At the turn of the last century it was considered that just as a few were born great artists, or dancers, or writers, a very few were born mediums, sensitives, for whom the wall between the living and the dead was thin, who slipped more easily between alternative realities than most. Like I do, I suppose.

  ‘Oh darling, you’ve no idea, have you, just how important you are,’ Cynara had said over our fish and no chips for her at the Caprice. It’s all very well for her. But I need food to weigh me down, to keep my physical presence strongly based. Most mediums are overweight. I’m a size twelve.

  Yes, it figured. ‘They’ might be gathering samples like me from here, there and everywhere. Big Data could locate us, the few amongst millions. And how long had Cynara been part of it? Why did Cynara buy me out of the gallery after Ted died? Simple greed on her part, perhaps? Within the month I’d accepted a miserable offer from her solicitors. I should have asked for three times as much and probably I’d have got it. Or if I’d stayed a sleeping partner I’d be rich by now. She’s branched out from old master fakes into works of art ‘by’ celebrities, but ghosted by notable ‘named’ artists. The gallery is no longer becalmed but steaming ahead. Cynara has friends in high places. ‘I’m with the NSA too’, while I was choking and gasping over our dry martinis.

  In retrospect I can see that Cynara timed her offer well: I was in no position to argue. Ted had left me inadequately provided for, which she knew. Her call to me days after Ted’s death to say he had appeared to her in a dream thoroughly unsettled me, and had perhaps been intended so to do. Though I can also see that if she was sleeping with Robbie and he was on Doxies, she too was likely to have powerful dreams.

  Until Robbie came to live with me the Ted dreams were erratic, and with nothing like the intensity of the first vision – when I was left poised in sunlight while Ted was whisked on in dark shadow to a gloomy shore. After that I’d just see Ted from a distance, stumbling amongst gnarled roots, held back by brambles and thickets like Snow White in the Disney film, but with the feeling that if only he got through the wood there would be something better on the other side. Now I must remind myself that Ted’s revenant, his visible ghost, his returning corpse, is coming from my mind, not his, and not through some malicious external force. This is not a curse, this is not black magic.

  My dreams: I wake from them, even if they became more difficult to forget. There is a difference between a dream (defined as a series of thoughts, visions, or feelings that happen during sleep, from which one is said to ‘wake’) and a hallucination (defined as an image, sound, or smell that seems real but does not really exist, from which you don’t ‘wake’, but is simply here one minute, gone the next). More, hallucinations are usually caused by mental illness or the effect of a drug, or so the dictionary tells me. But I suppose you could have a hallucination of a dream, which if there is any truth in Cynara’s wild assertions about Robbie taking Doxies, might well be the case. What I am having is both. His declarations of love for me might be as hallucinatory and as drug-fabricated as mine for him. Ted’s ‘for God’s sake leave me alone’ at least had a ring of familiarity.

  Two days after Robbie and I had met at Ali’s and I spent the night with him he turned up at my house with roses and quantities of smoked salmon. He was doing some serious wooing – that much was obvious. Then he said, ‘You won’t believe this, but your Ted appeared to me in a dream, and asked me to make a decent woman of you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I’d said. I wasn’t too pleased. He was linking my present with a past I wanted to put behind me.

  ‘I can’t help that though,’ said Robbie. ‘What happened, happened.’ He pulled me to him and we resumed our kissings and clutchings and the one trying to be part of the other, like teenagers. It was wonderful after the months of celibacy.

  Robbie did quite a lot of kissing with his perfect, shiny north-American teeth, so well set back behind well-shaped George Clooney lips. He favoured suit fabrics that were good to bury one’s head into – nothing cheap or man-made. He also ponged delicately of something called Homme de Chasse No 1, which he said Portal Inc always gave away as their annual Thanksgiving staff gift. ‘We guys can choose a twenty-pound turkey instead. I’ve always gone for the man-scent but come next Thanksgiving, when we’re married, I’ll take the turkey.’

  ‘Married? It’s only been two days,’ I said. ‘You may change your mind. And the twins are vegetarian.’

  ‘Dammit,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s perfect.’ I loved him.

