Francis ran the cleaver rapidly back and forth across the heap of dried liberty caps, chopping them into a coarse powder, which he then scraped on to the parchment paper next to the board. At a time when his thoughts were so often drawn to the vast and sometimes disturbing implications of fatherhood, of turning a love affair into a family, it was soothing to be engaged in such a practical and precise task. After drying his harvest of magic mushrooms in racks and dicing them up, he would scoop the powder into gelatine capsules, so as to make the dose as stable as possible. Mixing them up was a good precaution as the psilocybin content of each mushroom ranged from one quarter per cent to three per cent and encapsulating them helped reduce the indigestion they often caused. His arms and wrists were beginning to ache now, and it was time to switch to the finickity but less strenuous job of loading the powder into its little capsule. He needed a free day to deal with the magic mushroom assembly line. It was time consuming, not entirely legal and, as with cooking, he preferred to be left alone to follow his own rhythm and do what came naturally to him. He always gave George and Emma a bag of mushrooms; it was their land, after all, and he never lost his sense of gratitude and elation at being embedded in the middle of their wilding project.
Olivia was away as usual working in Oxford and London. She could often reduce her absence to three or four nights, but they still had to spend the core of the week apart. Exactly how their child would fit in to her migratory life was still not clear. He suspected that he would quite often be left holding the baby for a few days. Whereas Olivia might have to be in college, or at the British Library, he was the flexibly employed naturalist, wandering around a beguiling rural setting, counting turtle doves and Purple Emperor cocoons, putting rings on the feet of migrating birds, recording nightingales and checking the health of trees and deer, Exmoor ponies and Tamworth pigs. Part of him loved the idea of bringing up a child in the middle of this surge of regeneration, but he was also worried about the drastic loss of solitude. There was a lot of hazy talk about what enthusiastic grandparents Lizzie and Martin were bound to be, but they would only be available at the weekends and that would mean going up to London and becoming annexed to the magnificent Carrs. He had grown to love and admire Olivia’s parents and yet there was something overpowering about their virtue and prosperity that strained his self-respect. He hadn’t complained about it, and in a sense it was perfectly natural and convenient, but Olivia’s decision to take their child to her big old home straight from the hospital, as if it were their child’s true home, before they all went down together to her small new home (and his only home), had pissed him off. Why couldn’t they go straight from the hospital to Willow Cottage and then, after a month or two, take the baby to meet its grandparents in their rambling old house? He was just saying – or rather, he wasn’t.
For the time being, he had the cottage to himself. He had his fading solitude, but not the mental freedom he associated with solitude. The trouble was that when he was alone these days his thoughts were dragged back to California. Although it was only six weeks ago, his memories of the visit had the improbable depth of childhood recollections, as if he had lived with them for decades and they had played a deep role in his formation. No doubt this had something to do with Big Sur’s precipitous Pacific landscape, and the clouds of Monarch butterflies and the smooth unfolding of the wilding project, and Hunter’s house, which seemed like a concrete fantasy, something he might have dreamt before finding out that it existed. Above all, though, it was Hope’s swimming pool that was pinned to his memory, like a beetle in a showcase, its black wings glinting with greens and petrol blues under a museum spotlight. He couldn’t stop remembering every moment and every sensation that had led up to his agonising moral triumph in that sulphurous water. Hope was hanging from his throat until he said, ‘I can’t do this; it’s just not fair’, and then she dropped him, as if she didn’t really mind either way, and swam off with a few firm strokes, changing the subject without a hint of reproach or regret. He was left to reproach himself, while regretting he had so little to reproach himself for. He had done nothing – or nothing much – except, it turned out, to surrender his sexual imagination to a woman he hadn’t even fucked, although she had been willing enough. He was on the moral high ground, but only in the way that a ‘zombie ant’, invaded by the Cordyceps fungus, is forced to climb into the canopy and, after biting involuntarily into a leaf, is consumed by the parasite, which drives a stalk through its host’s head to make a chimney for the dissemination of its spores. Francis was not an ant, of course, and the appropriation was not complete, but it sometimes took control of him at night, when he was not wearing his ethical armour or feeling his love for Olivia, but was almost entirely submerged in his unconscious, like a hippopotamus barely breaking the surface to breathe before returning to wallow in the silt and the reeds. He really must stop identifying with one non-human animal after another. He was a Sapiens, after all, and would regain mastery over his night mind – sooner or later.
