A long time ago, at a dinner party in a house with harbour views, I found myself sitting next to a man who turned out to be a psychiatrist. It was the first formal dinner party I had been to, the men in suits, the women, even me, in expensive dresses and the table set with three knives, one for fish. The man I had come with, who I would shortly marry, was seated on the other side of the table, at the far end. From time to time he would glance up and smile quickly and reassuringly, but from where I was sitting I could barely even hear his voice above the others. I did not know which wine glass to use. I did not know what to drink. The host, who was tall and tanned and looked as if he played tennis, offered me a selection of whites, and I could feel my mouth open and close two or three times, fishlike, before the man beside me, who was balding with a reddish face, suggested the Chablis. And I said ‘Righto’ and reached for a glass, which turned out of course to be the wrong one. The psychiatrist was there because he was married to a paediatric anaesthetist, like half the people at the table I supposed—like me, almost—and although he looked, I thought, puffy and old, I realised after a while that he probably felt as out of place as I did and started to like him a little.

He was a good listener. He asked me about my job, so I told him about the business my friend Emma had set up (where I had met Michael) publishing medical books for the non-medical public, and about working there as a book editor, at least for now. He said that he was a great reader but tried to avoid medical books, and I said so did I and we laughed and talked for a while about novels and then the role of fiction, which he said was to remind people of things they did not know they had forgotten.

Then the conversation turned inevitably back to anaesthesia. It was the host’s birthday so there was a speech and doubtless a lot of hospital jokes, and while the cake was being cut the psychiatrist said that occasionally his wife referred a patient on to him; if they had not coped well with the general anaesthetic, for example, or had come back to her later as they sometimes did, complaining of anxiety or sleeplessness.

Everyone had started to stand now, pushing back their chairs, heading to the balcony for champagne and cigarettes. The psychiatrist put his hands on the table as if to push himself up, then sank back again.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘you could take any of the people in this room and, if they were suitable subjects, with a very simple procedure you could take them back so they could recall with remarkable clarity events that they had no idea they still remembered.

‘Take Brian over there,’ he said, nodding towards the host. ‘If he were a good subject, I could guide him back to his tenth birthday, or his eighth or his fifth.’

I wanted to ask him what made a good subject but, seeing Michael moving towards us, I laughed and said I wasn’t sure that I would want to remember any of my birthdays. Then we all walked out on to the balcony, Michael cupped his warm palm around the nape of my neck, and the psychiatrist dipped his head and wandered off, he said, to locate his wife.

I rang three weeks later and after reminding him of our conversation, asked if I could come and see him. He had a medium-sized room in a largish terrace in Potts Point. From his front window, peering between the slats of the wooden venetians, I could make out the grey bulk of the naval frigates in the harbour and the skeletal tip of the old finger wharf. The psychiatrist asked how he could help me and then directed me to a corduroy armchair opposite him. After explaining that we would start with a relaxation exercise, he asked me to close my eyes. It was all very simple and less fraught than I had expected. He was friendly but unobtrusive; his voice, which at the party had seemed almost wheezy, was in this room calm and solid.

At the end, he counted backwards from five, like in the movies. When I opened my eyes all I could see was dust revolving slowly in the slatted afternoon light.

‘How was that?’ he asked.

I told him it had been, as he had indicated, remarkably straightforward: like watching a film I had seen before, but so long ago I had forgotten the plot. ‘Enthralling but unsurprising,’ I said and started to cry.

The psychiatrist said I was a good subject for hypnosis and that perhaps I might want to come back and talk to him again. I said I would think about it, but in the end I didn’t. It was just the shock, I told myself later, of having found a whole day curled inside me, gleaming and wet like a child.