Looking out from the window of his apartment in St James’s Place, Hunter was filled with a hazy sense of depression, remembering how many times he had walked to school from his parents’ flat in Mount Street, across Constitution Hill, which he could see through the leafless plane trees, its rain-soaked paths hurried along today by office workers, tramps, civil servants, tourists and, for all he knew, Westminster School children on their way to the morning service ‘Up Abbey’, or to double Chemistry, or to an expulsion interview with the Headmaster – he had managed to clock up three of those during his chequered adolescence. He hadn’t thought of Westminster Abbey for a long time, although for five years he had gone there six times a week. He could still remember the chandeliers that hung by cords nearly invisible in the dimness of the morning service. They looked like glass bombs pointing down on the congregation, promising an explosion of light if they could only complete their descent to the stone floor a few feet below the tips of their scintillating bodies. Hunter would hide his most pressing homework inside his hymnal and pretend to sing while he tried to get on top of a Latin translation or a physics equation.
Sometimes, he used to take Queen’s Walk, along the eastern boundary of Green Park, and look up at the buildings whose gardens ran to the edge of the path, thinking that they would constitute an ultimate London address. Now he was on the other side of the wall, on the top floors and, later that day, he would be giving a launch party fifty yards away in Spencer House, which also overlooked the park. And yet, despite this over-attainment of his teenage grandiosity, he still didn’t feel as if he had arrived at his destination. On the contrary, a new destination that he couldn’t yet make out clearly seemed to lie in the opposite direction, and the journey there seemed to begin with this strange feeling of unspecific sadness. It certainly included sadness for the hunger that had driven him to vault over the garden wall and turn himself from a voyeuristic pedestrian into a disappointed resident. He wasn’t trudging his way to double Chemistry, but he did seem to be having some kind of history lesson: the history of how he had seen things at the time when he habitually walked back and forth across this park and the resulting mixture of revulsion and tenderness towards that former version of himself. At that time, he had been boiling with teenage conflicts which, although he would be fifty next year, didn’t seem to have simmered down until quite recently. The temperature had started to rise when he was fourteen, and by the time he was fifteen he had demanded that his parents let him become a weekly boarder at Westminster, so as to get away from their moronic company and their intrusive enquiries. He still often went back home between four and seven to raid the fridge, steal alcohol and money and take his mother’s Valium from the medicine cabinet. His school bedroom in Busby’s gave on to a flat roof that overlooked Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament; a view he still had, in a more remote form, from his roof terrace upstairs. In the summer term, on hot days, when he was in a ‘private study’, supposedly working on his A levels, he would spread blankets out on that terrace, and smoke joints, watching the hands of the world’s most famous clock take a staccato measure of his wasted time. The appearance of idleness was of great importance at Westminster (although an ‘essay crisis’ was allowed, since it issued from a collision between personal laziness and a universally resented authority). In reality, the cult of idleness had to be accompanied by secret bouts of hard work in order to stay in a school determined to keep its place at the top of the league table, delivering more students to the world’s best universities than any other in the country. Sometimes, Matron would stick her head out of his study window and ask, as swirls of hash and tobacco smoke dispersed over the division-bell area, if Hunter had been smoking.
‘Absolutely not, Matron,’ Hunter would say, barely able to disguise his annoyance at being interrupted while he admired the clouds that he was Rorschach testing through his wrap-around Ray-Bans.
His roof terrace also provided a fire escape for Busby’s, leading on to the high, sloping roof of Church House. There was a flat area at the top of a set of metal steps, girded on three sides by some simple rusting railings. Hunter found that it was just possible to hook his feet under the lowest bar of the railings and lean backwards along the slope of the roof, lying at a sixty-degree angle, held only by the pointed tips of his black leather boots. The challenge was to smoke an entire joint of Afghani Black in this position, against the steep, smooth slate tiles, with nothing, if he lost his foothold, to interrupt his headlong rush into Great College Street, more than a hundred feet below. Excited by this discovery, he invited his gang of reckless and clever friends to join him on the roof. After demonstrating the dare, he hoisted himself up, clasped the dirty and corroded iron bar and clambered back on to the flat area.
‘Who’s next?’ he asked, holding up a pre-rolled joint.
To his surprise, there were no takers. He had crossed the line from bravado to something unacceptably sinister that lay beyond the presumption of invulnerability among these self-professed daredevils, who never tired of driving cars over the speed limit without a licence, or jumping from high rocks into seas of uncertain depth, or swallowing random pills sold to them by strangers at festivals.
Where had his internal inhibition been? Hunter wondered, taking another mouthful of coffee from a broad thin cup and looking out on the dreary winter scene. Lucy was still in bed. There was no doubt that the strange flood of sadness he was feeling came not only from being in his rarely used London flat and experiencing it as a kind of umpire’s chair between his old home and his old school, between his past self and his present self, but also from living with Lucy’s illness, which had made him temper his megalomania and look seriously into the idea of moderation for the first time since his raging adolescence. At first, it had just seemed too tactless to wolf down cocaine in the presence of a woman who was abstaining from carbohydrates. Lucy was already lying upside down on a steep roof of undeserved misfortune and, far from wanting to hand her a joint, he wanted to lift her back to safety. He still wasn’t sure where his old appetite for high risk had come from. For a long time, he had imagined that his misguided audacity on that rooftop was an early sign, not yet fixed on its proper target, of the daring investment policies that had made him a billionaire with the Midas fund. When clients told him that the name of his fund was ‘kind of weird’, or even ‘inappropriate’, because King Midas had not been a happy bunny when he watched his food and his daughter turn to metal, Hunter would restrain himself from pointing out that he had absorbed all the Greek myths by the age of eight, and simply replied that he was the one taking ‘the Midas hit’ for them and that it was only their investments that would turn to gold. And in a sense, he had taken the Midas hit. Love of power and money had acted as a proxy for love itself, until Lucy had suggested a more direct path.
