At Swindon, he went out of his way to set me down at a hand car wash where, he said, the manager was always looking out for good people and didn’t ask too many questions, if I knew what he meant.

The car wash was jerry-built out of timber and plywood. A couple of Union Jacks hung over it as a form of camouflage. Everyone there was from Eastern Europe. The workers slept in a condemned building behind it. Sunk in the world of the labouring poor, I began to believe that Nicholas Slopen had never existed.

What I had now was a terribly truncated version of a life, but it was better than the DHU and it wasn’t unsafe. With an effort of will, I compelled my thoughts away from anything to do with my past, Nicky’s past. I thought about calling myself Viktor, but the name stuck in my throat. I told people my name was Stan, my father’s name, and no one ever asked more of me.

After I’d been there ten days, a Volkswagen camper van pulled in. It was so battered and rusty that it seemed odd that anyone would want to clean it; and in fact, its driver, a young woman with dirty blonde dreadlocks held back in a headscarf, was having trouble with the engine and wanted someone to take a look at it. I recused myself on the grounds of total engineering ignorance, which she found funny. While one of the other washers was checking her vehicle, she told me I looked familiar. I said that was unlikely and asked her where she was headed. She told me she lived in a commune on the border of Devon and Dorset. They had cows and grew much of their own food, she said. She had been on her way to fetch a couple of volunteer workers, but they’d called to say they had swine flu and then the van had broken down on the way back.

‘So I’m going back empty-handed if I get there at all.’

We’d had a slow week and Alex, our boss, was happy to lose me for a while. I went there with her that afternoon.

*

It had been a school for half a century – an experimental one that was closed down by the inspectors – and before that a vicarage. It still had a vaguely scholastic atmosphere. There was a library on the second floor which no one used. The books on the shelves were still alphabetised, not because of the diligence of the communards, but because none of them read any more. Firbank, Forster, Galsworthy, Gissing, Golding, it went, and so on, through all the other dead white men, like me. At times, I felt like the Time Traveller among the unlettered Eloi.

Mixed in with them were scatterings of more predictable volumes: What Colour is Your Parachute?, The Tao of Physics, absurd speculations about the Turin Shroud or the Templars.

Willow – the girl with dreadlocks – was about right when she described it as a commune. They were ineffectual at self-sufficiency, but they did their best and supported themselves by offering the place as a centre for retreats: dance, sacred drumming, all the stuff the old Nicholas thought was nonsense. Come to think of it, the new Nicholas also thinks it’s nonsense. But he liked the people themselves. I have to fight the urge to call them kids, but it’s how I think of them.

I want to avoid the obvious characterisations of it. There was more than a hint of dippiness about them. And there was an incuriousness, a complacency that you probably find among any people who feel they’re getting through life without making any compromises. But the thing to say is that they were so kind to me. There were even children there, with all the optimism that implies.

*

Willow had an old laptop with a sporadic internet connection. Their commitment to utopian mediaevalism was inconsistent at best. She talked me through Facebook and I was able to use her account to peek at Lucius’s. It was strange to see it – I still think of him as a little boy, which he is, but he passed himself off as a kind of sophisticate on it. I wanted to send him a message, but I knew that way lay madness, or worse, so I asked Willow to change her password to remove the temptation.

Everyone there was reinventing something about themselves, even if all they were running away from was just a background that seemed reprehensibly ordinary. My air of authentic disaster gave me a kind of kudos.

*

I ended up with a bed in what must have once been a broom cupboard on the second floor. Willow came past with dandelion coffee each evening, and scrupulously said goodnight.

‘You love to read,’ she said, one night soon after I’d arrived.

‘It’s my life.’

The following night, she asked if she could read with me.

She sat heavily on the edge of the bed with a copy of Dr Zhivago. I could tell she was dissatisfied with her book. There was something forlorn and fidgety about her. It made it difficult for me to concentrate.

Eventually she sighed. ‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘Give me a bit of your blanket.’

‘Please don’t take this the wrong way,’ I said, ‘but are you trying to seduce me?’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Maybe.’

She kissed me and her tongue flickered in my mouth like a tiny bird.

I pulled away.

‘Don’t you like me?’

‘It’s been a very long time since I was with anyone,’ I said.

‘How long?’

‘Longer than I can remember.’

‘That’s okay. We can just cuddle.’

She moved up awkwardly next to me. I admired her persistence. I held her close to me and breathed in her smell of hand-rolled cigarettes and patchouli.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.

‘I’m thinking about all the people who never get held like this.’

She stroked my face. ‘Read me something.’

‘It’s Edmund Gosse,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t excerpt terribly well. But I can tell you a poem if you like.’

‘I’d like that.’

The opening lines of ‘Lycidas’ floated through my head.

‘Why are you smiling?’ she asked.

‘I’m thinking about an old friend who loved poems.’

The bed frame creaked under us as she nestled closer with her back towards me. ‘Whisper it,’ she said. She put her ear close to my lips. It was as small and pretty as a seashell and smelled of gingerbread.

I didn’t even voice the words, I let my breath alone carry them across the four inches of silence between us.

‘Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew

Himself to sing and build the lofty rhyme.’

She wriggled around to face me delightedly. ‘Go on,’ she said.

*

The ankle knitted up completely, though it remained swollen-looking. It turned out that I had the knack of outdoor work, particularly scything – they’re scrupulous about their carbon footprint at Knowle Court. Leonora would have found it hilarious. Some muscle-memory in me seemed tuned to its rhythm. The blade snicked back and forth across the pasture and the cut grass fell in windrows beside the swath. ‘You’re a natural,’ said the livestock man.

They were all gentle ruminants there, Willow and the rest of them. I feared for them. Centuries on a more or less peaceable island had left them without any instinct for self-preservation. I found their lack of intellectual acuity frustrating, but their optimism and good faith moving in the extreme.

*

The sun came out strongly one day towards the beginning of December. Half a dozen of the residents got into the stockman’s Land Rover and went to the beach for a barbecue. It was stony and the water was freezing, but there was a competitive bravado about going in. I felt self-conscious about my tattoos and scarring, but they were, if anything, approved of. The displacement of light through the water made my swollen ankle look huge and kinked. I stared at my white feet in the green murk thinking: whose are these? Then I plunged in. The cold was so intense I experienced it as heat. I swam away from the shore, pulling strongly. On my shoulders, the water felt like broken glass or jellyfish tentacles. I thought: death can’t be more painful.