During the time we lived together, I ran into her once, unexpectedly, sitting in a pub with a group of people. She was barely recognisable in this context. It was my usual haunt, I had stopped in on the way home from a walk. I had never seen her so sociable and at the same time so inaccessible. I sat at the bar with my back to her and listened as she went on without pause for an hour and thirty minutes, discoursing upon Martin Luther and John Milton. Every so often and without warning she began expounding on current events, one moment decrying the housing crisis and the next excoriating foreign investment in Cuba. She spoke relentlessly, filling the space in front of her so full I was sure she could not see me, and yet at times I was convinced she was speaking directly and only to me, that the people who surrounded her, unknown to me, were just as unknown and indeed irrelevant to her. I remembered the stunned silence that used to sit between us, or upon us, or in any case seemed to surround us with such immensity, with such heaviness, that it rendered me completely immobile. The nature of the situation was such that it had caused the existing organisation of my life before to become finally untenable. It was like standing still as a great wind tore the roofs off the city. But could she have been that to someone else? What was absolute was not necessarily unconditional, I knew that now. Clara baited the stars – she was, like them, bright and intermittent.