Although his phone was on silent, Hunter saw the screen light up and the word ‘Jade’ appear.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hey, Hunter!’ said Jade, as surprised and delighted as ever to speak to him. ‘I’m sorry to call you so early, but Cardinal Lagerfeld’s office is pushing for him to come to the party tonight. I wrote to you about it last week, but you didn’t get back to me.’
‘Did his parents call him Cardinal, like Ellington’s parents called him Duke, or did he call himself Cardinal, like Prince called himself Prince?’ asked Hunter.
‘No,’ said Jade, laughing a little more than necessary, ‘he’s a real Cardinal. He was involved with the Capo Santo deal.’
‘I thought that was the little Abbot who came to Soleil.’
‘Father Guido. It was, but the Cardinal was the guy with the legal team.’
‘They were a pain in the ass,’ said Hunter. ‘They almost wrecked the deal. Is Guido coming?’
‘You’d better believe it,’ said Jade, ‘he’s way excited. He’s coming by train, or donkey, or on foot, or on his knees, I’m not sure, but he left Assisi about a week ago.’
‘Okay, we’d better let Cardinal Ellington come along,’ said Hunter, ‘or it might be awkward for Guido. I love that guy and so does Lucy.’
‘Did she enjoy the immunotherapy meeting with Dr Seaford?’
‘It was great,’ said Hunter, ‘and it ties in with what she is doing at Epi, working with the natural defences of plants.’
‘Right!’ said Jade, who appeared to be even more passionate about Lucy’s longevity than Hunter, or Lucy herself. ‘It just makes so much sense, working with the body instead of against it.’
‘Sure,’ said Hunter, ‘bar the odd amputation, antibiotic, transplant, anti-viral medication…’
‘Okay, so maybe I was rushing ahead,’ said Jade.
‘I think I’m going to try one of the Capo Santo programs before Lucy wakes up,’ said Hunter. ‘I never got around to testing it out. I was too busy with Focus and Concentrate. I could really use a mystical experience this morning and I’d like to see whether Cardinal Ellington has ripped us off or not.’
‘Enjoy!’ said Jade, in her go-to-bed voice, just in case Hunter had forgotten that she was always there for him.
‘I suppose we must support Lucy,’ said Martin, ‘but this Brainwaves thing…’
‘I know, darling,’ said Lizzie. ‘Look on the bright side, there might be a placebo effect.’
‘Oh, there’ll certainly be lots of effects. We’ve been shooting electric currents through the brain for some time. I used to have to watch. And we’ve been surrendering parts of ourselves to technology ever since we hit someone with a rock rather than a fist. It’s the credulity and the voluptuousness of the surrender…’
‘What if it works?’ said Lizzie. ‘Maybe there are brain-wave patterns that induce desirable emotional states.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ said Martin. ‘There are already so many ways to confuse pleasure with well-being.’
‘You’re such a puritan,’ said Lizzie, resting her hand on Martin’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze.
He got up and they both cleared away their coffee cups and the rest of the breakfast things, carrying them over to the sink.
‘I thought there was something odd about Francis last night,’ said Martin.
‘Maybe he’s just staring into the crevasse of parenthood,’ said Lizzie.
‘Maybe,’ said Martin, ‘it was definitely a crevasse of some sort.’
Lizzie gave Martin a sympathetic but firm look, managing to show that she understood, but was opposed to further speculation. ‘I enjoyed meeting Hunter. It turns out he’s been in analysis for quite a while.’
‘Yes,’ said Martin, ‘he mentioned that to me as well.’
Martin had spoken to Hunter and Francis at some length over dinner about what Lizzie called ‘the bee in Martin’s bonnet’: the way in which psychotherapy as a treatment for the most serious mental illness was denigrated by those who thought that it belonged to some fanciful realm beyond the proper objects of scientific enquiry: brain mapping and biochemistry.
‘The fanciful realm of emotion,’ Martin had said to Hunter, ‘of symbolic language, psychological conditioning and cultural context…’
‘Hang on a moment,’ Hunter pretended to object, ‘culture is invited to the party, once it’s been atomised into “memes”, to give it the boost of making its particles rhyme with “genes”.’
‘Yes, the “meme” is probably the luckiest break for civilisation since the invention of gunpowder,’ said Martin. ‘The idea that emotion and psychological conditioning should be rigorously excluded from science or included only as far-flung provinces of a Celestial Empire whose capital is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN belongs in a satire by Swift but, sadly, he’s not around to write it.’
‘I agree,’ said Hunter, the agreeable guest. ‘Science is a subset of human nature and not the other way around. It has its own oppressive sociology of funding and peer review and publication and profit, and it shares all the emotions of rivalry, intuition, conformity, anxiety and generosity that inform every other field of activity.’
‘At the beginning of my career,’ said Martin, ‘I spent a good deal of time in hospitals run by psychiatrists who were more or less unsympathetic to my approach. One of the patients whose incarceration was renewed year after year under the Mental Health Act of 1959 complained that he had Christ-like nails driven through his feet, not through his hands but through his feet. The psychiatrist doing the rounds explained as patiently as he could – he was not a cruel man, but it was rather exasperatingly obvious – that this claim was proof that the patient was hallucinating and therefore that it was the correct decision to keep him in the hospital. The patient turned to me, knowing that I had an interest in the workings of the human mind, and said, “Some of these doctors don’t seem to have ever heard of a metaphor.”’