  Robbie was so new to me, so un-Ted-like. Ted just smelt as he smelt, dressed as he dressed, was happy enough to buy his clothes from the charity shop, kissed little, fucked much. I’d have hesitated to nuzzle my nose into an old leather jacket that in all likelihood had been handed in by the initial wearer’s widow. And Ted would not have dreamed of wearing scent – last week’s bonfire was good enough for him. Ted’s bonfires smelt of wood; Robbie’s of paper and plastic.

  And then about a week after we’d met Robbie told me he’d dreamed of Ted too.

  ‘You’re making that up,’ I said.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have made it up. It was too detailed. Ted was wearing a black-leather biker jacket with a brown fur collar and striped yellow socks. He was looking at a painting of the Mona Lisa and she was smiling. He waved at me and said, “Look after her”.’

  I admit this gave me a shiver. Ted had bought such a jacket at a charity shop, and it was dear to his heart. I’d sent it back to the shop it came from, a couple of weeks after his death, when the clearing up had started. And how could Robbie know about the striped socks? Ted wore them in the garden, never to the gallery. Too gaudy.

  ‘I bet the Mona Lisa was a fake,’ I said.

  ‘She was sure as shit really smiling,’ he said. ‘Not just a simper. She was wishing us well.’

  And that dream, genuine or not, was the end of any doubts I had about the matter of marriage. Ted had given permission. Neither he nor I wanted the other to get away, that was the truth of it. Robbie never mentioned his own relatives. Ted’s family were horrified at the speed of events. You didn’t need to read their minds to know what others were thinking. A raise of the eyebrows, a sniff and a snigger said it all. ‘Out of one bed and into another!’ ‘It’s indecent! Those poor twins – what they must feel!’ ‘What on earth can he see in her?’ and so on.

  But in the here and now sleep was beginning to overcome me. The wake-up pills were wearing off. I wouldn’t wait up for Robbie. I’d go to bed alone in the confidence I wouldn’t dream if I didn’t have sex with him. Ted wouldn’t be able to come walking out of his world into mine. In the morning Robbie would be there, and he would sit on the bed and stroke my cheek, and his declarations of love and concern for me would ring as true to me as mine did for him: Let me not to the marriage of true minds, Admit impediments… Forget Cynara and her improbable impediments… I slept.

  I awoke from a dreamless sleep around nine a.m. feeling alert and rational. That is to say I couldn’t remember having any dreams, and my own view of myself was that I was alert and rational; but that too may have been illusion. There was no sign of Robbie, but I felt no pang of loss, no withdrawal symptoms resulting from the absence of his attentions. My conversation with Cynara had been the bad dream: lunch with an anorexic maniac. The room was full of light: the sun had been up for hours; I pulled the blind up and got the full blast of its brilliance in my eyes. I was dazzled and couldn’t see properly at first, then my eyes adjusted.

  On the floor between the bathroom and the chest of drawers, seeming to grow out of our new fitted pale green carpet (John Lewis, wool-rich woven celery velvet, £52 the square metre) which now replaced Ted’s and my pale pink one (John Lewis, wool and nylon mauve twisted pile, £19 the square metre) was a little sapling. It was about six inches high, with a brown stem hardly thick enough to call a trunk. It had branching arms hung with bright green clusters of something between leaves and fronds, and with black roots descending like tentacles and digging into the velvety pile of the carpet. It was a miniature version of one of the Arthur Rackham trees Ted wrestled with in my dreams of the great forest. It looked as though it had every intention of growing.

  I hadn’t had a dream and I hadn’t seen Ted, I’d just been asleep. No, I thought, this is a hallucination. This is not something that’s grown, sprung up overnight like an evil mushroom; this is some horror I have produced myself, out of my addled imagination.

  I tiptoed round the little tree carefully and went through to the bathroom; brushed my hair, my teeth, put on lipstick. If I ignored it perhaps it would go away. When I went down to the kitchen there was a strong smell of coffee and frying bacon, and there was Robbie, limber and fully dressed and perfectly lively. He smiled at me. His perfect teeth gleamed; his glasses caught the sun and glinted back at me. Everything glittered. It was a beautiful spring morning. Robbie was like a man on a Calvin Klein poster, all clean-cut and pent-up vigour, not a crumple anywhere. I didn’t run to him and clasp and wriggle: I pecked him affectionately on the cheek. I felt affectionate. A woman who hallucinates – but whose twins are housed by her husband, whose dream kitchen is paid for by him, whose Dualit toaster cost £195, and whose sexual needs are more than matched, does well to show affection even if their husband has been out all night, even if his jealous ‘ex-bed-buddy’ has had nasty things to say.

