It occurred to her that she was going mad. This was ‘the breakdown’ she had foreseen; the ‘cracking up’. Yet it did not seem to her that she was even slightly mad; but rather that people who were not as obsessed as she was with the inchoate world mirrored in the newspapers were all out of touch with an awful necessity. Yet she knew she was mad. And while she could not prevent herself from the careful obsessed business of reading masses of print, and cutting out pieces, and pinning them all over her walls, she knew that on the day Janet came home from school, she would become Anna, Anna the responsible, and the obsession would go away. She knew that Janet’s mother being sane and responsible was far more important than the necessity of understanding the world; and one thing depended on the other. The world would never get itself understood, be ordered by words, be ‘named’, unless Janet’s mother remained a woman who was able to be responsible.

The knowledge that Janet would be home in a month nagged at Anna inside her obsession with newspaper facts. It turned her towards the four notebooks which she had neglected ever since Tommy’s accident. She turned the pages of these books over and over, but had no connection with them. She knew that some sort of guilt, which she did not understand, cut her off from them. The guilt was of course connected with Tommy. She did not know, would never know, if Tommy’s attempt at suicide was triggered off by reading her notebooks; or, if this were true, whether there was something in particular which had upset him, or whether she was in fact arrogant. ‘It’s arrogant, Anna; it’s irresponsible.’ Yes, he had said that; but beyond knowing she had let him down, that she had not been able to give him something he needed, she did not understand what had happened.

One afternoon she went to sleep and dreamed. She knew it was a dream she had often had before, in one form or another. She had two children. One was Janet, plump and glossy with health. The other was Tommy, a small baby, and she was starving him. Her breasts were empty, because Janet had had all the milk in them; and so Tommy was thin and puny, dwindling before her eyes from starvation. He vanished altogether, in a tiny coil of pale bony staring flesh, before she woke, which she did in a fever of anxiety, self-division and guilt. Yet, awake, she could see no reason why she should have dreamed of Tommy being starved by her. And besides, she knew that in other dreams of this cycle, the ‘starved’ figure might be anyone, perhaps someone she had passed in the street whose face had haunted her. Yet there was no doubt she felt responsible for this half-glimpsed person, for why otherwise should she dream of having failed him - or her?

After this dream, she went feverishly back to work, cutting out news items, fastening them to the wall.