The sound of feet had stopped upstairs. I could not move, I was gripped by my disgust. Then I knew that Saul would come downstairs and say something that echoed what I was thinking; this knowledge was so clear that I simply sat and waited, in a fug of stale self-disgust, waiting to hear how this disgust would sound when said aloud in his voice, my voice. He came down and stood in the doorway, and he said: ‘Jesus, Anna, what are you doing there, sitting naked?’ And I said, my voice detached and clinical: ‘Saul, do you realize we’ve got to the point where we influence each other’s moods even when we are in different rooms?’ It was too dark in my room to see his face, but the shape of his body, standing alert by the door, expressed a need to fly, to run from Anna sitting naked and repulsive on the bed. He said in the scandalized voice of a boy: ‘Put some clothes on.’ I said: ‘Did you hear what I said?’ For he had not. He said: ‘Anna, I told you, don’t sit there like that.’ I said: ‘What do you think this thing is that makes people like us have to experience everything? We’re driven by something to be as many different things or people as possible.’ He heard this, and said: ‘I don’t know. I don’t have to try, it’s what I am.’ I said: ‘I’m not trying. I’m being driven. Do you suppose that people who lived earlier were tormented by what they had not experienced? Or is it only us?’ He said, sullen: ‘Lady, I don’t know, and I don’t care, I just wish I were delivered from it.’ Then he said, friendly, not out of disgust: ‘Anna, do you realize how damned cold it is? You’ll be ill if you don’t put on clothes. I’m going out.’ He went. As his feet went down the stairs, my mood of self-disgust went with him. I sat and luxuriated in my body. Even a small dry wrinkling of skin on the inside of my thigh, the beginning of being old, gave me pleasure. I was thinking: Yes, that’s as it should be, I’ve been so happy in my life, I shan’t care about being old. But even as I said it, the security leaked away again. I was back in disgust. I stood in the centre of the big room, naked, letting the heat strike me from the three points of heat, and I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never really understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. The texture of the carpet was abhorrent to me, a dead processed thing; my body was a thin, meagre, spiky sort of vegetable, like an unsunned plant; and when I touched the hair on my head it was dead. I felt the floor bulge up under me. The walls were losing their density. I knew I was moving down into a new dimension, further away from sanity than I had ever been. I knew I had to get to the bed fast. I could not walk, so I let myself down on my hands and knees and crawled to the bed and lay on it, covering myself. But I was defenceless. Lying there I remembered the Anna who can dream at will, control time, move easily and is at home in the underworld of sleep. But I was not that Anna. The areas of light on the ceiling had become great watchful eyes, the eyes of an animal watching me. It was a tiger, lying sprawled over the ceiling, and I was a child knowing that there was a tiger in the room, even while my brain told me there was not. Beyond the triple-windowed wall a cold wind blew, striking the panes and making them shudder, and the winter’s light thinned the curtains. They were not curtains, they were shreds of stinking sour flesh left by the animal. I realized I was inside a cage into which the animal could leap when it wished. I was ill with the smell of dead flesh, the reek of the tiger, and with fear. And, while my stomach swayed, I fell asleep.