It was some time before I saw this woman again. One day in November I stood at the window of my office eating my cheese sandwich, looking out at the rain, which had been falling ceaselessly for two and a half weeks. The river had already worn away some of its banks and an unspecified number of residents had had to be evacuated in boats, some in canoes, some in kayaks, some in rowboats and some in craft operated by the official coastguard. The university, being located at the top of a hill, had so far avoided being engulfed, although the fate of the train station and indeed the rest of the lower city was uncertain. As I looked out the window I saw a figure crossing the otherwise empty quadrangle. I recognised the woman immediately from the way she walked, a distinctive loping stride. She had reached the halfway point between the Arts building and the building that housed Politics and Social Sciences when she stopped dead. She turned her head and looked up at my building. In fact, she appeared to look up not just at the building but at the window where I was standing, and not just at the window but through the rain-streaked pane, through the pane, yes, and directly at me. She seemed, moreover, to nod, ever so slightly. Then, just as suddenly, she turned and disappeared into a doorway on the opposite side. I realised at that moment I had seen her before, earlier even than on the analyst’s doorstep, yes, earlier than that. It seemed to me she might be the wife of one of the members of my department, I thought perhaps – I was fairly sure of it now – the wife of the Chair. She was herself, it was said, a political philosopher, or a moral philosopher, in any case a philosopher of some kind. The Chair was a difficult man, prone to passionate rages and protracted periods of despondency, and sometimes to both at once, lasting days or even weeks during which he disappeared from the department altogether. What was extraordinary about this encounter, if one could call it that, in which this woman stopped in the middle of the quadrangle in the pouring rain, turned her head, glanced at the building, her gaze seeming to fall not just on my window but through it and, by extension, directly on me, was that my office was located on the thirteenth floor, a number whose superstitious significance did not escape me, and although I was not disposed to such notions, I was all the same amused by the dark congruity of the number with my life, and indeed with the spirit of the times more generally. Nevertheless, in spite of its strangeness, I forgot about this latest run-in with the woman almost immediately. I had not been sleeping well. I had woken in the night on multiple occasions with the feeling that there was someone in the room with me. Given that nobody aside from myself, with the exception of the letting agent who appeared unannounced for periodic inspections of the place, had entered the cottage since I arrived, the impression that my space had been trespassed upon was unsettling, to say the least. For the first few moments in which I found myself awake, I would lie still, listening for any unfamiliar sounds, or sniffing quietly for unfamiliar smells. Invariably I found nothing definitive; if now and then I thought I could identify the faintest trace of a smell I did not recognise, just as often the shapes and aromas in the darkened room seemed even more known to me than ever, and this terrible familiarity frightened me more than the idea of a malevolent stranger in the house. By and by, and I cannot explain this, the uneasy feeling pursued me into the daylight hours, as if I were being startled into an even deeper state of awakening by a malignant and disembodied force that dogged my steps, following my progress through the city. It came upon me, for instance, as I perused the fruit aisle in the supermarket, and then again in the pharmacy, where I at once felt as though I had grown enormous in size, a giant, all out of proportion with the bottles of shampoo and tubes of mascara. I squeezed myself down the aisle in the direction of the pharmacist’s desk so that I could fill my prescription, which I had allowed to lapse for several weeks, not having the physical energy or indeed the mental wherewithal to, in the first place, deviate from my daily routine and, in the second place, to face the pharmacy with its unforgiving strip lighting and the openly antagonistic, even hostile, attitude of the pharmacist himself. I stayed up through the night watching through the curtains. I thought of the Yale lock on the front door, the flimsy catches on the window, the figure of a woman walking in the dark. I stood all the long nights, watching the street, wondering, What’s going to happen?