Visions that come and go, swift, ephemeral. He is not in control of himself. Carefully he pushes paper and pen to the far end of the table and lays his head on his hands. If I am going to faint, he thinks, let me faint at my post.

Another vision. A figure at a well bringing a pan to his lips, a traveller on the point of departing; over the rim, the eyes already abstracted, elsewhere. A brush of hand against hand. Fond touch. 'Goodbye, old friend!' And gone.

Why this plodding chase across empty country after the rumour of a ghost, the ghost of a rumour?

Because I am he. Because he is I. Something there that I seek to grasp: the moment before extinction when the blood still courses, the heart still beats. Heart, the faithful ox that keeps the millwheel turning, that casts up not so much as a glance of puzzlement when the axe is raised on high, but takes the blow and folds at the knees and expires. Not oblivion but the moment before oblivion, when I come panting up to you at the rim of the well and we look upon each other for a last time, knowing we are alive, sharing this one life, our only life. All that I am left to grasp for: the moment of that gaze, salutation and farewell in one, past all arguing, past all pleading: 'Hello, old friend. Goodbye, old friend.' Dry eyes. Tears turned to crystals.

I hold your head between my hands. I kiss your brow. I kiss your lips.

The rule: one look, one only; no glancing back. But I look back.

You stand at the wellside, the wind in your hair, not a soul but a body rarefied, raised to its first, second, third, fourth, fifth essence, gazing upon me with crystal eyes, smiling with golden lips.

Forever I look back. Forever I am absorbed in your gaze. A field of crystal points, dancing, winking, and I one of them. Stars in the sky, and fires on the plain answering them. Two realms signalling to each other.

He falls asleep at the table and sleeps through the rest of the afternoon. At suppertime Matryona taps at the door, but he does not waken. They have supper without him.

Much later, after the child's bedtime, he emerges dressed for the street. Anna Sergeyevna, seated with her back to him, turns. 'Are you going out then?' she says. 'Will you have some tea before you go?'

There is a certain nervousness about her. But the hand that passes him the cup is steady.

She does not invite him to sit down. He drinks his tea in silence, standing before her.

There is something he wants to say, but he is afraid he will not be able to get it out, or will even break down again in front of her. He is not in control of himself.

He puts down the empty cup and lays a hand on her shoulder. 'No,' she says, shaking her head, pushing his hand away, 'that is not how I do things.'

Her hair is drawn back under a heavy enamelled clasp. He loosens the clasp and lays it on the table. Now she does not resist, but shakes her hair till it hangs loose.

'Everything else will follow, I promise,' he says. He is conscious of his age; in his voice he hears no trace of the erotic edge that women would once upon a time respond to. Instead there is something to which he does not care to give a name. A cracked instrument, a voice that has undergone its second breaking. 'Everything,' he repeats.

She is searching his face with an earnestness and intentness he cannot mistake. Then she puts aside her sewing. Slipping past his hands, she disappears into the curtained alcove.

He waits, unsure. Nothing happens. He follows her and parts the curtains.

Matryona lies fast asleep, her lips open, her fair hair spread on the pillow like a nimbus. Anna Sergeyevna has half unbuttoned her dress. With a wave of the hand and a cross look in which there is nevertheless a touch of amusement, she orders him out.

He sits down and waits. She emerges in her shift, her feet bare. The veins on her feet stand out blue. Not a young woman; not an innocent surrendering herself. Yet her hands, when he takes them, are cold and trembling. She will not meet his eyes. 'Fyodor Mikhailovich,' she whispers, 'I want you to know I have not done this before.'

She wears a silver chain around her neck. With his finger he follows the loop of the chain till he comes to the little crucifix. He raises the crucifix to her lips; warmly and without hesitation she kisses it. But when he tries to kiss her, she averts her head. 'Not now,' she whispers.

They spend the night together in his son's room. What happens between them happens in the dark from beginning to end. In their lovemaking he is struck above all by the heat of her body. It is not at all as he had expected. It is as if at her core she were on fire. It excites him intensely, and it excites him too that they should be doing such fiery, dangerous work with the child asleep in the next room.

He falls asleep. Sometime in the middle of the night he wakes with her still beside him in the narrow bed. Though he is exhausted, he tries to arouse her. She does not respond; when he forces himself on her, she becomes like a dead thing in his arms.

In the act there is nothing he can call pleasure or even sensation. It is as though they are making love through a sheet, the grey, tattered sheet of his grief. At the moment of climax he plunges back into sleep as into a lake. As he sinks Pavel rises to meet him. His son's face is contorted in despair: his lungs are bursting, he knows he is dying, he knows he is past hope, he calls to his father because that is the last thing left he can do, the last thing in the world. He calls out in a strangled rush of words. This is the vision in its ugly extremity that rushes at him out of the vortex of darkness into which he is descending inside the woman's body. It bursts upon him, possesses him, speeds on.

When he wakes again it is light. The apartment is empty.

He passes the day in a fever of impatience. Thinking of her, he quivers with desire like a young man. But what possesses him is not the tight-throated douceur of twenty years ago. Rather, he feels like a leaf or a seed in the grip of a headlong force, a winged seed drawn up into the highest windstream, carried dizzily above the oceans.

Over supper Anna Sergeyevna is self-possessed and distant, confining her attention to the child, listening single-mindedly to the rambling narrative of her day at school. When she needs to address him, she is polite but cool. Her coolness only inflames him. Can it be that the avid glances he steals at the mother's throat, lips, arms pass the child entirely by?

He waits for the silence that will mean Matryona has gone to bed. Instead, at nine o'clock the light next door is extinguished. For half an hour he waits, and another half-hour. Then with a shielded candle, in his stockinged feet, he creeps out. The candle casts huge bobbing shadows. He sets it down on the floor and crosses to the alcove.

In the dim light he makes out Anna Sergeyevna on the farther side of the bed, her back to him, her arms gracefully above her head like a dancer's, her dark hair loose. On the near side, curled with her thumb in her mouth and one arm cast loosely over her mother, is Matryona. His immediate impression is that she is awake, watching him, guarding her mother; but when he bends over her, her breathing is deep and even.

He whispers the name: 'Anna!' She does not stir.

He returns to his room, trying to be calm. There are perfectly sound reasons, he tells himself, why she might prefer to keep to herself tonight. But he is beyond the reach of his own persuading.

A second time he tiptoes across the room. The two women have not stirred. Again he has the uncanny feeling that Matryona is watching him. He bends closer.

He is not mistaken: he is staring into open, unblinking eyes. A chill runs through him. She sleeps with her eyes open, he tells himself. But it is not true. She is awake and has been awake all the time; thumb in mouth, she has been watching his every motion with unremitting vigilance. As he peers, holding his breath, the corners of her mouth seem to curve faintly upward in a victorious, bat-like grin. And the arm too, extended loosely over her mother, is like a wing.