As we approached her flat a heavy silence seemed to settle between us. I guess we both felt a sense of the possible importance of the evening ahead. We had stopped off to get a little shopping – she said she lived from day to day as far as eating went – and the everyday act of choosing groceries had seemed incredibly strange. I had thought several times about calling it off and retreating to the safety of my own digs, but I knew I’d never forgive myself.

She seemed to sense my doubts; as she put her key into the lock she turned to me. ‘Still want to do this?’

‘I told you: how could I leave it the way it is?’

She nodded slightly and opened the door. I couldn’t help taking a deep breath as I followed her inside.

It was a pretty ordinary place; a large house divided into several flats. We entered a small dark hallway. Barbara’s flat was up the first flight of steps; I saw a door in the lower hall open a crack as we went up.

‘This will do interesting things to my reputation,’ murmured Barbara as she unlocked the door to her flat. She looked back at me. ‘You might have to go around ten o’clock, or my name will be mud.’

‘Are they that rigid here?’

‘No…but they have ways of making their feelings known. My landlady’s brother is—’ She broke off. ‘I try not to get on the wrong side of them.’ She pushed open the door and extended an arm, inviting me to go ahead. ‘Well, here it is. The home of a crazy woman.’

‘I don’t think you’re crazy,’ I told her as I went inside. ‘But I’m having trouble trying to figure out just what I do think.’

It was a clean, tidy room, just as I’d expected. There wasn’t too much furniture; a couple of old armchairs, a small low coffee table and one cabinet. And in the corner a small desk with a wooden chair drawn up and beside that some bookshelves. There were also books in neat piles on the floor. The desk was littered with sheets of paper – the only sign of disorder in the room.

She dumped her shopping hastily in one of the chairs and hurried over to the window. She had some washing drying on a wooden clothes horse; I couldn’t avoid being intrigued by the sight of various items of underwear, but she gathered it up very quickly and skipped across the room. ‘Excuse me.’ She went through a doorway next to the cabinet; her bedroom, I supposed, resisting the urge to move so I could see inside. Instead I went over to the window and looked out into the street. It was already dark, so I drew the faded orange curtains. As I shut them she reappeared, pulling the door closed behind her. ‘Sorry about that; obviously, I wasn’t anticipating having a visitor.’

‘It’s all right.’

She picked up the shopping and made for another doorway that I had not registered. ‘Do you want to make yourself comfortable? It won’t take long. There are glasses and one or two bottles in the cabinet, or I have some soft drinks in the fridge, I think. Oh,’ she paused. ‘Since I visited India, I don’t eat meat. Well…I gave it up gradually. I hope that’s all right. I didn’t think of it while we were shopping, but if it’s a problem—’

‘That’s fine,’ I said quickly.

She looked at me as moment as if doubting my hasty assurance. Then she nodded and went through the doorway.

Left to myself I made straight for her books. I quite often have to restrain myself so as not to seem rude when I go to people’s places for the first time; if I see a bookshelf my reflex is to check it out. It’s not even that I think people’s books will give me clues about them; it’s simply the books themselves. I have to look.

The shelves were mostly filled with history books; some popular and some that looked like academic texts left over from her days as a teacher. The books on the floor were more varied. Some quite new works on physics which had been heavily annotated, a few sf paperbacks and some eastern stuff I recognised the titles of but hadn’t read; the sort of thing the Beatles had been talking about since they went to Bangor. I wondered what she wanted with this sort of metaphysical, religious stuff. I picked one more or less at random, intrigued by the combination of authors – Yeats and some Indian Swami – and took it back to an armchair. As I sat down I noticed a curious lack in the room; no telly and not even a record player. I resolved to ask her about it later and opened the book.