  ‘Sorry not to get back earlier,’ Robbie said. ‘I called but couldn’t get through. I hope you weren’t worried. There was a major security lockdown at the Embassy.’ The new American Embassy, next to Portal Inc at Nine Elms. That great sparkly glamorous prism on the Thames skyline, all facets and angles, that citadel that seemed to hover rather than stand; that miracle of rare device, with its closed-loop water supply, its blast-resistant glass, its controlled climate! Robbie certainly had a thrilling life. To be near to it, close to it, trapped inside it, could justify all eventualities, neutralise all grievances. ‘The big guys flew in an hour early, ahead of schedule. The Portal crew, yours truly included, were stranded the wrong side of the doors and that was it for the night.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t it alarming?’ But I was impressed. I couldn’t help it. My Robbie, so close to the centre of power! It is dreadful the way status and wealth impinge on the female psyche.

  ‘A nuisance,’ he said. ‘But we were safer in there than any place else. I’ve cooked pancetta; I prefer it to the back bacon.’

  ‘I do too,’ I said.

  I knew better than to ask who the big guys were, or why their flying in triggered a security shut down.

  ‘I hope you got some sleep,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, they looked after us. I’m not used to sleeping alone, though.’ He gave me a little pinch on the bottom. I quite liked that. It’s nice to be owned, good to be acknowledged; I gave him a little pinch back. ‘In fact I’m feeling great – they handed out Juves by way of apology. It was a great honour to be there. I was privileged.’ He looked at me and he smiled. It was the smile of the evangelist, of one who knows he will have eternal life, and deserves it.

  ‘Juves?’

  ‘Rejuvenating capsules. CDF hormones, good for heart-function and general wellbeing.’

  ‘Like Doxies?’

  He seemed taken aback. He shook his head.

  ‘No. Not at all like Doxies. Doxies are extremely complex psycho-pharms. Juves are junior league.’ And then: ‘But what do you know about Doxies? They won’t be let out on sale for a good five years and then only on prescription.’

  ‘Cynara told me at lunch.’

  He said Cynara was a naughty naughty girl, but he didn’t deny the existence of Doxies. The Juves, whatever they were, appeared to me to have the same effect as cocaine; that is to say rendered the taker wide awake, lively and friendly, but without any accompanying anxiety.

  He asked me how I had got on with Cynara. He wanted his two favourite girls to be friends.

  ‘Don’t take that amiss,’ he said, since I must have shown from my face that I did.

  ‘The most she ever was to me was a bed buddy.’ That phrase again. Were they both talking from the same script? ‘You are my wife and I love you. But she was fun.’

  The Juves seemed to be acting as a truth drug, so I took the opportunity of asking him whether he thought Cynara had had an affair with Ted when they worked together at the gallery. I dropped it in casually as a kind of afterthought, but some basic wariness in him lingered. He lived in a top secret world. He was not going to tell me.

  ‘Phyllis honey,’ he said. ‘I thought we were living our new life together, not forever raking over old times. My predecessor in your bed was an attractive fellow, but what’s dead and gone is dead and gone.’

  I said I didn’t think that was necessarily the case and suggested he go upstairs to the bedroom and have a look at what was growing there. He bounded upstairs.

  A few seconds of silence. And then a shout.

  ‘Oh my God, Philly, what have you done?’

  That’s right, I felt like saying: when in doubt, fucking blame the woman. But Robbie was already on the phone. I took the pan off the cooker. I didn’t think we’d be getting any breakfast.

  5

  By ten o’clock we were on the underground on our way to the new award-winning, art-deco-maroon-and-white-tiled station at Nine Elms, having taken a ticket to Vauxhall. Robbie explained we would not actually get off at Vauxhall, but would stay on the train and pay the extra, the better to forestall watchers. He did not say who ‘watchers’ were. Juve-induced paranoia, I supposed.