‘That’s hilarious and tragic,’ said Hunter.
‘Mainly tragic,’ said Martin.
‘Are you a fan of Ronald Laing’s?’
‘It was hard to be an unreserved fan of Laing’s,’ said Martin, ‘he was so incredibly drunk; but he did show moments of genius in analysing the dynamics running through schizophrenic families, and his wild and sometimes misguided experiments have to be understood in the context of the world I was just describing, where incarceration and sedation and at times barbaric treatment were seen as the only possibilities.’
Martin would have expected Francis to contribute more to the discussion, and it was during this exchange, when Francis was leaning in and nodding and appearing to listen, that Martin had noticed something uncharacteristically distant and inauthentic about his presence.
‘I suppose you’re wildly excited to be seeing Lucy tonight,’ said Lesley. ‘She must be even more tantalising now that she’s shacked up with a billionaire.’
‘My sister tells me she’s blissfully happy with Hunter,’ said Charlie.
‘My sister would probably have lied just to torment me,’ said Lesley.
‘I know,’ said Charlie, reminding himself that one day he really must stop understanding Lesley, and break up with her instead. ‘I’ll just have to settle for the kind of sister I have, my ally in all things.’
‘Anyway, it’s not Lucy’s happiness I’m concerned about,’ said Lesley, ‘it’s your fantasies of happiness at her side.’
‘I’m not so confused that a woman being delighted by her existing situation, as well as unavailable, acts as an aphrodisiac on me,’ said Charlie, pleased not to be strapped to a polygraph.
‘Oh, because you’re all so psychoanalysed,’ said Lesley. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You know this subject makes me irrational and you know that it’s only because I love you so much.’
‘Sure,’ said Charlie resignedly, ‘but could we have a go at enjoying this party tonight.’
‘My lips are sealed,’ said Lesley, zipping them up with her right hand and throwing away the key.
The world is information, and life is an arrangement of information that enables it to grow, replicate and achieve some level of interactive sensitivity with its environment – that much was obvious, at least to John MacDonald. Man was clearly destined to build machines far more intelligent than Homo sapiens. They would become the 3-D printers of the future, in turn building any further machine that the species desired, made out of an informed rearrangement of atoms, which, to all intents and purposes, were in limitless supply. Humanity would be released from the resource anxiety that afflicted men and women less visionary and scientifically rigorous than John. In the rudimentary stages of the escape from planet scarcity (or Planet Scaremongering, as he liked to call it), there might be some value in the kind of information gleaned by Brainwaves, but only while sentimentalists remained attached to the biological substrate that evolution had handed down, with a brain that had not wavered from its three-pound and fifteen-billion-nerve-cell format for over a hundred thousand years, despite the explosion in knowledge that had taken place during this period of cerebral stagnation. Although that seemed to show that the capacities of the mind were not entirely inherent to the design of the brain, and that the mind had been able to evolve without changing the physical basis of its existence, John had plans for upgrading that antique vehicle to something altogether more potent, while keeping it aligned with the interests of the human race – in so far as they could be imagined at this early stage of The Greatest Upgrade in the History of the Universe.
It was a frustrating but unavoidable fact that he would need a great deal of money to make that transition happen and it would involve a deeper collaboration with Digitas than he had originally envisaged, but he had a plan for getting what he needed later today at the launch party.
Father Guido could not resist lowering and raising the brown and purple blinds of his hotel room one more time, using the remote control on his bedside table, while doubting that this was an entirely proper pastime for a Franciscan Abbot. He was not simply giving in to the childish pleasure of playing with a toy that had never been in his possession before, since the act of raising the blind had become entangled in his imagination with the miraculous power of Our Lord when he raised Lazarus from the dead, although, Father Guido reminded himself, Christ had not raised and lowered Lazarus three times; in fact, he had rather bided his time before raising him at all. Guido placed the remote control firmly back where he had found it and promised himself not to touch it again until nightfall, which, at this time of year, was quite soon enough to soften his renunciation with the promise of an imminent return to pleasure.
Cardinal Lagerfeld was staying in the honoured guestroom of the Apostolic Nuncio, in his magnificent Residence overlooking Wimbledon Common. Father Guido had been given a room in the Hospitality Inn, around the corner, overlooking the car park of the Hospitality Inn. In some ways, this visit to England was a sad occasion. The Blessed Fra Domenico had died during a cold snap at the end of November, only a couple of weeks ago. He had been found by Manfredi with a ‘beatific smile’ on his face, in the hut where he had spent thirty years of austere silence. Cardinal Lagerfeld was giving a Solemn Pontifical Mass of Thanksgiving for the life of the Blessed Fra Domenico in the private chapel in the Apostolic Nuncio’s Residence, and then descending on the Brompton Oratory to perform another Solemn Pontifical Mass, but combined, on this more public occasion, with a sermon to console the faithful that the brain of the greatest mystic of the modern era had been scanned just in time and that Fra Domenico would not only be interceding for them from the supernatural realm, in the usual fashion, in response to their petitionary and intercessory prayers, but would also be available in the form of the Capo Santo, which promised to plunge the owner into the profoundest mystical state by replicating the Blessed Fra Domenico’s neuroimagery and stimulating the mystical centres of the brain. One hundred Special Edition Capo Santo helmets, signed by His Eminence, would be on sale after the Mass. With no time to spare, he and the Cardinal would then be rushing over to Signor Sterling’s Brainwaves launch party at the Palazzo Spencer, which belonged to the family into which the lovely Princess Diana had been born, a truly beautiful and virtuous woman. What a day! He must set off to the Residence – but first, thought Guido, reaching eagerly for the remote control, he had one last task to perform.
