I came across, or round, a set of grey stone pillars, part ruins of a monastery of sorts, part columns that had simply chosen to stand in isolation. They were meant to bound a regular sward, but the grass was ragged and brown, and had slipped away in all directions like something that had melted in the sun. It was true, anyway: fifteen years had passed, and I had done nothing to keep their memory green, preferring to deny that anything had been there in the first place. Despite this, the cloister was otherwise much as it had ever been, when I used to enter it daily to take my place at the scholars' table for dinner.

The vaulted dining hall was dark, but that was nothing new. The lights were too small, or too high, and since we all wore charcoal suits anyway, it was hard to escape the thought we were just a hoard of shadows struggling together in the gloom. The air was suddenly still; there was a dignified "Benedictas benedicat," closely followed by the thunder of feet and the rattle and squeak of benches as everyone sat down to eat.

I tried to find my table, but I could not. I recognised a few faces; others I felt I should have recognised. But the ones I recognised were only generic faces that never belonged to anyone in particular, and were passed around like a handshake or a lame joke; maybe I was closer, ultimately, to the ones I only recognised in part, which put into my mind the image of spilt gold. In them, at least, I detected either the children or the close kin of my former classmates.

"You've gone before me, then," I said, wondering what I meant by it. But no one would help me reach inside to discover. The students were sombre and distant, doubtless busy with their own thoughts. Or maybe it was just out of etiquette that they chose not to answer me. Fifteen years had passed, and now I was a stranger to them all, for those fifteen years had been so singularly eventless that I could not find a single detail within them with which the protracted past about me could identify.

Then there was a movement, just ahead of me. It was an ugly, pale-faced girl, though she was too timid to turn to face me. Instead she looked down and a little to one side, a motion that parted her lips, or made the fact that they were parted apparent to me; at the back of my mind already I could smell the harmless yet unpleasant odour of the inside of her mouth. Her ugliness seemed to stream toward it, taking her saliva for a pivot; yet, at the same time, it also streamed forward and outward from it, through her flesh, as though it simultaneously celebrated an independent life outside the body that gave it incarnation. She had all her frail anaemic life before her, I found myself reflecting, and suddenly I envied her this ugliness, which was so inextricably bound to the life-force within her that the two might almost have been metonyms for one another.

She made a half-hearted attempt to find a space for me at her table; the upper part of her torso turned desultorily a few degrees to the left and then to the right again, searching for something within her narrow field of vision. Then her shoulders raised themselves slightly in a clumsy gesture of appeal to no one in particular, as if she herself questioned her right to intercede on anyone’s behalf. She was with the musicians anyway, I realised; she was with the table of musicians, and I did not belong there; I did not belong with them. Even as the idea presented itself, the words pulled her away regretfully, trussing the whole lot of them together with their tubas and circumscribing and silencing them all, like a sheet of glass.

So I stood up instead against the exposed stone of the wall behind me, joining a general detritus of late arrivals. Looking from side to side, I was struck by the neutral, vaguely reflective humility we seemed to transmit as a whole. Like the musicians, we were also grouped and circumscribed, but in a different way. We were the belated, meaning that we had arrived late, but not too late to be there at all. However, any sense of comradeship ended there, since every way of being late is different and exceptional, and is not an experience that can be shared. I might as soon have posed for a photograph with a crowd of tourists on a day out to the capital.

Now the diners were probably sitting down. My mind, either way, had dismissed them. I was not hungry, anyway; I had only come back to try to rediscover something familiar, to seek some kind of absolution or encouragement from someone who might have aged with me, but who had not yet gone away, as I had done. I wanted to be back there again, at the beginning, or at least know that by returning to this place I could somehow reclaim the person I had been before I went away, so that, by a sleight of hand or movement of my mind, everything of the past fifteen years could be escaped, redeemed, forgiven.

Now I sought out my old room; I mounted the linoleum-clad stairs, unsurprised to find them just the same; even the metal insteps were still there, their dull metal percussed in places by the kick or scrape of shoes. As I did so, I experienced again the gloomy lack of light, the lonely, wandering walls with their thick and lifeless paint. I walked down the memory of the red corridor between them, feeling its day-or-night coldness against my bare feet, past the board which would always shift with a sound, near the window whose view had been fixed in the stonemason's yard, describing a deserted cloister with gas lamps, and over which, once, a girl I knew had walked slowly with ringing heels from one end to the other - an image whose recollection makes the present impossible, since it could only have acquired its extraordinary emotional resonance if I were not in fact free to return at all.

Finally I had reached the room, though I knew it would be my legacy there to find a heap-smudge of a man slouched at forty-five degrees on my bed, like a half-load sloughed from a tail-gate. He would turn lazily, as if he didn’t really care who I or anyone was. Nevertheless, eventually, he would gather himself up into an improbably tall man; but somehow, for all his materiality, he would remain part and parcel of the greyness of the room, woven out of the same grey wool as the tuba players at the dinner table, and overlooked by the same chilly November evening beyond the small windows. In this, perhaps, history reversed itself, since it was I who had been assigned the room, and only later he that had joined me. But then I realised it was simply that I had understayed my welcome, so that he could overstay his. Over there was his big bag of fencing gear, and even the smell of his sweat hadn’t changed. Balanced on the window sill, my little Cymru coffee cup was steaming still, and I opened the window to hear the thwack of baseball bats echoing across the green. If only he would go away then perhaps I could think something or feel something that I needed from this place, but I saw that he had no intention ever of vacating my room, his career sprawled forever on the bed behind me, as if crippled by its sheer potentiality.

"It doesn't matter where anything settles in your life," my house-master whispered - a man to whom I had never looked for encouragement, and who I strongly suspected had no real intention of offering it now, either. "It doesn't matter, because, while the present may change, your experience of it always remains the same. There are no better or worse times, and your options are always exactly as long as the different pieces of string you use to measure them. Yesterday's nostalgia is the same as tomorrow's nostalgia, and the thud of a pneumatic drill is no more inopportune than the cry of a nightingale out of place."

I might have blocked my ears, but I knew all it would take was a man throwing his leg over the saddle of a bicycle and starting to ride a little crookedly; all it would take was that motion, the momentary uneasiness of two skewed wheels undecided about their final orientation, and it would all have come out anyway. Even if he had never opened his mouth, I would have drawn the self-same conclusion, namely that I would not be absolved; I would carry nothing away; and, because I hadn’t returned, I would be obliged, like a sleepwalker, to keep on returning, until the impossible day my past can make peace with my present and set me free.