Francis stopped loading the capsules abruptly, hoping to interrupt his obsessive recollections. He needed a walk, a cold, fast walk through the woods before it grew dark, which at this time of year would be in about two hours. He left the mushrooms behind, after putting the finished capsules into a Ziploc bag. As the world descended into catastrophe, the psychedelic renaissance had arrived just in time to catch its fall, thought Francis, with a half-smile, but also with the sense that there were dangerously few alternatives. Poets, the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’, were now the acknowledged casualties of literature; politicians seemed to be recruited exclusively from the locked wards of psychiatric hospitals, and protesters, in the absence of poets to write their scripts and politicians to legislate their demands, could only grow more strident and desperate as they vied for attention with the better funded organisations they were protesting against – Occupy Wall Street, for example, had not distracted Wall Street from its occupation. On the drive to San Francisco from Big Sur, Francis had seen a banner saying, ‘Fuck You and Your Corporate Pride’, without being able to catch whose corporate pride deserved to be fucked. Perhaps it was a universal denunciation. In any case, in the absence of poetry, politics and precise protest, there seemed to be little choice but to turn to psychedelics for a cure to a global malaise. Universities were now falling over each other to study the effects of psilocybin, and its therapeutic value for those suffering from chronic depression and destructive addictions was astonishing, far better than any manufactured compounds. How could a pharmaceutical company, messing about for the last few decades, hope to compete with the expertise of fungi, which had been luring animals to disperse their spores for millions of years? Not only were the results magnificent but, by all accounts, there was an unusual atmosphere of collaboration between the university departments focused on this study, as if they were being guided by the psilocybin to form mycorrhizal networks, to fuse and transfer information, to branch and explore without losing a sense of shared purpose and basic unity. As he put the new bag of capsules next to the many other bags in a cool, dim corner of the larder, Francis had to recognise that if there were ever a call to promote awe, universal goodwill and personal breakthrough in West Sussex, he was unusually well placed to help.
Outside, a thin veil of cloud bruised the sunlight. The air was chill and the ground firm after several days without rain. Francis decided to cut across the open ground to the woods and then curve back home along the northern edge of the estate. He walked through the familiar and yet enduringly strange English savannah that had emerged from the wilding of Howorth. When he reached the woods, he caught a glimpse of the neighbouring land through the tangled branches: huge monotonous fields of winter stubble waiting for a shower of nitrogen and phosphates and pesticides and fungicides and herbicides and a rise in temperature to turn them into huge fields of monotonous blonde wheat. Isolated from the rest of nature, it required ever larger prescriptions of fertiliser, like adrenalin shots in the heart of an overdose victim. As he made his way among the first few trees, Francis heard a commotion deeper in the wood, in the direction of the field he had just glimpsed; the sound of shaking and cracking branches. He wondered if one of the poachers who were attracted by Howorth’s abundant game had set a trap or wounded an animal with a crossbow. He pressed ahead towards the source of the disturbance and, after working his way around a thicket of brambles, came upon a full-grown fallow deer caught up in the wire of the boundary fence. Its thick neck was twisting back and forth, and its legs gouging the earth, pushing it deeper into the metal knot tangled around its palmated antlers. When it saw Francis, its frantic, glassy eyes stared at him with pure terror.
‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ said Francis, ‘I’m going to help you.’
He edged closer, trying to calm the tormented buck and to see if he could loosen the wire, but its agitation grew more violent as he approached.
‘I’ll be back,’ he said, hoping his tone would sound soothing, or that at least his absence would reduce the poor animal’s distress.
He crashed back through the narrow strip of woodland and started to run across the open ground to his house to fetch the wire cutters he kept in the garden shed. He was still jogging, but now short of breath, by the time he arrived in view of his cottage. Despite his longing to press on, he had to stop to take in what he thought he saw. Perhaps the urgency of his mission and the hours spent packing magic mushrooms had made him start to hallucinate, or perhaps Hope, in faded jeans and an elegant sheepskin jacket, was standing with her back to him writing on a notepad pressed to his front door, her slender wrist encircled by her silver and turquoise bracelet. It generated the fake nostalgia of recalling something that had never happened and seeming like an ancient token of his love, rather than an object he had seen for the first time at Hunter’s lunch.
‘What the hell?’ he said, more loudly than he had meant to.
‘Hey, Francis!’ said Hope, spinning around and smiling reproachfully. ‘What kind of a way is that to greet a friend?’
‘I haven’t got time for this,’ said Francis, starting up again, ‘there’s a deer entangled in the boundary fence. It’s in a blind panic. I have to set it free.’