Everyone has cancer all the time; that was the perspective that Lucy had been given in her immunotherapy meeting with Dr Seaford. Those diagnosed with cancer had immune systems that had failed to eliminate the cancerous cells efficiently enough to stop them from growing dominant. Once a brain tumour formed, it sent out chemicals to suppress the immune system everywhere, as well as finding ways to disguise its own abnormality. T cells, the infantry of the immune system, gradually became exhausted by the long-term presence of a tumour. The tumour, however, was not a homogenous entity, it was a mixture of cancerous cells and other cells whose immune defences could be boosted.
Immunotherapy was potentially the most exciting development in the history of oncology. Its collaborative rather than adversarial approach created a new set of odds for the patient. Whereas a surgeon would have to remove the entire tumour to cure the disease and would only think that it was worth ‘buying time’, considering the risks of surgery, if ninety per cent could be cut out, the immune system just had to be stronger than the cancer by fifty-one to forty-nine per cent in order to achieve a cure, a cure which was a self-healing, rather than a burning, a poisoning or an excision. Dr Seaford had kindly agreed to include Lucy in his immunotherapy trial, starting in January. He had managed to get a few doses of the startlingly expensive Ipilimumab. Brain cancer was the most underfunded cancer in the country, because its small patient population usually made Big Pharma unwilling to participate in trials. As one of Seaford’s assistants had told Lucy before the meeting, ‘The problem is that with other types of cancer, like breast and colon and prostate, survivors do a lot of fundraising, but with brain cancer, there just aren’t that many of them around, and I’m not sure you want to roll them out, if you know what I mean.’
‘Well, here I am,’ Lucy had said, giving him a defiant stare.
He had tried to amend his tactlessness by saying that he normally worked with glioblastoma patients and that Lucy’s situation was not as grim, but she was shaken and as she sat down to the meeting a small seizure clutched at her right leg.
Some of the shock of her initial diagnosis had dissipated over the last year, but there was still a basic sense that as a thirty-five-year-old woman she was out of step with conventional mortality. The teenage years of anxiety and grief, which had sometimes made her life close to unbearable, were far behind her, and the failing faculties and spreading pains, the fatigue and the arthritis, the increasingly limited possibilities of redeeming a disappointing life – the veiled kindnesses of old age that might encourage a person to join the queue for death with a certain eagerness – had not yet come her way. Her desire to ‘end it all’, in so far as she had ever had one, had been at a record low when she received the news.
And yet, although she would be embarking on an immunotherapy trial at the same time as her best friend was embarking on motherhood, she still felt immensely lucky to be surrounded by so much love. She was also encouraged, as a patient, to be living at a time when oncology might be about to enter a revolutionary change rather than just make incremental refinements to its old attacks on the ‘emperor of all maladies’, as the famous oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee had called it. Whether a revolution was about to occur or not, she must, as she had often discussed with Francis, resist the lure of optimism as much as the lure of terror and ‘rest in not knowing’, as he put it. Amazingly enough, that was what she was doing now, looking out of Hunter’s windows at the darkening park, perhaps more at ease than she had ever been, not just with her tumour, but with being alive.
Saul and Chrissy Prokosh sat in the bar of Dukes hotel, which Chrissy had told Saul was ‘one of the world’s best’, according to the New York Times.
‘Better get used to it, baby,’ said Saul, clinking his prodigious, frosted Martini against Chrissy’s cloudy yellow margarita, while raking up a handful of nuts from the silver bowl on the elegant table between them.
‘This was Ian Fleming’s favourite bar,’ said Chrissy.
‘And this was his favourite drink,’ said Saul, taking his first gulp. ‘Boy, that is a great Martini.’
‘So, why should I get used to the “world’s best”?’ said Chrissy, half coy and half challenging.
‘Because I have plans,’ said Saul, draining the rest of his drink and fake shuddering as it slipped down his throat. ‘Can I get another one of these?’ he asked a waiter who was passing.
‘Plans? I thought you had to wait until your contract expired,’ said Chrissy, leaning forward, ‘so you could get away from the long and vengeful arm of Hunter’s legal department.’
‘I’m putting out feelers,’ said Saul, ‘preparing the ground, so that when we make our move, there’ll be things in place, but it’s all legally watertight.’
Chrissy raised her glass.
‘To getting used to it,’ she said, sinking back in her dark blue armchair and giving him an admiring smile with just enough wickedness in it to remind him that he wouldn’t be in this enviable position without the relentless pressure she had put him under to act like a man.
‘So, what’s it like making love to a pregnant woman?’ Hope asked, amazed by the domed and indented ceiling of the Palm Room in Spencer House, like a curved honeycomb which, to her enhanced visual centres, seemed to be dripping gold.
‘Realistic,’ said Francis. ‘Thanks for asking; it makes this situation even more relaxing than it is anyway.’
‘Would that make us virtual, if we ever made love?’ said Hope, destroying his defensiveness by pressing her leg lightly against his.
‘Totally,’ said Francis. ‘When they move on from Focus and Relax to the Brainwaves Flirt series, they’ll be begging us for a scan.’
‘You make it sound so romantic,’ said Hope, breaking contact.
‘There’s another effect,’ said Francis, trying to disguise his devastation at the interruption of the erotic transfusion between them, ‘to go back to your first question about sex with a pregnant woman, or at least one you’ve made pregnant – I don’t claim any general expertise – it’s like a painter being shown a canvas that no longer belongs to him, hanging in a house that never belonged to him, in a place of honour, over the fireplace – important and lost at the same time. There’s a mixture of intimacy and usurpation. Some women get post-natal depression; some men get pre-natal depression.’
