I peered into the mirror. She was sitting slumped on the seat with her head hanging and her hands resting palm upwards on her thighs.

Suddenly the sea was on my left, far below, blue, unmoving. I drove down a steep hill, then along a straight cement road beside a railway track. A pink and white hotel, castellated, with pennants flying, rose up on my right, enormous and empty. The road straggled to an end in a marshy patch of scrub and thistles, and there I stopped, in the midst of a vast and final silence. I could hear her behind me, breathing. When I turned she lifted her sibyl's fearsome head and looked at me. Help me, she whispered. Help me. A bubble of blood came out of her mouth and burst. Tommy! she said, or a word like that, and then:

Love. What did I feel? Remorse, grief, a terrible – no no no, I won't lie. I can't remember feeling anything, except that sense of strangeness, of being in a place I knew but did not recognise. When I got out of the car I was giddy, and had to lean on the door for a moment with my eyes shut tight. My jacket was bloodstained, I wriggled out of it and flung it into the stunted bushes – they never found it, I can't think why. I remembered the pullover in the boot, and put it on. It smelled of fish and sweat and axle-grease. I picked up the hangman's hank of rope and threw that away too. Then I lifted out the picture and walked with it to where there was a sagging barbed-wire fence and a ditch with a trickle of water at the bottom, and there I dumped it. What was I thinking of, I don't know. Perhaps it was a gesture of renunciation or something. Renunciation! How do I dare use such words. The woman with the gloves gave me a last, dismissive stare. She had expected no better of me. I went back to the car, trying not to look at it, the smeared windows. Something was falling on me: a delicate, silent fall of rain. I looked upwards in the glistening sunlight and saw a cloud directly overhead, the merest smear of grey against the summer blue. I thought: I am not human. Then I turned and walked away.

II

All my adult life I have had a recurring dream (yes, yes, dreams again!), it comes once or twice a year and leaves me disturbed for days afterwards. As usual it is not a dream in the ordinary sense, for not much happens in it, really, and nothing is explicit. There is mainly an undefined but profound and mounting sensation of unease, which rises at the end to full-fledged panic. A long time ago, it seems, I have committed a crime. No, that is too strong. I have done something, it is never clear what, precisely. Perhaps I stumbled upon something, it may even have been a corpse, and covered it up, and almost forgot about it. Now, years later, the evidence has been found, and they have come to question me. As yet there is nothing to suggest that I was directly involved, not a hint of suspicion attaches to me. I am merely another name on a list. They are mild, soft-spoken, stolidly deferential, a little bored. The young one fidgets. I respond to their questions politely, with a certain irony, smiling, lifting an eyebrow. It is, I tell myself smugly, the performance of my life, a masterpiece of dissembling. Yet the older one, I notice, is regarding me with deepening interest, his shrewd eyes narrowing. I must have said something. What have I said? I begin to blush, I cannot help it. A horrible constriction takes hold of me. I babble, what is intended as a relaxed little laugh turns into a strangled gasp. At length I run down, like a clockwork toy, and sit and gape at them helplessly, panting. Even the younger one, the sergeant, is interested now. An appalling silence descends, it stretches on and on, until at last my sleeping self makes a bolt for it and I start awake, aghast and sweating. What is peculiarly awful in all this is not the prospect of being dragged before the courts and put in jail for a crime I am not even sure I have committed, but the simple, terrible fact of having been found out. This is what makes me sweat, what fills my mouth with ashes and my heart with shame.

And now, as I hurried along the cement road, with the railway track beside me and the sea beyond, I had that same feeling of ignominy. What a fool I had been. What trouble there would be in the days, the weeks, the years ahead. Yet also there was a sensation of lightness, of buoyancy, as if I had thrown off an awkward burden. Ever since I had reached what they call the use of reason I had been doing one thing and thinking another, because the weight of things seemed so much greater than that of thoughts. What I said was never exactly what I felt, what I felt was never what it seemed I should feel, though the feelings were what felt genuine, and right, and inescapable. Now I had struck a blow for the inner man, that guffawing, fat foulmouth who had been telling me all along I was living a lie. And he had burst out at last, it was he, the ogre, who was pounding along in this lemon-coloured light, with blood on his pelt, and me slung helpless over his back. Everything was gone, the past, Coolgrange, Daphne, all my previous life, gone, abandoned, drained of its essence, its significance. To do the worst thing, the very worst thing, that's the way to be free. I would never again need to pretend to myself to be what I was not. The thought made my head spin and my empty stomach heave.

