I drift out of a heavy drug-induced sleep. ‘Where’s the woman in the other bed gone?’

‘Who?’ the brown-haired nurse says absently, preoccupied by a syringe she’s about to jab me with.

‘The woman in the other bed.’ The bed is neatly made and empty.

The nurse furrows her brow. ‘There hasn’t been anybody in that bed.’

‘I’ve seen you taking her temperature and talking to her.’

‘Me?’ the nurse laughs.

She frowns. ‘April twenty-third, I think.’

‘April twenty-third?’ Can I really have lost that much time? ‘Really?’

‘I know,’ she says with a smile, ‘we lost you for a couple of weeks there, didn’t we?’ She fills up the water jug on my bedside locker, smoothes the sheets and looks at my chart and says, ‘That’s right – you came on the first of April, that’s over three weeks you’ve been here now.’

‘The first of April?’ I repeat, puzzled, but she’s gone and I’m soon asleep again. I think I must be catching up on all the sleep I’ve been deprived of over the years. Or maybe I’m turning into a cat.

When I wake up there’s a student doctor investigating my chart and trying to look as if he knows what he’s doing. He smiles encouragingly when he sees I’m awake. ‘What year is it?’ – a familiar question somehow – I mumble at him. He looks disconcerted, ‘1960.’

‘April twenty-third, 1960?’

‘Yes.’

It’s still happening then. Or is it? I fall asleep, I just cannot keep my eyes open.

‘How did I get here?’ I ask a staff nurse when she brings me my lunch.

‘In an ambulance.’

‘A tree fell on you.’

‘A tree fell on me?’

‘That old elder by your back door, it was rotten and your dad was chopping it down. It fell the wrong way or something. It was really windy.’

‘It was your birthday too,’ Carmen adds sympathetically, trying to inhale a sweet cigarette.

‘They thought you were going to die,’ Eunice carries on, ‘they had to give you the kiss of life.’

‘Better than the kiss of death,’ Carmen says, nodding her head sagely.

‘An ambulanceman?’

‘No, Debbie.’

‘Debbie?’

‘Debbie.’

Mr Rice, on the other hand, in this alternative version of events, is still with us, as is the Dog (‘He appeared on the doorstep one day,’ Charles says, so that much is the same). The baby, however, is non-existent. Where has it gone to? (Where did it come from?)

Eunice shrugs, ‘Who knows? The police say it happens all the time. People just walking out of their lives.’ And so it does.

It’s as if reality is the same, and yet … not the same. So, it was my comatose brain that played tricks on me, not time? Yes, says the neurologist. Although, actually – as Vinny kindly informs me – I have many of the symptoms of fly agaric poisoning, especially the hallucinations and the death-like sleep. Gey queer, as Mrs Baxter would say.

I suppose reality is a relative kind of thing, like time. Maybe there can be more than one version of reality – what you see depends on where you’re standing. Take Mr Baxter’s death, for example, perhaps there are other versions. Imagine—

At first Mrs Baxter couldn’t take it in, how could Daddy do such a thing? But then something in her, a little voice, a tiny whisper, said – yes, this is just what Daddy would do.

Mrs Baxter would like to cut her throat in the middle of Glebelands’ market square so that everyone can see how she’s failed to protect poor wee Audrey, see what a bad mother she’s been. But not as bad a mother as he’s been a father.

Audrey is all tucked up in bed now, like a small child, with blankets and hot-water bottles and aspirin and Mrs Baxter’s in the kitchen making Daddy’s tea. His favourite – mushroom soup. She makes Daddy’s soup with a lot of care, slicing the onions into moons and stirring them round and round in the frothing yellow butter. The fragrance of onions and butter filling the kitchen, drifting out of the open door into the April garden. From the cooker she can see the lilac outside the window, its purple heads still hanging wet and heavy from this morning’s shower of rain.

When the new-moon onions are soft and yellow Mrs Baxter adds the mushrooms, little cultivated buttons that she’s wiped and chopped in quarters. When they’re all nicely coated in butter she adds the big flat horse-field mushrooms that grow in the corner of the Lady Oak field, like huge gilled plates, their dark brown the colour of the earth. She stirs the fleshy slices around until they begin to wilt a little and then she adds the olive-coloured fungi that also grow in the field but are not nearly so common – a treat for Daddy, for this is Mrs Baxter’s special recipe for mushroom soup.