‘Lucky I’m here to cheer you up,’ said Hope, restoring contact.
‘Yes,’ said Francis, delinquently grateful. ‘I’m not sure that it was a good idea to take quite so many mushrooms, although those golden palm trees look pretty great.’
‘I love the ceiling, too.’
‘Yes,’ said Francis. ‘We really ought to circulate.’
‘Our hips or our tongues?’ asked Hope.
‘You’re impossible,’ said Francis.
‘Who is that?’ asked Hope, amazed by the vivid contrast between the red face, white hair and glacial blue eyes of the figure in front of her grasping a glass of champagne from one of the circulating staff. ‘He looks like a neon man who swallowed a French flag.’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Francis. ‘From Olivia’s point of view, he’s more of a bête noire than a tricolore. His name is William Moorhead…’
‘Oh, him…’
‘He’s just been thrown out of the University of Riyadh.’
‘So, how come he’s looking so unhappy?’
‘He left in disgrace, for emptying a hip flask of whisky into his lemonade at a party and then hitting on the wife of a fellow academic. Standard behaviour, you might say, but he was spotted by the deputy head of the religious police and the wife was a devout Salafist who despises alcohol and worships her husband, the Vice-Chancellor. Moorhead was lucky to escape lashes and prison. Apparently, his line is, “I forgot to change my SIM card at the airport.”’
‘Ho-ho-ho,’ said Hope.
‘Ho-ho-ho,’ said Francis. ‘He’s spent his career as a public intellectual pouring scorn on all fields of human enquiry that are not susceptible to the scientific method, without applying the scientific method to itself, saddling us with “missing heritability”, generated by genetic dogma, not by evidence; “dark matter” generated by the need to balance equations; multiverses, also without a shred of evidence, generated by a Many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory. It was great when empiricism displaced ignorance, but now mathematics has usurped empiricism…’
‘Baby, you’re so intellectual,’ said Hope, resting her palm at the base of Francis’s spine. ‘That’s just one of the things I like about you. Remember the sleeping snake coiled here.’ She spread her palm over his sacrum. ‘And when it wakes up it shoots up the spine,’ she went on, running her hand up the centre of his back, ‘and strikes at the base of your skull and your whole mind explodes into light.’ She ran her nails through his hair towards the crown of his head.
Francis closed his eyes and felt the firework display inside the sky of his skull and then inside the dome of the sky and then in a pulsing expansion of coloured light exploding in all directions with no limit.
‘You can’t,’ mumbled Francis, still vaguely tethered to the fact that he was at Hunter’s party surrounded by dozens of people, including Olivia and Lucy and Martin and Lizzie and George and Emma and Hunter and Saul – the list went on – who might see this strange scene and be amazed by his dumb ecstasy. ‘You mustn’t.’
‘Sorry,’ said Hope, quickly removing her hand.
‘No,’ said Francis, ‘don’t stop.’
She put her hand back with a quiet sigh, and ran her fingers through his hair again, provoking another burst of light in Francis’s imagination and, for all he knew, everywhere.
Olivia was resting on the green velvet cushion of a golden chair, watching Bill Moorhead through the doorway, beneath the palms. She remembered the room well from her tour of the house, when she and Lucy had been taken by Jade to admire her choice of location for the party: that astonishingly gilded space, with palms on the principal columns, which fanned into the ceiling and then reappeared in miniature in the inner frame of the golden mirror above the fireplace and in the legs of the sofa and chairs designed for the room. The architect, whose name she had forgotten, had been inspired by Inigo Jones’s plans for a royal bedroom. Palms were a symbol of marital fertility. She had the fertility down, although marriage wasn’t something that interested her or Francis. Still, perhaps he would lose his head and propose, if she could stagger across the threshold.
Moorhead was grabbing a glass of champagne from a passing tray. He drank it with the abandon of a man recently ejected from a dry country, called the waiter back and exchanged his empty glass for a full one. The waiter clearly made some remark, which left Moorhead staring indignantly at his back.
‘There you are!’
‘Oh, hi, Luce; I was just having a rest.’
‘Laying down your burden,’ said Lucy, sitting down next to her.
‘I’m looking on the obesity crisis with renewed compassion,’ said Olivia. ‘Look who’s drinking at a reckless pace in the Palm Room.’
‘Oh, heavens, as I live and breathe, is it not Sir William Moorhead?’ said Lucy, pretending to fan herself with the agitation of an aspirant bride in a BBC costume drama.
‘It is indeed that sad gentleman,’ said Olivia, playing along, ‘much oppressed by his tribulations in the Orient.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s been emailing Hunter over the last two days asking him for help in getting a job at Google. He wants to be their Spokesman for Public Discourse on Science and Technology.’
Lucy and Olivia were caught in one of the fits of laughter that had swept through their friendship over the years.
‘I think Hunter should endow the Sir William Moorhead Prize for Premature Denigration,’ said Olivia, ‘rather than introducing him to Silicon Valley.’
‘Yes, I’m sure he was a member of the Stop Continental Drift Society,’ said Lucy. ‘In fact, he was probably at Galileo’s trial, probing the sincerity of his recantation…’
‘Still,’ said Olivia, with one of the sudden waves of sympathy that seemed to be preparing her for the unrelenting demands of motherhood, ‘it’s difficult not to feel sorry for him. I mean, look, he’s obviously panicking under all that smugness.’
‘Stay strong,’ said Lucy.
