The game could not begin without a ball, and, running up the steps to look for one, I suddenly found myself in the assembly room - although this should hardly have surprised me, since, the more I reflected upon it, the easier it became to remember that this staircase had always existed, and there was no reason it should have carried me anywhere but here. In front of me, set back a little from the wide, stone entrance and therefore already absorbed in the general gloominess of the foyer, a slim, smartly dressed Hispanic woman was in attendance, and immediately I recognised one of the lynchpins both of the school and of its way of life. While her figure and complexion failed to deny that fifteen years had passed, they also had more important things to do than draw attention to it, and when she started to speak I experienced again the measured eloquence of a calm and competent soul shackled with unshakeable loyalty to a cause.

"I'm afraid you aren't allowed here, sir," she said with absolute authority, reaching me in a single, smooth motion. "It isn't possible to continue further, here."

"I used to come here, a long time ago; I don't think you would remember me ..." I began, for I felt I had a better explanation than most whom she might challenge, even if I didn't intend to try her patience and demand any particular concession on this count.

"Of course I remember you, Mr Hildyard," she said softly and almost intimately, dropping her eyes, as though she and I had shared some secret, but I didn't know what it was. So I asked if she could lend me a ball, and, seeming to find nothing unusual in the request, she then started to name variants of squash balls, none of which I understood, and the more she spoke the further I realised I had journeyed in the wrong direction, and even if I ran every day back the way I had come, I would not regain the strength and sanity of that past within my lifetime. In her world, squash meant something; it represented a scale of values she understood, and it was my chance decision, fifteen years later, to play a game of squash again that had caused this necessary collision of worlds in which the flight of steps that led to the locker room and the showers now led, with inexorable logic, to the place where I used to change my clothes and the woman who had first taught me that game. Finally, seeing that I could not answer her questions, and with that reserve peculiar to her class and situation, she reached into her pocket and silently handed me what I wanted.

And so I turned and descended again the stone steps that led back into the ever new, ever distant future in which I had made my home. Nothing further could be achieved here, I reflected, for even if I tried to tell her about that place, she would only have shaken her head, as if I had spoken out of turn or made some impropriety. Nothing would ever change; it was essential to her sense of identity, and if anything did change, then she would have been mistaken, and therefore she could never have existed in the first place. I, meanwhile, had changed; but I meant nothing, for, if no chains held me fast, then it was the harbour itself that dismissed me. Nevertheless, remembering the way she had dropped her eyes, I half wondered if, somewhere within the equal reverence she seemed at that moment to accord both the past and present, she could find a place for me once again.