As she stirs and stirs Mrs Baxter thinks about Audrey upstairs in her child’s bed and thinks of Daddy creeping into that bed. Then she puts some water in the pan, not too much, and salts it with tears and sprinkles in pepper. Then she puts the lid on and leaves it to simmer.

When the soup is cooked, Mrs Baxter whirrs it around in the liquidizer attachment on her Kenwood, taking each pureéed batch of soup and placing it in a nice clean pot. And then when all the soup is smooth she adds some sherry (‘just a wee drappy’) and half a pint of cream, then leaves it to keep warm on the stove. This is such a special soup that Mrs Baxter makes crouûtons, crisp golden cubes that she scatters on top of the bowl of soup, along with a handful of parsley.

‘Mm,’ says Mr Baxter, coming into the kitchen and taking off his bicycle clips, ‘that smells good.’ Mrs Baxter is so unused to getting compliments from Mr Baxter that she blushes.

Mr Baxter enjoys his soup. He eats alone at the dining-room table, listening to the six o’clock news on the radio. After his soup Mrs Baxter serves him lamb chops and mashed potatoes and minted peas and for his pudding a golden, steaming, syrup sponge-pudding in a sea of yellow Bird’s custard.

‘Why aren’t you eating?’ he asks her and she says that she’ll get a bite to eat later because she’s had one of her headaches all day and is ‘fair-scunnered’. Daddy doesn’t express any sympathy, or even interest.

Mrs Baxter takes some sponge-pudding and custard up to Audrey in her bedroom and feeds it to her like she did when Audrey was a baby. Then she gives her a mug of hot milk and two of her sleeping tablets.

It is growing dark by this time and Mr Baxter has gone upstairs to his study to do some marking.

Mrs Baxter washes up all the pots and pans, scouring them with bleach and wire-wool and then cleans the kitchen, wiping everything down with hot water and Flash. Then she gives the cat a saucer of milk and sits at the kitchen table and has a wee cuppie.

By this time she can hear Mr Baxter groaning in agony, vomiting (‘boaking’) in the upstairs toilet. She thinks she might just have another cup of tea before she goes upstairs to see how he’s doing. He’s not doing very well – writhing in agony on the floor of his study, his face a dreadful colour, his muscles in spasm. He splutters something unintelligible and Mrs Baxter kneels down on the carpet to hear him better. ‘What’s that, Daddy?’ He seems to be querying what has happened to him and Mrs Baxter explains, very gently, that it must be the Death Caps having an effect.

Mr Baxter isn’t going to get better, there is no antidote to Mrs Baxter’s special soup, so she takes his well-oiled service revolver from the secret drawer of his desk and puts him out of his misery. The same happened to their old cat, the vet had to put him down after he’d eaten rat poison. Mrs Baxter always suspected that it was Daddy who put the rat poison down.

The noise from the gun is tremendous, a crack that echoes around the streets of trees. Mrs Baxter wipes the gun clean and puts Daddy’s fingers round it and then lets it drop to the floor. Poor Audrey is woken from her drugged sleep by the report of the gun and comes in the room and sees Daddy lying in a pool of his own blood. She doesn’t flinch.

Trevor Randall, the young policeman who is first on the scene, used to go to Mr Baxter’s school. Mr Baxter used to beat Trevor a great deal with his strap and Trevor has no kind feelings about him. ‘Suicide then,’ he says.

‘Suicide,’ says the coroner. It was so obvious that Mr Baxter had died because he’d lost his head that no-one ever looked at the contents of his stomach. Real right justice. Done.

It’s like Alice waking up and finding she dreamt the looking-glass world. It is difficult to believe that all those things that seemed so real have not happened. They felt real then, they feel real now. Appearances can be very deceptive.

She turns to look at me and the milk boils over. I snatch the pan off the cooker and turn off the gas. Debbie clutches her stomach and gasps. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask her more urgently. ‘Have you got a pain?’ She nods her head and grimaces. I coax her through to the living-room and she sits heavily on the sofa.

‘God, that was horrible,’ she says.

‘But you’re all right now? Shall I fetch Gordon?’

‘Oh no, don’t be silly,’ she says, ‘I’m fine, I just –’ She breaks off and gives a little scream, clutching herself round the middle. ‘I’ll call the doctor,’ I say hastily. Her eyes open so wide that they look almost big, she takes a huge breath of air and chokes on the word ‘No!’

‘No?’