‘Sorry, I must have testosterone on my amygdala again,’ said Olivia.
‘That’s just the sort of explanation he would approve of: putting magnanimity on a sound physical basis,’ said Lucy. ‘Oh, by the way, just to test the strength of those mercy hormones, guess who I just saw?’
‘I’m flooding my bloodstream,’ said Olivia. ‘Who?’
‘Hope.’
‘What? Why is she here?’ said Olivia. ‘Was she with Francis?’
‘Not really. She was talking to Hunter, and Francis was standing nearby, but in his defence, he seemed to be much more interested in the ceiling than in Hotel California.’
‘Yes, I think he decided that the exceptional architecture called for an exceptional dose of magic mushrooms, but what’s she doing here at all?’
‘Well, she is a friend of Hunter’s and it is his party…’
‘True,’ said Olivia, ‘it must be my…’
‘Hormones?’
‘Right!’
‘They sort of explain everything, along with genes and quarks and, well, everything, especially RNA.’
‘Now you’re just being trendy,’ said Olivia.
‘Okay, everything explains everything,’ Lucy conceded. ‘Let’s hold that beautiful thought.’
‘Where did you see them?’
‘Through there,’ said Lucy, pointing at the Palm Room.
‘Why are you staring at that waiter?’ asked Charlie. ‘Do you remember him from Broadmoor?’
‘No,’ said Martin, relieved that his son had overreached and allowed him to tell the truth. ‘He just looked a little lost, that’s all. As you know, it’s one of the shadows of my profession that I can’t entirely stop interpreting.’
‘I do know,’ said Charlie, ‘but you’ve got much better at disguising it.’
‘Stop flattering me,’ said Martin, laughing.
‘You’re like a constitutional monarch. You may have strong views, but you’re not allowed to give anything away.’
‘I’m sure the Queen and I could have hours of conversation on that particular topic – if either of us were allowed to discuss it,’ said Martin.
Francis heard the ominous appeals for silence that precede speeches and bolted up the stone staircase, against the advice of various people who seemed to think he must be longing to hear Saul’s promotional musings on Brainwaves, a subject that had already stolen days of his attention in Big Sur and Plein Soleil. Given the strength of the mushrooms and the scorpion’s nest of his conscience, Francis would have been driven into hiding whether there had been speeches or not. In a sense they were welcome, since he could now search for solitude in less crowded rooms, especially since all the people close to him would feel compelled by politeness to listen while Saul and Hunter were unveiling the technology of consciousness.
Once upstairs, Francis passed through the thinning population of guests loitering in a magnificent red silk room, with a green and gold ceiling of shallow domes, that he would normally have taken time to be enchanted by. On this occasion, the opportunity for promiscuous visual pleasure offered by every carving, every painting, every window pane glowing with reflected chandeliers, every detail, down to the serpentine pattern of golden metal entwined around the door handles, was being usurped by an emotional urgency that drove him deeper into the house, as far away from other people as possible. Eventually, he came to a smaller, intensely decorated room. The pieces of furniture that had been made specifically for the room were already cordoned off and occupied by polite notices requesting visitors not to touch them, but a caterer’s chair was still available for Francis to rest on. A couple stood in the bay window speaking quietly, and a man who seemed to be straining to give the impression that he was no stranger to such surroundings was squinting at the neoclassical decoration as if he had been asked to authenticate it, but was in no rush to lend his authority to the anxious owner. Otherwise, the room was mercifully empty. Francis calculated that it must be directly above the Palm Room where he had sat with Hope earlier in the evening. He was distraught from the recklessness of their conversation (not to mention the recklessness of the behaviour that had accompanied it), and by the fact that he seemed to have become addicted to her touch. It was a drug that created its own anguish. He hadn’t been anguished before he met her and then suddenly been relieved by her touch; he had become anguished by discovering her touch and the bleakness of its absence. In fact, it was deeper than that, they seemed to be part of the same organism, rather than individuals who had chosen to enter into some kind of relationship. As an ecologist, he was always going around saying that life occurred in a world of processes and not things, but he had been thinking of biology, not love, and he was somewhat taken aback that the fervently mutual life he had been observing with binoculars and analysing in soil samples and talking about with passion, while he catalogued the wilding of Howorth, had suddenly broken into what he had secretly persisted in regarding as a private sphere. Far from being a private sphere, it turned out to be a tropical ecosystem over which he had no individual control, and in which, perhaps, he had no individual existence. No, he really didn’t want to have that thought. It was all very well to chop a carrot mindfully, acknowledging the shop and the van driver and the farmer and the farmer’s children and the microorganisms in the soil and the seed and the history of the plant and the rain and the clouds and the evaporating oceans: the endless sprawl of interdependent causes and conditions, but being the person who was holding that awareness with practised logic and easy inclusiveness was quite another matter from feeling like a microorganism in the soil of another process in which his own decisions and judgements were devoured and dissolved. The mushrooms were not helping, if the idea was for him to preserve any sense of control, or they were helping, if the idea was to see what a waste of time it was to cling to that illusion.
Oh, shit, the connoisseur was homing in on him, with the pedantic smirk of a man who is always ready to take a masterpiece off the hands of the ignorant fools who happen to own it.
‘Christopher Spandral,’ said the connoisseur.
Francis seemed incapable of saying his own name and simply stared.
‘As you probably know,’ said the connoisseur, rushing past the obvious historical facts, ‘this room suffered some damage during the war, but rather wickedly, I have to admit that I actually prefer—’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Francis, ‘I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve come here to be alone. I’ve just had some rather overwhelming news.’
