I turned in my seat. Will’s face was in shadow and I couldn’t quite make it out.‘Just hold on. Just for a minute.’‘Are you all right?’ I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong.‘I’m fine. I just . . . ’I could see his pale collar, his dark suit jacket a contrast against it.‘I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about . . . ’ He swallowed.Even in the half-dark it seemed effortful.‘I just . . . want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.’I released the door handle.‘Sure.’I closed my eyes and lay my head against the headrest, and we sat there together for a while longer, two people lost in remembered music, half hidden in the shadow of a castle on a moonlit hill.

As the new year began, [Patricia Highsmith] felt completely paralysed, incapable of reading or picking up the phone. 'I can feel my grip loosening on my self,' she wrote. 'It is like strength failing in the hand that holds me above an abyss.' She wished there was a more awful-sounding word for what she was feeling than simply 'depression'. She wanted to die, she said, but then realised that the best course of action would be to endure the wretchedness until it passed. Her wish was, 'Not to die, but not to exist, simply, until this is over'.

Don’t you think it’s actually harder for you . . . to adapt, I mean? Because you’ve done all that stuff?’‘Are you asking me if I wish I'd never done it?’‘I’m just wondering if it would have been easier for you. If you’d led a smaller life. To live like this, I mean.’‘I will never, ever regret the things I've done. Because most days, if you’re stuck in one of these, all you have are the places n your memory that you can go to.’ He smiled. It was tight, as if it cost him. ‘So if you’re asking me would I rather be reminiscing about the view of the caste from the minimart, or that lovely row of shops down off the roundabout, then, no. My life was just fine, thanks.