He unlocked the shed and took the wire cutters from their hook.
‘I’ll help,’ said Hope.
‘That’s not something I associate you with,’ said Francis.
‘Let’s just save the deer and argue later, if you’re still in the mood,’ said Hope.
‘Fine,’ said Francis, in a tone that communicated the opposite.
When they arrived, the buck was further ensnarled in the wire, but also clearly demoralised by its futile struggle.
‘Let me,’ said Hope, putting a restraining hand on his arm. Her touch left him awash with chaotic desire.
‘Shh,’ she said, moving carefully towards the ensnared animal, pausing between each step. ‘Shh…’
‘Watch out,’ said Francis.
Hope did not respond but took a further step, stretching out her hand and placing it on the buck’s taut neck. She held it there with a quality of presence and compassion that Francis was surprised to see in a woman who he had tried to dismiss as a selfish opportunist. The deer moved its eyes, released from the fixity of relentless stress, and looked towards her, starting to breathe like a runner after a race, as if it knew that something was finished and that it could afford to rest. Without turning around, Hope reached back with her free arm and squeezed her hand twice in the air. As quietly as possible, Francis stepped forward and handed her the wire cutters. She turned parallel to the stag, leaning her body against it and continuing to soothe it with her voice while she cut the wires one by one. She left a single filament attached to the fence until she had unwound the metal tangled around its antlers and then, with one last cut, she released the buck entirely. It was by now so calm that it took a while to realise it was free. Hope gave it one last stroke along its back and then stepped gracefully away.
‘You can go now,’ she said.
Soon after she spoke, the buck turned abruptly, bobbed over a fallen branch and then, seeing an open path through the trees, put on a short burst of speed before pausing to look back at them. After this moment of connection, it set off again, cantering towards the open ground with its head held high.
‘That was amazing,’ said Francis.
‘Do you still want to argue?’ asked Hope, with a smile that made a perfect parenthesis for her lips, as if she had almost forgotten to mention how lovely they were.
‘Maybe,’ said Francis tenaciously. Now that the buck was free, he was free to be appalled that Hope had burst out of his guilty imagination and into his life, like a grand piano, whose faint music he had been overhearing from the flat above, crashing through the ceiling and landing at his feet.
‘Maybe has a “maybe not” hidden inside it,’ said Hope.
‘Does it?’ said Francis, kissing her lightly on the lips.
She pulled him forward and they started to kiss with more conviction.
‘So,’ said Francis, when they broke off, ‘how come you’re here? I still haven’t recovered from our last encounter.’
‘What’s taking you so long,’ said Hope, ‘regret that we didn’t make love?’
‘I regret that we didn’t; I would have regretted it if we had and, as it is, I regret that we came so close.’
‘You’re really into regret.’
‘In your case,’ said Francis, ‘totally.’ He felt her hands on his sides and imagined that he could understand the strange calm that had taken over the terrified deer when she touched him. Why did she have this tactile genius, and did she have a licence to use it?
‘Didn’t they teach you about non-attachment on the weekend workshop?’ said Hope.
‘They told me there would be exceptions – anything I liked or disliked, for instance. With the things I’m indifferent to, it’s a pushover.’
‘Indifference is not detachment,’ said Hope.
‘Yup, I heard that on the workshop as well,’ said Francis, ‘but don’t pretend for one moment that you want me to be non-attached. Or perhaps you do, once I’m inside you. Is that what you are: an itinerant guru of Ultimate Paradox?’
‘That’s me!’ said Hope. ‘Paradox Dakini.’ She made the whooshing sound of a superhero arriving on the scene of impending disaster.
‘Sure,’ said Francis wearily. ‘We should be heading back; it’s too late to have a proper walk.’
He started to lead the way through the fallen leaves and broken branches.
‘Seriously, though, how come you’re here?’ he asked.
‘I was going to email you, but George and Emma told me that you were off the grid, so they drew me a map.’
‘You’re staying with George and Emma,’ said Francis, struggling between alarm and excitement. For the past six weeks, he’d been thinking of Hope as an obscure torment on the far side of another continent, but now, if things went badly enough, she might end up in his bed in Willow Cottage. No, no, no, no; that was not going to happen, he insisted, noticing how hard he had to step on the brakes.
‘Yes, your name came up at breakfast and we all said what a coincidence it was. Or you could say that it was serendipity, or synchronicity—’
‘You have to pay extra for that sort of thing,’ Francis interrupted. ‘I travel in economy with the coincidences.’