One of my great regrets is that I’m almost unable to read poetry. I read for narrative, in whatever subject, and somehow the density of language in poetry trips me up. I can’t slow down enough to take it in. I can’t even read Homer easily if it’s in verse. So the look of this book – The Ten Principal Upanishads – was off-putting to me as soon as I opened it. I looked at the words for a few moments without seeing them , then remembered how impressed I’d been by George Harrison’s enthusiasm for Indian religion, and resolved to make an effort.

I couldn’t make much sense of it. I understood the words, and even some of the sentences, but they didn’t seem to add up to a coherent whole. One line stopped me dead quite early on:

‘…hope for a hundred years of doing your duty.’

But they didn’t define exactly what your duty was supposed to be. It seemed to be tied up with loving and trusting "the Lord" which I hadn’t expected, having some vague idea of Hinduism as having hundreds of gods. I pressed on with it but didn’t find it getting any easier; despite supposedly having been cut for repetition, I found it rather too ceremonial, like an endless series of prayers. I wondered again what Barbara wanted it for.

She came back into the room, stopping with one hand still on the doorframe. ‘Shouldn’t be long now.’ She looked at me in a motherly sort of way. ‘You haven’t even taken your coat off.’

I realised I’d been too distracted by the books to think about what I was wearing. I shrugged off my coat and draped it over the arm of the chair, then held the book up towards her. ‘This doesn’t seem to have much to do with what we’ve been talking about.’

She came towards me. ‘Well…it does and doesn’t. I picked that up recently – after seeing the Maharishi interviewed on tv. It reminded me of something I stumbled across a few years ago – something I felt I should have looked into.’

‘Which was..?’

‘If you don’t believe in God there’s not much point trying to tell you.’

I turned the book around and looked at it. Then I nodded. ‘But you have a few things like this – so it obviously means something to you.’

‘It has to do with someone I met. Possibly the most remarkable human being I’ve ever encountered.’

‘Oh. Well, we’re going to talk about him soon – maybe you can tell m—’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean the Doctor.’ She lifted her eyebrows, mildly reproving. ‘I said "human being".’ And with that she went back into her kitchen.

I shook my head. Was she mad after all? She had told me, during the afternoon, about this character called "the Doctor", who had taken her to all sorts of places – and times – but until now she hadn’t clearly said that she believed him not to have been human. I had enough problems with the existence of aliens; aliens who looked perfectly humanoid was stretching credulity a bit. I went back to the book, but I found my mind was all over the place.

Ten minutes later she emerged from the kitchen with a kind of vegetable stew. She apologised for not having a dining table, but I told her I was quite happy to have the plate on my lap. At this point she saw I hadn’t got myself a drink and I was told off for that, too. She gave one plate to me and put the other in the second armchair.

I waved the book. ‘I got distracted by this.’

She went to the cabinet and bent down. ‘What did you make of it?’

‘Not much. I find practical religion quite inspiring – the Sermon on the Mount and so on – but this seems a bit metaphysical.’

She stood up holding a couple of glasses, and swung the cabinet shut with a twist of her hip, which distracted me for a moment. ‘Perhaps you should have read the Gita. That’s full of practical

instructions.’

‘The what?’

‘The Bhagavad Gita. I suppose you could call it a sort of Hindu equivalent of the New Testament, at least in terms of its importance and centrality to the Hindu credo.’ She held up the glasses as she went into the kitchen again. ‘Some cordial all right for you?’

‘Fine.’

I tasted the stew. It had some kind of spice or something in it; I hadn’t tasted anything quite like it, but it was by no means unpleasant. Barbara came back with the two glasses full and put one on the floor at my feet.

She smiled a little tentatively as she sat down with her own food. We ate in silence to begin with; I was casting about for some relatively neutral subject of conversation. I came up with nothing except a few things about her current lifestyle. We established that no, she didn’t have a tv or a record player although she did have a radio in her bedroom. She didn’t socialise much and had few friends. Sally Willmott had been posted as a relief teacher just before Barbara left Coal Hill; that was where they had met.

‘So was it Sally who got you this job – the survey stuff?’

She looked surprised. ‘How did you…?’