The connoisseur nodded, with a slightly raised eyebrow that indicated that in his day he had been no stranger to fierce emotion, but that he had stamped on that spitting cobra long ago, without being in the least surprised to see it flaring up impressively in the lives of lesser mortals. He slipped from a room that had ceased to amuse him; while at the same time the couple who had been whispering in the bulging, pregnant window, chose to wander off, leaving Francis unexpectedly alone. He closed his eyes to deepen his solitude, but instead of the darkness and peace that he craved, he found that his eyelids had turned into hectic and vivid screens. He seemed to be hurtling through a V-shaped space towards an infinitely postponed convergence, rushing past charged but indecipherable clips from a cutting-room floor, subliminal advertisements for products that didn’t exist and were impossible to desire.
‘To hell with that,’ said Francis, opening his eyes without dispelling his unease.
He was in trouble. It turned out that Hope was going to see her mother in Portugal in order to persuade her to leave her considerable fortune to Not on Our Watch, a consortium of rich environmentalists that was buying up thousands of square miles of Amazonia, in order to preserve them and their indigenous inhabitants from predation. She wanted him to help run Not on Our Watch. She wanted him to go with her to Eastern Ecuador where they had one of their bases, since Ecuador was the first country to have included The Rights of Nature in its constitution. Francis was longing to go with her, to make love on the equator, among the swirling info-chemicals, with the full heat of the world weighing down on them. She said it would be a richer life, not a double life; that she would be sharing him, not stealing him, but, in the end, he didn’t even know if the story of the bracelet she had told in his cottage was true. He wavered between paranoia and adoration – variants of credulity – without finding anything he could believe. At the most mundane level, he was unclear how he was going to run an Amazonian non-profit while looking after a newborn child in a cottage in Sussex.
‘Oh, so that’s where you are.’
‘Oh, hi. Hi, yes. Sorry, overdid the mushrooms a bit.’
‘I see,’ said Olivia. ‘Is that why you’re hiding up here?’
‘Yes. All quite full-on downstairs. It’s nice to see you. Sorry.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Ultimately, yes, but I’ve got to metabolise rather more psilocybin than I bargained for.’
‘Is that all? Because George and Emma were saying that Hope Schwartz is trying to steal you away to run some Amazonian project…’
‘No, no, no; I mean, yes: there is an Amazonian thing that Hunter is involved with and Hope and lots of rich people…’
‘And how are you going to be involved?’
‘Technology,’ said Francis boldly. ‘Drones are going to patrol all the land owned by Not on Our Watch and they’ll have sensors to detect pollution, gold prospecting, deliberate fires, and so on.’
‘Hmm,’ said Olivia. ‘And you’re going to process all this information with your Nokia Brick while living off the grid in the ecological Langley of Willow Cottage.’
‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to compromise,’ said Francis.
‘What other compromises are you planning to make?’ Olivia asked.
‘None that I can think of,’ said Francis.
Other guests started to wander into the room.
‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ said Olivia, ‘when you’ve metabolised.’
‘Yup, definitely, just need a while to get my head straight.’
What was he doing? He did not want to live a divided life. On the other hand, he already was. It was divided by his overwhelming attraction to Hope. There was nothing wrong with the attraction; it was grasping at Hope that was splitting him in two. He mustn’t be distracted by his yearning for Hope, but he also mustn’t be distracted by his loyalty to Olivia. Resolution couldn’t lie in siding with either part of the divide; it must be deeper than that.
He tried to pull himself together and concentrate. The way out was not to constrict the underlying feeling of attraction, but to expand it. As he allowed its full force to rise up in him, it seemed to push Hope aside, like the bud on a tree pushing aside its sticky scales as it breaks into flower and opens to the sun.
What a feeling.
He still wanted to fuck her, there was no getting away from that, but for the moment he didn’t have to shield himself with guilt when he could open himself to something even more thrilling than her touch.
Phew. Okay. Back in the saddle. See how long that lasts. Better get back down to the party.
‘Hey, Saul,’ said Hunter, calling over his friend. ‘Great speech. I wanted to make sure you know that before I sack you.’
‘Sack me?’ said Saul, chuckling. ‘You always had a twisted sense of humour. The speech was great, right? You just said so.’
‘It was adequate,’ said Hunter, ‘but the reason I’m sacking you is because I’ve seen the email trail between you and John MacDonald.’
‘That is a private email exchange, at a private address on a personal device,’ said Saul. ‘Whatever you think you found by hacking my emails, which by the way are totally exploratory, is inadmissible and I can sue you for violation—’
‘No hacking, Saul. MacDonald sent me the whole exchange and wanted to know if I would make a better offer. I could. So, we’ve signed and you’re out.’
‘Hunter, it’s not like it looks. These inventors are sometimes so on the spectrum, they’re off the spectrum, if you know what I mean. Out there. They need special handling—’
‘Saul,’ said Jade, ‘Chrissy is standing in the hall flanked by two security guards. She’s not looking happy, more like a shoplifter being handcuffed in Macy’s in front of her children. The longer you delay this, the longer she’s going to be having that feeling and the more she’s going to hate you.’
‘Hunter?’ Saul pleaded.
‘Get him out of the building,’ Hunter said to Jade.
‘Hunter!’ said a delighted William Moorhead, moving into the space vacated by Saul and Jade. ‘What a truly magnificent party; the best possible setting, perfectly organised and what an impressive crowd. Talking of which, I was wondering if you could put in a good word for me with some of your pals at Google. There’s a position there that I think would suit me rather well and help keep the roof on Little Soddington.’