‘No,’ she grunts, ‘s’too late.’

‘Too late for what?’ But she’s kneeling on the carpet making strange gestures at me and I shout for Vinny to come. ‘Something’s wrong with Debbie,’ I tell her, ‘get the doctor!’ Debbie screams again, not a high-pitched noise but a kind of groan that comes from some primitive place she didn’t know existed inside her.

She’s right, it’s too late, the baby’s head has already appeared. ‘Bloody hell,’ Vinny says succinctly. ‘Where did that come from?’

Vinny, more the midwife from hell than Queen Mab, gets down on the floor with Debbie while I rush and put the kettle on because we all know that’s what you’re supposed to do.

Debbie grunts and huffs and puffs and nearly blows Vinny down in her effort to give birth to this sudden child. The Dog stands by, head cocked to express interest, ears pricked to show it’s ready to help if necessary.

Vinny has a skirmish trying to get her to lie on her back but Debbie screams, ‘Not bloody likely!’ between two particularly violent contractions and then suddenly the baby shoots out and is caught – to her everlasting surprise – by Vinny. Vinny gets the first yell in, ahead of the baby and Debbie asks, quite calmly, for her dressmaking shears and with one confident ssslicing of blades sets the baby free of her. ‘Has that kettle boiled?’ she asks me impatiently. ‘I’m dying for a cup of tea.’

‘Your sister,’ Vinny says, quite tenderized by so much emotional trauma and hands me the scrap of baby, wrapped now in a towel.

‘Your sister,’ I say to Charles who comes home from work at that moment and takes the baby from me automatically but then nearly drops it. ‘Sister?’ he says, utterly baffled. Debbie chuckles and Vinny lights up a cigarette and I have to explain to him. Gordon comes home from work and Charles passes on the parcel, saying, ‘Your daughter.’ Gordon’s mouth drops open, ‘My what?’ and I jump up and explain to him that it’s not me, shrunk and gone backward in time but a whole new surprise Fairfax. ‘Just like that?’ he murmurs in amazement.

The baby already sprouts a crest of soft red-gold hair from its ‘Fontanelle’, I tell Charles knowledgeably.

‘Fancy that,’ Debbie says, ‘she’s got Charles’ hair. Someone in your family must have been red-headed, I wonder who?’

‘It must be a recessive gene,’ Gordon says quietly, as if this idea makes him sad somehow.

Apart from the red hair there are few similarities between this baby and the prototype doorstep baby. We call the baby Renee.

I stand up. If I look very closely at the trunk of the tree I can make out the famous faint initials of ‘WS’. I embrace the Lady Oak like a lover, feel its bark, its age, its electricity. I close my eyes and kiss the faded initials. What if it really was Shakespeare himself who carved his name here? What if we had both touched, embraced, admired, this same tree.

I call the Dog, we must be away – before the fairy king and queen make their appearance in the field. ‘Ah, Isobel,’ Mr Primrose says, striding towards me, his ass’s head under his arm, ‘come to watch the performance?’ What fools these mortals be.

The sun setting behind the Lady Oak bathes the green in gold. This is an ideal thing. Not a real thing. I sigh and turn away.

He’s there. He’s lying on my bed, one cynical, quizzical eyebrow raised at me, a lopsided smile as he watches me. I know him. I’ve always known him. Spaniel eyes and chestnut hair. Not yet bald, slightly greasy. Leather boots. Doublet and hose and rather grubby linen. I walk over to the bed and sit on the edge, next to where he is sprawled. It’s very warm in this room, under the eaves. There is a strange quality to the air … like magic, only less real.

I have only one question for him. ‘It is all about death, isn’t it?’ I say to him. He’s chewing a stalk of grass. A wood-pigeon on the dragon-scale slates above our heads gives a soft trill. He throws his head back and laughs. His breath smells of liquorice and he doesn’t answer, only extends an arm towards me. ‘And the end of the world, and time’s thievish progress?’ I persist, but he just shrugs.

If I take his hand will I go beyond time for ever? His forearm is curved and manly, a dusting of dark auburn hair. His fingernails are dirty.

The only sound is that of opalescent fairy wings, beating in the dark air and the sweeping of the tiny fairy brooms, cleansing our house. I take his hand. I let him pull me down next to him. I let him kiss me. He tastes of cloves. We melt into one and time collapses.

Only the imagination can embrace the impossible – the golden mountain, the fire-breathing dragon, the happy ending.