  Robbie had to use the kitchen scissors to disentangle the roots of the little tree from the carpet – it was a tender sapling scarcely a hand tall but already an inch taller than when I had first seen it – so tightly and firmly had they dug themselves in. He did it with energy and verve. I would have to put a rug down to cover the damage. But it was a small price to pay for getting the thing out of the house. I didn’t like the tree at all, and obviously neither did Robbie. He had placed it, along with its small quantity of muddy soil and some extra tufts of green carpet, inside a sealed zip bag, then put that into his brief case. He carried it with him, rather gingerly now, I thought, as if it was an unexploded bomb. But he remained inordinately cheerful.

  After the phone calls, and after he’d showered and found a clean shirt, a fresh suit and a new tie – rather wide and bright yellow, which seemed to echo his cheerful and active mood – he’d suggested I come along with him to the office.

  ‘It would be good for you to meet everyone,’ he’d said. ‘And my friend Ben Marcus in the neurological department wants to have a word with you about trauma nightmares.’

  It seemed as well to co-operate. If Ted had stepped into my reality last night without so much as the courtesy of a dream, and brought with him not just a scrap of mud but a living entity, and this colleague Ben could stop the dreams, then I must let him, whatever else lurked at Portal Inc. I would step into the mouth of the dragon.

  ‘Because you do love me, don’t you,’ he said, oddly child-like as I helped him with his tie. It took me only ten minutes to get ready: a clean dress, and sandals. No eye make-up.

  ‘Of course I do,’ I’d said, but I wasn’t sure. An adult Robbie on Doxies was easy enough to love: Robbie, on Juves as well, was fast developing a child-like, trusting quality, which came over as non-erotic, and I wasn’t used to it. But then I’d taken another wake-up pill and they helped me think clearly. I’d only had four hours’ sleep and I could see it was going to be a long, breakfast-less day.

  Oddly enough, I rather enjoyed the journey, into the mouth of dragon though it might be. We sat next to each other. I felt at home and safe and liked the feel of his haunch against mine; I was wearing a rather pretty white cotton dress with red poppies on it and I knew I looked good. On our way to the station Robbie had taken another pill from his inside breast pocket, chewed it, and swallowed. He seldom kept things in his pockets, for fear or spoiling the hang of his suits.

  ‘A Juve,’ he explained, ‘I swiped a couple of extras last night. I’ve had quite a tough time lately; things are hotting up at Portal. Fucking funding priorities.’

  ‘All the more reason to look after your heart muscles, darling,’ I said. I had never heard him swear before; he was acting like some college boy. But then it was not in my nature to call men ‘darling’. Perhaps it was the wake-up pills. ‘They do say it’s stress that wears them out.’

  We were at Archway before he replied. I sat silent. I thought, well, Robbie is a single-tasker. He does not usually talk and catch trains at the same time.

  ‘It’s not just about fucking heart muscles,’ he said. ‘Juves can make a guy, well, impetuous. But I’m well under control. Not like some I know. I’m not saying a thing. Juves kinda screw up a guy’s ability to keep his cards close to his chest. An anti-lie mechanism kicks in. Not a good idea in this business. They sure put a spring in your step, but they can make you stupid too, so you gotta know how to handle them, d’you get it?’

  ‘I get it.’ I said. And so I had. I was looking at the psycho-pharma future, where nobody was quite what they seemed. The depressed laughed, the frivolous ceased to smile, pundits believed their own lies. The crazy looked sane and the sane crazy. Doxies made you mistake sex for love and love for sex; Juves made you lose years of wisdom; my little pink pills evened me out into a false serenity. I no longer knew who I was. I’d given up knowing who Robbie was.

  At least my wake-up pills helped me think, turned me from passive to active. They were also making me walk fearless into jeopardy. Of course Portal Inc wanted to bring me in. I was their contact with the other side, unwitting and unwilling as I might be, and their robot-slave Robbie had been sent to pull me in. Portal Inc wanted to make the dead walk. Well, fuck them. Maybe I’d rather join the dead than collude. In the meantime I was sitting on a train next to a husband who could not tell lies, and I should make the most of it.