BRYONY WASN’T ABSOLUTELY SURPRISED when the Doctor suddenly flopped to his knees. Although she didn’t know him very well, she realised that it was odd and very noticeable if a man with such wide, striking and trustworthy eyes, a man who liked people so much, didn’t meet your gaze even once as you walked along. It was probably also a bad sign if he talked nonsense at great speed, as if someone had a gun to his head and was ordering him to gabble. And it was also probably a really terrible sign if his scarf looked somehow depressed. Actually, his kneeling rapidly on to the turf at the edge of the eighth green was the only thing he’d done in ages that made a bit of sense. ‘Doctor? Doctor, are you all right?’

‘He’s fallen over,’ Putta told her, as if she might not have noticed.

‘I can see that,’ she snapped, regretting it slightly when Putta flinched. ‘Doctor? Are you OK?’

‘Oh, absolutely.’ Those large, trustworthy eyes peered sadly up at her, plainly in pain. ‘I take an interest in golf course grass varieties. It’s a kind of hobby.’ He ran his large fingers through the grass leaves, as if he were calming the fur of a large, uneasy animal. ‘This is a mixture of creeping red fescue and velvet bentgrass.’ It was clear that he was attempting to smile, but all that his face could manage was something half-formed and lonely. ‘The peculiar thing is that I don’t remember even knowing the rules of golf before now…I have the distinct impression that yesterday I was entirely baffled by what could possibly be appealing about repeatedly knocking away and then retrieving and then dropping into a hole and then retrieving a small white sphere across various reproductions of a common Scottish coastal habitat. I mean, it’s not as dreadful a pastime as collecting bandan eggs…’ He glowered at Putta and became himself again for an instant.

But then the Doctor subsided again, almost seeming to shrink as he continued, ‘Not that one can’t alter one’s hobbies – no need to get in a rut, as they say. As someone must have said…’

When Bryony took the Doctor’s hand, her consciousness was immediately filled beyond its capacity with a torrent of images and emotions: a Victorian policeman looking stunned by something near his feet, a magnificent sunset involving two suns, slender azure-leaved trees arching overhead while uniformed creatures with insect-like faces swung out of them on glistening ropes and then – for a breathless instant – a swirling tunnel of silver, blue, black, brown, this urgent rush of light and speed and…time…it was time, too…time was pouring and leaping up around her and she was falling into it…