirt and folding them with studied precision in a bid to delay the moment when I must turn back and face the room.
    I am distracted by a delicate young woman who returns from the inner sanctum. She makes straight for the pile of clothes to my left and I watch in awe as the beads of moisture on her neck and shoulders evaporate like water on a hotplate. The force of Vincent’s jibes dries up with them. It is