The Drowning Girl. Margaret Leroy

are illuminated.

      But Adam doesn’t confine his researches to ghostly apparitions. One of the cases he’s currently investigating is that of four-year-old Kevin Smith (not his real name). Kevin wakes sobbing every night and says he wants to go home, and sometimes he talks about a place where he says he used to live. His mother wonders if Kevin is remembering a previous life…

      The room tilts. I can feel my heart, its rapid, jittery beat.

      I put it to Adam that many children live in a fantasy world. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘And that’s why we have to look at these cases very carefully. In fact, accounts of children apparently remembering past lives are actually quite common, though most of them come from cultures which have a belief in reincarnation, like the Druse of Lebanon.’ And he tells me there are psychiatrists who claim to use past life regression to heal physical symptoms and phobias…

      I ask him what he thinks of all this. ‘I’ve never investigated a past life case that I found completely convincing,’ he tells me. ‘But there’s a US psychiatrist, Dr Ian Stevenson, who devoted his life to exploring this phenomenon—and some of his cases are really very persuasive.’

      I jump as my dentist’s door swings back. An elderly man in a drab grey coat comes out; he’s touching his face with his fingers, as though to check that it’s still there. The dentist’s wife takes his credit card. I read hungrily on, my heart juddering.

      So what does Adam make of Kevin? He’s diplomatic: he gives me a guarded smile. ‘As a scientist, I never say never,’ he tells me.

      Have you had an experience that you can’t explain? Adam Winters would love to hear from you. You can contact him at this e-mail address…

      I grab my bag and scrabble around for a pen.

      ‘Ms Reynolds, could you come in now?’

      The dentist is standing at the door of his surgery. I fold up the paper and tuck it under the magazines.

      I get in the chair, and the dentist pokes around in my mouth. He’s a bony, lugubrious, kindly man. He allows himself a melodramatic sigh.

      ‘And when did you last come to see me?’ he says.

      ‘I can’t remember exactly. I’m afraid it’s quite a while.’

      He shakes his head, as though wearily resigned to human weakness.

      ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he says mournfully. ‘But in the end we’ll probably have to extract it.’

      He drills my tooth, puts in a filling, prescribes some antibiotics.

      ‘To be honest, I really don’t know if this is going to work,’ he says. ‘You should make an appointment for eight weeks’ time. But any trouble, you come back sooner, OK? Any twinges.’

      I promise that I will.

      I go back into the waiting room. The dentist’s wife follows. If she weren’t here, I might steal the Twickenham Times. The work will cost a lot: I arrange to pay in instalments. She fixes my next appointment.

      Outside, I’m amazed that everything is just the same as it always was: the lumbering buses, the crowd of pedestrians jostling at the traffic lights—all solid, vivid, predictable, just as they were before.

      CHAPTER 10

      It’s a cold, dreary December: dark days, with a raw, searching wind that often has flakes of snow in it, and sometimes a rain that looks like water but feels like ice on your skin. In our garden, the mulberry branches are bare, and the lawn is muddy and sodden, and leaves from the trees in the Somerfield car park drift up against the wall, their extravagant russets and yellows darkened and dulled by the wet. It’s a struggle to keep the flat warm, with the ceilings so high and the heating so elderly and erratic; the wind sneaks in through every little crack. At night I pile my coats on top of Sylvie’s duvet.

      At the flower shop, we’re stocking up for Christmas, with poinsettias, and amaryllis bulbs, and mistletoe that I love for the remote, pearly glow of its berries, like something seen through clear water. And Lavinia buys in willow wands and patchwork scraps of fabric, and when the shop is quiet we sit in the room at the back and make up Christmas garlands—some of them very simple, woven from twisted twigs, and more formal, traditional ones with ribbon and berries and greenery; and sometimes I like to use colours and fabrics that nobody else would think of—bows of brown paper, or shimmery Indian ribbon. When I get home, my hands still smell of juniper.

      A letter comes, with the Arbours Clinic slogan on the envelope: Helping Families Help Themselves, and a rainbow drawn by a child. I feel a rush of hopefulness. Now someone will come to our rescue, someone will understand. I rip the envelope open. We have an appointment with Dr Strickland at the start of January. I’m pleased—it doesn’t seem too long to wait. I worry that Sylvie’s trainers are scruffy—I don’t want them to think that I am a neglectful parent—and I take her to buy some new shoes for the appointment—pink suede boots with laces that I can’t really afford.

      I yearn for Dominic. I ring the house in Newgate Road, hoping to hear him on the voicemail, so hungry for something of him, just for a moment to have his voice vibrating inside me. I choose a time when Claudia should be meeting their children from school, but to my horror it’s Claudia who answers. I put the phone down rapidly, ashamed.

      And all the time I wonder about the article I read. Sometimes—most of the time—I tell myself it was nonsense, a deluded, New-Agey fantasy. I remind myself that people need something to cling to—anything to protect ourselves from knowing, really knowing, that we are mortal beings. Sometimes the mind won’t let that knowledge in.

      I remember the night my mother died. I’d spent several hours that afternoon at her bedside in the hospital; she’d been doing so well with all her rehabilitation, she was starting to walk again, two months after her stroke. She’d been sitting up in bed, alert and vivid, wearing the bright new bedjacket I’d brought her, and with some lipstick on; and talking about what she’d do when they discharged her—the pelargoniums she was longing to plant. She was worried she’d missed the start of the growing season. The ward sister rang at eleven that night to say she’d died. I just said, ‘No, she hasn’t.’ My voice quite calm and unconcerned. ‘Really. Don’t worry, she’s fine, I was with her this afternoon…’ I simply didn’t believe it. When the nurse persisted, I thought it was a practical joke. I actually said that. ‘This is a joke, isn’t it? You’re having me on…’ She wasn’t thrown. It can’t have been the first time this had happened to her. She kept on talking, her manner gently insistent. ‘Miss Reynolds, I’m really sorry, but you need to listen to me. I’m ringing from Stanton Ward. Your mother had another stroke. This time it was a massive one. It was very sudden. She wouldn’t have felt any pain…’ But I couldn’t take it in. Just couldn’t. As if there were a door in my mind, shut fast—that couldn’t be prised open, wouldn’t let this knowledge through. And mostly I think that’s what all these beliefs are, really: doors in the mind, keeping the dark out.

      Yet sometimes I find myself thinking: Perhaps it’s true—perhaps the soul goes on. Perhaps some of us have a memory trace—some imprint of a previous life—or a psychic link with the past… And always, just wondering that—just touching on it so lightly, even for a second or two—there’s a sense of something shifting—the present, certain, obvious world dissolving all around me, as everything I thought I knew begins to fall away.

      Sometimes I wonder about Adam Winters, and kick myself that I didn’t manage to note down his e-mail address. At least I’d have a choice then. But I can’t imagine how it would be if I met him, or what on earth he’d make of Sylvie and me. I simply can’t envisage it. I think of him in his university department—his glamorous career, his adulatory students—and me in my flat in Highfields, cooking chicken nuggets, reading old copies of Heat. And what might it do to Sylvie—to give so much weight and attention to all the strange things that she says? Everything might get worse then. There are lots of good reasons to forget all about him. I tell myself it’s as well that I don’t