Slowly, slowly, the fear drained out of me, though I felt shaken and light-headed, so that I backed away and sat down again on the bench to recover myself.

I stayed for perhaps twenty minutes. It took as long as this for me to feel calm again. As I sat there in the sunshine, I thought of Hugo. I had never fully understood until now how terrifying his ordeal had been, and how the terrors must have taken him over, mentally and physically. No wonder he had said to me when I first visited him in the hospital that he felt safe for the first time in several years.

Was it hereditary, then? Was I about to experience these terrifying urges to throw myself out of windows or into the path of oncoming trains? I knew that Hugo had gone through a very turbulent time in his youth and I had put his condition down to a deep-seated reaction to that. So far as I knew, neither of our parents had ever suffered in the same way.

At last, I managed to get up and walk towards the gates. I felt better with every step. The fear was receding rapidly. I only shivered slightly as I looked back at the pool. Nothing more.

I was glad to be in the bustle of the High and I had no urge whatsoever to throw myself under a bus. I walked briskly to the railway station and caught the next train back to London.

THAT NIGHT I DREAMED that I was swimming underwater, among shimmering fish with gold and silver iridescent bodies which glided past me and around me in the cool, dark water. For a while, it was beautiful. I felt soothed and lulled. I thought I heard faint music. But then I was no longer swimming, I was drowning. I had seemed to be like a fish myself, able to breathe beneath the surface, but suddenly the air was being pressed out of my lungs by a fast inflow of water and I was gasping, with a painful sensation in my chest and a dreadful pulsing behind my eyes.

I came to in the darkness of my bedroom, reached out to switch on the lamp and then sat, taking in great draughts of air. I got up and went to the window, opened it and breathed in the cool London night, and the smell of the trees and grass in the communal gardens of the square. I supposed the panic which had overcome me beside the pool in the Botanic Garden had inevitably left its traces in my subconscious, so that it was not surprising these had metamorphosed into night horrors.

But it faded quickly, just as the terror of the afternoon had faded. I am generally of an equable temperament and I was restored to my normal spirits quite easily. I was only puzzled that I should have had such an attack of panic out of the blue, followed by a nightmare from which I had surfaced thrashing in fear. I had had a pleasant day and I was excited about Fergus’s possible coup. The tenor of my life was as even and pleasant as always.

The only untoward thing that had happened to me recently was the incident in the garden of the White House. Unlike the terror and the nightmare, the memory of that had not faded – indeed, if anything it was clearer. I closed my eyes and felt again the small hand in mine. I could almost fold my fingers over it, so real, so vivid was the sensation.

Without quite knowing that I was going to do so then, I did fold my fingers over as if to enclose it. But there was nothing.

Not this time. Not tonight.

Seven

y business was going through the usual summer lull and I did not have enough to occupy me. The nightmare did not return, but although I had no more attacks of fear, I could not get that experience out of my mind and, in the end, I decided that I would talk to my brother. I rang to ask if I could go to see them for a night and got his Danish wife, Benedicte, who was always welcoming. I think that so far as she was concerned I could have turned up on their doorstep at any time of the day or night and I would have been welcome. With Hugo, though, it was different.

He was now a teacher in a boys’ public school situated in a pleasant market town in Suffolk. They had a Georgian house with a garden running down to the river and the slight air of being out of time that always seems to be part of such places.

They had one daughter, Katerina, who had just left to stay with her cousins in Denmark for the holiday. Hugo and Benedicte were going to the States, where he was to teach a summer school.

I have always felt a great calm and contentment as I step through their front door. The house is light and elegant and always immaculate. But if it belongs to the eighteenth century from the outside, within it is modern Scandinavian, with a lot of pale wood flooring, cream rugs, cream leather chairs, steel and chrome. It would be soulless were it not for two things. The warmth that emanates from Benedicte herself, and the richly coloured wall hangings which she weaves and sells. They make the house sing with scarlet and regal purple, deep blue and emerald.

It is a strange environment for my brother. Hugo has perhaps never quite picked up the last threads of equilibrium, which is why the house and his wife are so good for him. He has an edginess, a tendency to disappear inside himself and look into some painful distance, detached from what is going on around him. But he loves his job and his family and I do not think he is greatly troubled – for all that he has reminders of his sufferings from time to time.

I ARRIVED IN the late afternoon and caught up on news. Benedicte was going out to her orchestra practice – she plays the oboe – but left us with a delicious dinner which needed only a few final touches put to it. The kitchen opened on to the garden, with a distant glimpse of the river, and it was warm enough for us to have the doors open on to a still evening. The flames of the candles in their slender silver holders scarcely flickered.

‘I need your advice,’ I said to Hugo, as we began to eat our smoked fish. ‘Advice, help – I’m really not sure which.’

He looked across at me. We are not alike. Hugo takes after our mother, in being tall and dark with a long oval face. I am stockier and fairer, though we are of a height. But our eyes are the same, a deep smoky blue. Looking into Hugo’s eyes was oddly like looking into my own in a mirror. How much else of his depths might I see in myself, I wondered.

‘Do you ever c’ I looked at the fish on my fork. I did not know how to ask, what words to use that would not upset him. ‘I wonder if you sometimes c’

He was looking straight at me, the blue eyes direct and as unwavering as the candle flames. But he was silent. He gave me no help.

‘The thing is c something quite nasty happened to me. Nothing like it has ever happened before. Not to me. Nothing c’ I heard my voice trailing off into silence.

After a moment Hugo said, ‘Go on.’

As if a torrent had been unleashed, I began to tell him about the afternoon in the Botanic Garden and my terrible fear and then the overwhelming urge to fall face down into the water. I told him everything about the day, I elaborated on my feelings leading up to the fear, I went into some detail about how things were in my present life. The only thing I did not mention, because there were somehow not the words to describe it, was the small hand.

Hugo listened without interrupting. We helped ourselves to chicken pie. A salad.

I fell silent. Hugo took a piece of bread. Outside it had grown quite dark. It was warm. It was very still. I remembered the night I had sat out on the terrace at the Merrimans’ house in the gathering dusk, so soon after these strange events had begun.

‘And you think you are going mad,’ Hugo said evenly. ‘Like me.’

‘No. Of course I don’t.’

‘Oh, come on, Adam c If you’re here to get my advice or whatever it is you want, tell me the truth.’

‘I’m sorry. But the truth is – well, I don’t know what it is, but you didn’t go mad.’