Absolutely nothing. Nothing until he suddenly ‘woke up’, about ten minutes ago on Hunstanton station – ‘woke up’ to find himself looking into the eyes of the man who was clipping his ticket, and hearing the fearful hissing noise of that engine.

Good God – he had been ‘out’ for twenty-four hours! – from about three o’clock on Christmas afternoon to three o’clock on Boxing Day. This was awful. Something ought to be done about it. He ought to go and see a doctor or something.

What was he thinking about all that time – what was he doing? That was the point – what was he doing? It was terrifying – not to know what you thought or did for twenty-four hours. A day out of your life! He could be terrified now, he could let himself be terrified – but the thing had been happening so often recently that it had lost its terrors, and he had too many other worries. He had Netta to worry about. That was one thing about Netta – you couldn’t worry about much else.

But, really, it was awful – he ought to do something about it. Imagine it – wandering about like an automaton, a dead person, another person, a person who wasn’t you, for twenty-four hours at a stretch! And when you woke up not the minutest inkling of what the other person had been thinking or doing. You might have done anything. You might, for all you knew, have got madly drunk. You might have had a fight, and got into trouble. You might have made friends or enemies you knew nothing about. You might have got off with a girl, and arranged to meet her. You might, in some mad lark, have stolen something from a shop. You might have committed assault. You might have done something dreadful in public. You might, for all you knew, be a criminal maniac. You might have murdered your aunt!

On the other hand it was pretty obvious that you were not a criminal maniac – and that you had not had a fight, or done anything dreadful in public, or murdered your aunt. For if you had people would have stopped you, and you would not be sitting comfortably in a third-class carriage on your way back to London. And that went for all the other times in the near and distant past – all the ‘dead’ moods you had had ever since they had begun. You had never been arrested so far, you had never shown any signs of having been in a fight, and none of your relations and friends had been murdered!

Your friends and relations, in fact (though they certainly recognized and sometimes chaffed you for your ‘dead’ or ‘dumb’ moods), had never accused you of doing anything in the slightest way abnormal: nor had anyone whom you didn’t know ever claimed to know you.

It was, indeed, abundantly clear from all the evidence that when the shutter was down he behaved like a perfectly reasonable, if somewhat taciturn, human being. How else could he have got to the station? How else could he have packed his bag – and put The Bar 20 Rides Again on top so that he could take it out to read in the train? How could he have bought his ticket – known where he was going? No – there was nothing to worry about. He had thought out all this before, and he had always known there was nothing to worry about.

It just was that he wished to God he could remember what he had been doing and what he had been thinking.

Chapter Four

The train, rattling in gentle unison with his thoughts as it slid over the surface of the cold, flat, Boxing-Day bungalow-land of this portion of the coast, began to slow down, and then stopped at its first stop, Heacham.

There was a gloomy pause. Then the handle of his door was rudely and ruthlessly seized, and a cold woman, seeming to bring with her all the pain and bleakness of the Norfolk winter outside, violated his centrally-heated thought-closet.

She was apparently of the servant class, and as soon as she had entered she lowered the window and began talking volubly to a friend on the platform, who had come to see her off. This woman on the platform wore no hat, he noticed, in spite of the cold; but instead of that she wore a hair-net over her hair. He looked at this hair-net with dull misery in his heart. Even after the train had started, and the woman had vanished, he retained a picture of the hair-net, and wondered why it made him miserable, why he hated the woman for wearing it, why he obscurely felt she had been giving him cause for resentment.

Net… It dawned on him. Of course, that was it. Net.