‘You said you couldn’t get another job teaching – I thought that might apply to other fields as well. I thought maybe the only way you could get a job was through a friend – someone who knew you well enough to trust you.’

She grimaced. ‘This is only temporary, of course – we break for Christmas next week, then another two weeks’ work and I’m back looking for something. But at least I’ll have a recent reference to take to prospective employers.’

‘Didn’t you tell me you came back in ’65? This is the first job you’ve had?’

She nodded.

‘Must’ve been difficult.’

She shrugged and got up, reaching out for my empty plate. ‘Some tea?’

‘Yes…thanks.’

She took the plates back into the kitchen. I decided I should at least appear willing to do my bit, and I scooped up the glasses and followed her.

The kitchen was incredibly tiny and I almost ran into her. ‘Can I wash up..?’

‘I think I’ll leave it ’til tomorrow – thank you.’ She had no kettle either; she was putting some water in a pan to boil on the stove.

I stood in the doorway. ‘What about your family? Uh, I mean your mother? Isn’t there anything she could do to help you? It can’t be easy for you, living like this…’

She did not look up as she took two mugs from against the wall. ‘If not for my mother I wouldn’t even have this place. She gave me the deposit and the first six months’ rent. She even bought me a coat when I couldn’t afford one. She’s been wonderful, but there’s only so much she can do.’

She looked so forlorn that I felt a momentary urge to reach out to her. My hand actually twitched upward, but I folded my arms and leaned against the doorframe. ‘You…you must wish you could go back.’ As she looked up, frowning, I added: ‘To how it was before, I mean. Your old life.’

She considered. ‘I don’t know. In some ways, yes of course, but…I don’t think we should hide from the truth. I know more about…about the real nature of the universe now…I don’t think I’d want that taken away.’

‘Not even if it meant peace of mind?’

She looked at me for a moment, then gestured in the direction of my knees. ‘Can you get the milk out?’

There was a compact fridge just inside the door. I crouched and opened it, passing her the milk bottle. She spooned some tea into a small strainer and put it into the top of one of the mugs. The water had boiled and she switched the stove off. Then she looked at me again. ‘Go and sit down – please. I feel awkward with you watching what I have to go through just to make tea.’

I obeyed and went back to the armchair. I eyed the book lying on the floor, but left it where it was. I looked around the room and noticed another lack; she had a mantelpiece, although the fireplace was blocked up – but there was nothing on it. No photographs or ornaments. It was almost as if she had resisted personalising the room – as if she didn’t expect to be here for long. Or didn’t want to be.

She came in with the tea. I thought I could see her trembling slightly as she handed me the mug. We both knew that the preliminaries were over. She sat down, gripping the mug two-handed in that characteristic way she had. ‘So.’

‘So…’ I echoed.

‘Are you ready for this?’

‘Are you?’

She took a sip of the tea. ‘It’s difficult to know how to begin.’

‘Well…assume you’ve told me nothing at all and take it from the start. When was the first time you had any suspicion that something was…well, not right?’

She nodded. I could see her shoulders rising and falling as she breathed deeply. ‘Well…I told you about Susan. Susan Foreman.’

‘She was a pupil at Coal Hill, right?’

‘Yes. She was very bright, exceptionally so, but there was something…something odd about her. There were things she didn’t seem to know, really obvious things like the imperial weights and measures, and then…her knowledge of other things was astonishing. Her grasp of certain periods of history, for example…’

For a moment she stopped, obviously finding the memories somehow overwhelming. I decided not to prompt or interrupt, trusting her to find her own way back. She didn’t look at me, but she went on:

‘It gradually became obvious that her work was always going to be erratic; she was consistently brilliant at bringing history to life with telling little details and appallingly ignorant of current affairs and social trends. It was as if she’d been locked away from society for years, learning from books and conjuring things up with an extraordinarily vivid imagination.

