Annie’s voice was very warm when I called. I had been a co-conspirator for her in younger days, encouraging small moments of revolution, of counter-conventional thinking, and I had as is appropriate in a good grandfather been a source of forbidden sweets. I had drawn pictures for her—the last residue of my old life, cartoon dachshunds and sometimes, in extremis, images from her more threatening nightmares made kindly by the light of day, and by my conviction that any beast from the realm of sleep can be made a guardian if one works hard enough at the task. Then she had been away at university and in her first jobs, then working terribly hard to set up her company, so that for six years we had been nodding acquaintances only, however warm.