‘What about destiny?’
‘That’s strictly for pilots.’
‘You must have some of those front-of-the-plane feelings,’ Hope insisted.
‘Maybe I do, but maybe I don’t trust them,’ said Francis. ‘Or perhaps I’m just being difficult.’
‘Oh, so, are we arguing after all? How exciting.’
They continued in silence for a while.
‘The thistles are doing well,’ said Francis, the naturalist, walking through the mass of dead brown stalks and sagging heads.
‘Really well,’ said Hope, as enthusiastically as she could.
‘So, how come your parents called you Hope?’ said Francis, playing with the front-door key in his jacket pocket and trying to counter his racing pulse with small talk.
‘They didn’t have any of their own, so they passed the problem on to me,’ she replied. ‘That’s why I’m in Europe. I’m slowly dragging myself to my mother’s house for Christmas. She has a whitewashed castle on a cliff in Portugal. The place is stunning; it’s just the owner who’s a problem. She’s a selfish bitch and the main reason I decided never to have children.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Francis, who was not concentrating properly. He really ought to tell Hope to go back to the Park and not visit him again.
‘Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?’ he asked.
‘I’d love that,’ said Hope.
He was reminded again of a zombie ant. Hope had clearly taken control of his language centres and made him say the opposite of what he intended. He must fight back.
‘Are those what I think they are?’ said Hope, stepping out of her shoes and discarding her jacket on the sofa.
‘Yes, if you think they’re magic mushrooms,’ said Francis.
‘Let’s take some now.’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ said Francis, tilting the guard to throw more logs on the fire, ‘but I have some for you to take back to George and Emma. I’ll go and get them and make some tea.’
‘It’s so cosy here,’ said Hope, sitting sideways across the armchair and stretching her feet towards the rekindled flames.
Francis went into the kitchen and filled the battered, cream-coloured kettle that had amused Olivia on her first visit, a relic with a thick nozzle and a whistle. He put it on the hob and lit the gas, feeling that his polite but cool replies to Hope showed that he was getting on top of the Cordyceps Californica that was attempting to commandeer his mind and body. He dropped a teabag into the pot and put it on the tray with two mugs. There was still time to make this into an affectionate but decisive de-escalation of their charged and potentially destructive relationship. They had kissed, it was true, but not to have kissed would have been frankly hostile. He could still police the riot she had started by touching him. It was difficult for him to be on the side of the truncheons, the shields and the tear gas, but it would be vandalism to be on any other side. He loved Olivia and her family, and he was preparing to love their child. On this occasion, being a man meant stepping firmly away from his virility.
While he was in the larder collecting the mushrooms for Hope to take back to the house, the kettle started to whistle faintly, and Francis hurried to take it off the stove before it reached its shrillest note. He poured the water into the teapot, put the Ziploc bag next to the milk jug, picked up the tray and walked resolutely into the living room.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he said, standing in the doorway, ‘put your clothes back on.’
‘What?’ said Hope. ‘It’s not like you haven’t seen me naked before.’
‘I’ve almost only seen you naked,’ said Francis, ‘that’s why it would be refreshing to talk to you when you were wearing something – other than that bracelet.’
‘I never take this off,’ said Hope.
‘How restrained of you,’ said Francis. ‘I wish you took the same approach to your underwear.’
‘It was given to me by the only man I ever loved,’ said Hope, sitting up and hugging her knees.
‘What happened to him?’ asked Francis, trying not to look at her and taking inordinately long to put the tray down on the table. ‘Did he catch a chill snowboarding in the nude?’
‘He drowned,’ said Hope.
‘Oh, okay, well, I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Francis, feeling unjustly caught out.
‘That’s why I’m making a fool of myself chasing after you,’ said Hope. ‘I’ve been feeling numb for the last four years – until we met.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Francis, ‘you can’t do that.’
‘Do what? Tell the truth?’
‘No, put that on me.’
‘Don’t you find me attractive?’
‘Oh, fuck off. You know I do. That’s why you’ve got to go. I can’t believe you’re sitting there naked, fishing for compliments!’
Francis dropped the bag of mushrooms on the sofa in front of Hope.
‘I’m going to go upstairs and wait to hear the door close behind you.’
He leant over and kissed her on the forehead.
‘I’ll see you at Hunter’s party,’ said Hope.
‘Oh, Christ, are you going to that as well?’ said Francis.
‘I promise to behave,’ said Hope.
Francis gave her a final, despairing look and turned to leave the room.