‘Eventually…things came to light that made me resolve to do something about it. She apparently lived with her grandfather, a Doctor, but when I offered to do a little home tutoring so she could really get to grips with her history, she said we couldn’t work at her home because her grand-father didn’t like strangers. I spoke to one or two of her closest friends at school, and found out that they had never visited her at home. It all seemed rather odd. I decided to talk to her grandfather, went to her home, and…well, it wasn’t there.’

‘Just a junkyard.’

She nodded. ‘I double-checked, of course, but I couldn’t come up with any more information – so I decided to get help. I went to Ian – Ian Chesterton, who taught science to Susan’s class. I discussed Susan with him and found he’d had similar problems to mine; in many ways she was his most advanced student, but then she had all sorts of strange ideas that didn’t fit any known scientific theory…ideas about the fourth and fifth dimensions…’

‘Time and Space – you mentioned it this afternoon.’

She barely acknowledged my comment. By now she was totally absorbed in replaying the past. ‘Ian agreed to help me find out a little more about her home life. We went to Susan’s supposed home and waited for her to turn up. It was then, for the first time, that I felt a kind of premonition, a sensation of vague fear, as if we were venturing into something extraordinary, something that shouldn’t be tampered with.’

She took an absent-minded sip of her tea. ‘We saw Susan go into the junkyard and followed her, but we couldn’t find her in there. All there was…was a Police Telephone Box. It seemed strange enough to find it there at all, but then Ian discovered there was kind of vibration coming from it. And then the Doctor turned up.

‘We didn’t know who he was, at first, but it seemed likely to us that he was Susan’s grandfather. He had been about to open the Police Box before he discovered us, but when we tried to get him to show us the inside, he got very aggressive.’ She paused and brought a hand up to her face. ‘I forgot to say – we thought we heard Susan’s voice inside the Box. It seemed a stupid place for her to be, but then where else could she have gone? Ian tried to reason with the Doctor, but we were getting nowhere. We were just about to go and find a policeman when we heard Susan’s voice – clearly coming from inside the Box. Before the Doctor could stop us we pushed past him…and…and…’

During the afternoon she had hinted about the Doctor’s Police Box, but she had not been explicit. I leaned forward, trying to urge her to continue without interrupting the flow of her words.

‘When…when we arrived in the junkyard Ian had walked around the Police Box, trying to see if it was linked up to a power source, I think…because it was humming. It was just a box, a few feet square, but…but when we went through that door, we came into a room…’ she waved her arm in a curve, ‘a room the size of this flat. Bigger.’

‘Some kind of trap door. Or an illusion.’

She shook her head. ‘No. No, somehow, there was no doubt about what we could see. Ian struggled with it, tried to reconcile it with what he knew…but I was actually more concerned about Susan. I didn’t like the old man, and the thought of a young girl living with him in such a strange place…’ She seemed to have trouble with her recollection for a moment, then continued: ‘I tried to make her see that she was trapped in the old man’s fantasy, but she – they both – kept insisting that this Police Box was a ship that could move through space and time. It’s difficult to recall everything that happened, but I remember Ian and the Doctor arguing and then Ian was hurt – some kind of charge from the console when he was trying to open the doors, to get out.’

‘Console?’ I enquired gently. ‘can you describe the interior of the ship – this box?’

She looked surprised at the question. ‘Uhh…it was a large room, white, very brightly lit…there was a hexagonal console in the centre, covered with all sorts of buttons, dials and displays. In the centre of the console was a column, a glass cylinder filled with machinery. This rose and fell when the ship was in flight.’

‘And…what did you say this thing was called?’

‘TARDIS. Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. Susan claimed she made up the name, but later on both of them referred to the ship in such a way that it made me suspect there might be others like it elsewhere – now I think perhaps TARDIS was a generic name for that kind of craft.’

‘But…you never saw any other…ship like it?’

‘No. And the Doctor and Susan both seemed reluctant to talk about anything involving their own people. Ian and I soon learned not to press them.’

