That glass box inside which Steve Smith does his work is built from three dimensions of oblivion. His concentration shuts out other people, so he is ferociously alone. With nobody outside, he is unusually candid in his mannerisms, so that at times we feel we are spying on an uninhibited, obsessive child shadow-batting in his bedroom. The third dimension is forgetting time, both past and future, no matter how traumatic or worrying.

When a fast bouncer from Jofra Archer hit him in the neck at Lord's on Saturday, Smith went into a momentary twilight zone. His mime artistry, which sparks so much fascination, became for a few seconds a horror show. His head flung back and he dropped, limp, to the turf. He went down with the expressiveness that marks all his actions on a cricket field. This time it expressed the purest fear of a young man in the instant of wondering if this is when he dies.

Several of the Australian squad were at the Sydney Cricket Ground on 25 November 2014, the day a cricket ball killed Phillip Hughes. Matthew Wade, who wasn't there, wears Hughes's face on his skin. The various masks these men must don to keep on playing cricket can only come at some unknown, delayed personal cost.

Smith has never been as eloquent or open on the subject of Hughes' death as he was in that split-second on Saturday afternoon. The airwaves, and the ground, fell silent. Lord's was certainly no place for the faint-hearted, and the faint-hearted, who might otherwise be called intelligent and sensitive to the miracle of life, might well have called the game off. A centimetre either side? Smith's return to Test cricket has had something uncanny, other-worldly about it. Was this to be how it ended? It doesn't bear thinking about.