She held her face between her hands, stared at herself in the glass. She thought: If I continued doing this for long enough I suppose I could hypnotise myself. She thought it would be wonderful to be able to hypnotise oneself—to take oneself away from life—to find some pleasant place in the recesses of the mind in which to rest.
She thought back through the years. She saw herself as a bride. She remembered her honeymoon in Paris; then the years that had come afterwards; then the time when she had discovered that beneath the façade of being an engineer her husband had another job—that he worked for Quayle. She remembered the travelling and the ships—the liners and the dingy cargo boats; the cold and the heat. She remembered Morocco. Suddenly, she began to cry. She covered her face with her