I lifted an eyebrow. ‘Very diplomatic of you, considering how potentially fascinating the subject must have seemed.’

She clearly sensed my disbelief. ‘You must remember that Ian and I were dependent on the Doctor’s goodwill to get home. And after a while, the questions didn’t seem so important.’

‘But that takes us a little ahead of ourselves.’

‘Yes.’ Her face creased in remembrance. ‘The Doctor and Susan argued about us – the Doctor felt he couldn’t let us go because we’d seen the ship, but Susan was sure we wouldn’t say anything.’ She smiled slightly. ‘At that stage, I wouldn’t have known what to say, or who to tell it to. Susan threatened to stay if the Doctor left, and that obviously unsettled him deeply. The next thing we knew he had done something at the console, Susan was shrieking, and the whole place seemed to…I don’t know. It was the strangest feeling. I think it must have been the suddenness of our departure, because the subsequent journeys were never like that, but something seemed shake the ship – the whole room juddered and bucked. Ian and I both fell…and I must have fainted.

‘And…when you woke..?’

She didn’t reply immediately. Instead she looked directly at me. ‘What are you thinking? What do you make of all this? Do you believe any of it?’

I didn’t know what to say. I could see she believed it, and there were no signs of hysteria or incoherence, beyond her obvious difficulty in recalling clearly the events of four years ago. And yet it was preposterous. Completely ridiculous. How could she sit in this spartan flat in the centre of London and seriously tell me she had visited the past? Or other planets? And in a spaceship that looked like a telephone box?

And yet…and yet…I couldn’t entirely disbelieve her. If she wasn’t insane, what reason would she have to lie? (I discarded the wild notion that she might be after my body and spinning a yarn to fascinate me) Why should a sensible and intelligent woman make up such a tale?

I told her the truth. ‘I can’t make a judgement. I really can’t. Just keep talking, and maybe things will get a bit clearer to me. What happened when you woke up?’

She looked at me for a few seconds as if trying to see inside my mind. Then she drew in a long breath. ‘I came round to see the Doctor and Susan standing at the console, talking…talking about where we had landed. And somehow, suddenly, I knew they weren’t mad. It was almost as if something about me was different, something had been changed by that journey…I would have been more surprised if they had turned out to be wrong, I think.

‘But Ian was still a doubter. He argued with the Doctor – something about the nature of time, I think – and demanded that we be offered some proof. I tried to express some of the new feelings I had, the sudden certainty that there was more to this than fantasy…but all argument ended when the Doctor opened the doors.’

‘So…what was outside?’

‘A barren landscape. Rocks, sand…a few shrubs. And we had walked in from a junkyard in London.’ She shook her head faintly. ‘Poor Ian was dumbfounded. He simply couldn’t accept it, and yet he had to. But he was supremely practical; once he had grasped the reality of the mess we were in, he coped much better than I did. Once I’d got over my initial wonder, I was terrified.’ She broke off for a moment, and a kind of serenity settled on her features. ‘Although…that moment, when I stepped out of the ship, onto a completely new world, was like nothing I’d ever known. For all the uncertainty and fear, I think there was a kind of excitement deep down.’ Her eyes wandered around the room. ‘Perhaps we all secretly long for something to wrench us from our everyday lives and present us with a totally new and unexpected…challenge.’

I didn’t know about that; it sounded entirely too much of a challenge to me. ‘Did you find out where you were?’

She nodded. ‘Eventually. We were somewhere in the distant past, in prehistoric Britain. Possibly we were on the site of London itself – I don’t know if we’d moved through space at all. We encountered a primitive tribe who lived in the forest near where the ship had landed. They captured the Doctor, took him away – and so we had to find him and rescue him because without him we’d have been trapped there.’

‘And that was the only reason?’ I asked, slightly startled.

Her eyes did not meet mine. ‘It…seemed the most important reason at the time. I…I’m not very proud of the way we – I – behaved then, but I was so completely out of my depth, so paralysed with fear…’

‘All right. So you rescued the Doctor?’