I was prey to a host of niggling worries. This pullover was smelly, and too tight for me. The knee of my left trouser-leg had a small rip in it. People would notice that I had not shaved today. And I needed, I positively longed, to wash my hands, to plunge up to the elbows in scalding suds, to sluice myself, to drench, rinse, scour – to be clean. Opposite the deserted hotel there was a jumble of grey buildings that had once been a railway station. Weeds were growing on the platform, and all the windows in the signal box were smashed. A pockmarked enamel sign with a lovingly painted pointing hand indicated a cement blockhouse set at a discreet distance down the platform. A clump of purple buddleia was flourishing by the doorway of the gents. I went into the ladies – there were no more rules, after all. The air here was chill and dank. There was a quicklime smell, and something green and glistening was growing up the walls. The fittings had been ripped out long ago, even the stall doors were gone. It was apparent from the state of the floor, however, that the place was still in frequent use. In a corner there was a little heap of stuff- used condoms, I think, discoloured wads of cotton, even bits of clothing – from which I quickly averted my eyes. A single tap on a green copper pipe stuck out of the wall where the handbasins had been. When I turned the spigot there was a distant groaning and clanking, and presently a rusty dribble came out. I washed my hands as best I could and dried them on the tail of my shirt. Yet when I had finished, and was about to leave, I discovered a drop of blood between my fingers. I don't know where it came from. It may have been on the pullover, or even in my hair. The blood was thick by now, dark, and sticky.

Nothing, not the stains in the car, the smears on the windows, not her cries, not even the smells of her dying, none of it affected me as did this drop of brownish gum. I plunged my fists under the tap again, whining in dismay, and scrubbed and scrubbed, but I could not get rid of it. The blood went, but something remained, all that long day I could feel it there, clinging in the fork of tender flesh between my fingers, a moist, warm, secret stain.

I am afraid to think what I have done.

For a while I sat on a broken bench on the platform in the sun. How blue the sea was, how gay the little flags fluttering and snapping on the hotel battlements. All was quiet, save for the sea-breeze crooning in the telegraph wires, and something somewhere that creaked and knocked, creaked and knocked. I smiled. I might have been a child again, daydreaming here, in these toy surroundings. I could smell the sea, and the sea-wrack on the beach, and the cat-smell of the sand. A train was on the way, yes, a puff-puff, the rails were humming and shivering in anticipation. Not a soul to be seen, not a grown-up anywhere, except, away down the beach, a few felled sunbathers on their towels. I wonder why it was so deserted there? Perhaps it wasn't, perhaps there were seaside crowds all about, and I didn't notice, with my inveterate yearning towards backgrounds. I closed my eyes, and something swam up dreamily, a memory, an image, and sank again without breaking the surface. I tried to catch it before it was gone, but there was only that one glimpse: a doorway, I think, opening on to a darkened room, and a mysterious sense of expectancy, of something or someone about to appear. Then the train came through, a slow, rolling thunder that made my diaphragm shake. The passengers were propped up in the wide windows like manikins, they gazed at me blankly as they were borne slowly past. It occurred to me I should have turned my face away: everyone was a potential witness now. But I thought it did not matter. I thought I would be in jail within hours. I looked about me, taking great breaths, drinking my fill of the world that I would soon be losing. A gang of boys, three or four, had appeared in the grounds of the hotel. They straggled across the unkempt lawns, and stopped to throw stones at a for-sale sign. I rose, with a leaden sigh, and left the station and set off along the road again.