A slight smile again. ‘If only it had been that simple. We were captured ourselves in the attempt. It turned out one of the tribe had seen the Doctor using matches, and they were desperate to rediscover the secret of fire. They’d lost the knack somehow…perhaps their fire-maker had died suddenly or something. We would have been quite happy to give the secret to them, but there were internal rivalries that made it difficult for us negotiate with them. We escaped, but they came after us…and it was then that I realised for the first time how far we had come from our cosy lives. This wasn’t a film or a book, this was a real life-or-death situation; we were struggling through a prehistoric forest, probably lost, with savages behind us…at that point I really felt I couldn’t go on. I broke down. Ian…Ian pulled me together, somehow – and then something odd happened. It was…I think it was a sort of turning point for me.’

She paused and looked at me as if to assure herself I was still listening. I imagine she was satisfied with the level of my attention, since she returned to the story.

‘The people pursuing us were attacked by an animal. It was our chance to escape from them – but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just leave them. A man was badly hurt, and at the sight of his suffering – well, I won’t say my fear vanished, but it was suddenly…manageable. I knew we had to help him. The Doctor thought I was mad, and even Ian was hesitant, but something in me revolted at leaving someone to die. I think,’ she said carefully, ‘that what is said about discovering reserves of courage within ourselves is slightly inaccurate – or at least incomplete. I think the courage comes from the recognition of a need outside ourselves – whether it’s the pain of another, or simply a soldier’s duty in wartime. Do you understand what I mean? It wasn’t anything in me that gave me strength – I’d forgotten about myself completely. I simply had to help.

‘So, we bathed the man’s wounds and talked to the woman – there were only two of them, but we knew the tribe was probably just behind them – and for a few minutes, we seemed to have made a breakthrough. But their need for fire was so great they couldn’t risk letting us go – when the others caught us we were taken back to their camp.’ She sighed. ‘We escaped again – eventually – by tricking them, but we barely made it back to the TARDIS. They were right behind us. The Doctor shut the doors and set the ship on its next journey.’

She sighed. ‘And that was the end of our first adventure. Very mundane it was, too, compared to what we would go through later.’ She looked at me. ‘Would you like some more tea?’

I laughed. The words were too incongruous, coming after the story she had just told me.

She seemed to understand, smiling slightly as she rose from her chair. She came over to me and took my cup. ‘I’ll give you a minute or two to think over what you’ve heard,’ she said softly, then disappeared into the kitchen.

I found I couldn’t think clearly. All I knew was that I believed her. Or at least, I believed she was completely sincere and completely sane. Which left me where? Was there any way she could be in command of all her faculties and yet be the victim of some fantasy? Was there the possibility that it could all be true? That seemed ridiculous, and yet…there was something about her that inspired confidence. She was not a liar.

I decided I was thinking in circles. It was at the very least plain that she was not dangerous, and that she had a fascinating story to tell. I wondered in a supreme moment of opportunism whether the tales she could spin would be my doorway to a literary career. If I could rework what she was telling me into a coherent work of fiction…

She came back with the tea. She looked at me guardedly as she handed me the mug. ‘Well?’

I met her gaze squarely. ‘I don’t know what to say except…I think I believe you.’

Her face seemed to convulse briefly; for a moment I thought she was going to fall. Then she regained control of herself. She settled herself carefully on the edge of her chair and leaned forward, resting her mug on her knees. ‘You…"think" you believe me?’

I sipped my tea, hating to keep her in suspense but having no real answer to her doubts. ‘Well – let me put it this way. I don’t doubt your sincerity. I can’t see why you’d lie about something like this. And you don’t seem…disturbed. So what options do I have? Either it’s all true, or you believe it is – and either way, I want to see where it goes.’

She was silent for a full minute. Then she nodded. ‘All right. That’s…something. More than I expected. Much more, really. So…you want to hear about the rest of it?’

I wondered what the time was. ‘Well, maybe not right now. What you’ve described to me sounds like it happened over a day or two – and you said you were away two years. There could be a fair bit more to come, I guess.’

‘The Doctor always said time was relative – the period we spent in the TARDIS felt like about two years, but how can you measure days when time is different wherever you go?’

‘I see what you mean – a kind of superannuated jet lag.’

‘It’s a wonder we weren’t more physiologically disoriented, but I suspect there was something in the TARDIS that compensated for that effect. It was an amazing machine.’

‘And this Doctor claimed he built it?’

‘Well, that was something else he wasn’t entirely consistent about. He did seem to have trouble operating it. He knew the ship inside out, and yet he couldn’t control it enough to get us home.’

‘Was…’ I hesitated. ‘Was there ever a time when you didn’t want to get back?’

She smiled. ‘It’s funny…I was just remembering that after a while, it stopped being so important when we arrived and it still wasn’t twentieth century earth. I suppose you adjust to all sorts of things. We did adjust to being adventurers, in a way. And the Doctor and Susan became good friends.’

I was still trying to get a grip on this; I needed to find a way to make it more real. ‘Tell me a bit more about the Doctor.’

‘Well…what do you want to know?’

‘Start with what he looked like.’

She took a sip of her tea. ‘He seemed old…sixty or more. I must admit I sometimes suspected him of playing on that a bit, because when he needed to he could think very quickly indeed. And then I sometimes wondered if he wasn’t actually a good deal older than he seemed. He dressed like a kind of Edwardian gentleman. He…had a strong face, full of character and intelligence, but rather long silver hair, which gave him his air of eccentricity, I think.’

‘It was slightly more than eccentric to kidnap you and…Ian.’

‘I told you why I think that was; he simply couldn’t bear the thought of losing Susan, and he reacted emotionally. Of course, I hardly saw that at the time; it was only much later that I was able to work it out.’

‘Obviously you forgave him for it. Did Ian?’ I hoped she wasn’t picking up on my slight hesitation about using Ian’s name.

‘Oh, we both did. What choice did we have, in the end? He really did try to get us back, and after so many shared adventures, we grew to have a tremendous respect for him. To…love him, I suppose.’

There was silence for a few moments after she had spoken. A car passed by outside. I stifled a yawn. It had been quite a day.

‘You’re tired,’ she observed. ‘Time to call it a night.’

‘Yeah…I guess so.’

She stood up. ‘I wonder if you appreciate how much this means to me. To be able to talk about this, finally, to someone who will listen…’

I got to my feet. ‘But will my listening change anything? I’m not sure what you hope to achieve by telling me all this.’

‘Nor am I,’ she admitted. ‘But I feel better for having begun. All that worries me now is,’ she faltered, ‘do you want to continue? I mean, really?’

I nodded. ‘We can’t stop now. From what you told me this afternoon, the best is yet to come.’

‘Well, I’d hardly call it that, exactly, but…’ Suddenly she leaned forward and pressed her lips to my cheek. It happened too quickly for me to react; she drew back and said: ‘Thank you.’

For a moment all the lunatic things I had been listening to left my mind and I was conscious only of her as a woman. I looked into her eyes and felt that I was somehow betraying her by what I was thinking. ‘Wh-when’ll we meet again?’

‘Whenever would suit you.’

‘Uh…all right. I’ll give you a ring. Okay?’

She nodded. I scooped up my coat and pulled it on. ‘Thanks for the food and so on…it’s been nice. Really.’ I felt a distinct urge to return her kiss and decided I’d better leave quickly.

She saw me to the door and I wondered if she was actually reluctant to let me go. I looked at my watch as I went down the steps; only quarter past nine. We seemed to have been talking the whole night. I shook my head – it did almost feel as though I had been on a long journey through uncharted territory.

I looked back. She raised a hand and I waved in return. I found it alarmingly difficult to walk away.