‘Jesus,’ said Hunter, ‘have you still got that place? Shouldn’t you downsize after the divorce? Isn’t there a Very Little Soddington Manor? Or a Tiny Soddington Manor?’
‘You mustn’t hit a fellow when he’s down,’ said Moorhead.
Hunter put a hand on Moorhead’s shoulder and addressed him with apparent tenderness.
‘Listen, William, ever since I heard a Google exec say, “It is our intention to manage the knowledge of the world,” I’ve been longing to clip their wings. That’s far too great a weight for a single corporation to take on. Although you would clearly be a liability to any organisation that employed you, I can’t just pick up a rusty nail file from the pavement when I clip those giant wings, I’m going to need a chainsaw.’
Hunter slapped Moorhead rather too hard on his shoulder and walked away without giving him the chance to reply.
Plagues were sweeping across the world: Ebola, sweating blood out of West Africa; rabid dogs roaming and foaming in India; superbugs crawling up hospital walls. If you thought about it, thought Sebastian, hospitals were really for looking after germs, not people, to make sure that they learnt how to survive all the antibiotics known to man. You were never going to get human beings who survived one hundred per cent of the insults thrown at them, but these superbugs were entering a realm of immortality. We were preparing them to be the gods of the next era, when humans were dinosaurs. The real point, though, like the tip of a syringe, like a syringe giving you a flu jab, was that this year there was a very nasty flu virus doing the rounds and a lot of his workmates had been struck. They were bedridden now, with superbugs parachuting from the ceiling into their compromised immune systems. Mr Morris, whose son had taken his own life in a mental health tragedy, used the word ‘colleagues’, but Sebastian couldn’t handle that. It was more than he could bear to think he was important enough to have a ‘colleague’. Once you had a colleague, you might end up with ‘an opposite number’ and, once you had an ‘opposite number’, you might get cancelled out, like being eaten in a video game, or like anti-matter – which he wasn’t quite clear about, but it didn’t sound good, did it, from the point of view of matter? And nowadays he did take the point of view of matter, although at one time he had probably been more anti-matter-minded.
‘My opposite number in Washington,’ said Sebastian to himself, in his super-posh voice, checking out Eric’s suit in the mirror again, but then Washington seemed so far away that he got a bit upset. ‘My opposite number in Dalston,’ he said, to make it less frightening, but in the same voice, otherwise it would be cheating. Dr Carr said that they were his voices and that he was learning to have a more playful relationship with them.
There was no disguising it, he was feeling extremely, extremely nervous. Mr Morris had called that morning to say that so many of his ‘colleagues’ had been struck down by the flu that he was going to have to ask Sebastian to help serve the canapés at tonight’s event. He said that Sebastian had been a valuable and reliable ‘member of the team’ washing the dishes, and that he had ‘complete confidence’ that Sebastian could ‘step up to the plate’ and help with the canapés tonight. Sebastian had become very confused for a moment because he was still thinking about the dishes and ended up picturing himself stepping on a plate of canapés, but Mr Morris brought him back to his senses by saying that he was having Eric’s suit couriered over to the venue, because Sebastian and Eric were ‘roughly the same fit’.
‘Roughly’ was one way of putting it, although in fact it was quite slippery and slithery getting into Eric’s suit and also, since the shoulders sloped off the end of his shoulders and the sleeves practically came down to his knuckles, it was in fact totally the wrong fit. He looked like a boy who was in a uniform that would fit him in three years, like the one his fake mum bought him, saying there was no point in wasting money. But then Carol, who was very, very nice, had taken some of the tissue paper from the coat hanger and worked it into the shoulder pads and managed to raise the sleeves by a couple of inches and make the shoulders look as if they belonged to him.
About lunchtime, his nerves had got so bad he’d thought of taking some of his old meds. Dr Carr had said that he was doing really well without them, but that it was all right to keep them at the back of the medicine cabinet as an insurance policy. They had been talking a lot about the side effects recently. He had told Dr Carr all about the dry mouth and the dullness and the weight gain, and the tremors, but they had also discussed some long-term studies – he was always online, reading up on his meds. Dr Carr was careful not to be negative about the meds, because he knew that compared to an episode, they were like a packet of cigarettes and a tub of ice cream in the park. It was the studies that were negative, showing that anti-psychotics lowered people’s life expectancy, which wasn’t good – unless you wanted to kill yourself, of course. ‘The exception that proves the rule’, as people liked to say. But even if you wanted to commit suicide, they weren’t much good, because they didn’t kill you outright, they just caused cardiovascular complications, and other stuff, that made your life, on average, shorter. Lots of people wanted to live for a long time, and quite a lot of people wanted to kill themselves, but you really had to look long and hard to find people who were gagging to make their lives shorter and nastier, on average, over quite a long period. Not that lots of people didn’t manage to do that.
Carol had told him that all he had to do was hold out the tray and smile and say, ‘Would you care for a canapé?’ When the tray was empty, he should go back and get another one. He’d already done that three times now, but he still got super-tense each time he left the kitchen. He also had to know the ingredients of the food he was offering, because allergies were the biggest thing in catering now, and you had to be able to say that there were no peanuts in the smoked salmon, or someone might foam at the mouth and suffocate on the floor, like that poor boy at his birthday in a restaurant on the news. This time his tray had asparagus tips on it with tight little belts of special Spanish ham and some black napkins in the corner and a shot glass full of toothpicks. Gabriella, who was very nice and very cheerful, had some black seaweed cones with some shredded veggies in them, and John had some tiny pancakes with stiff cream and caviar (but no peanuts) and some lemon wedges. The special ham was called Jamon Iberico, which was a bit of a tongue twister, but he memorised it by thinking ‘jam’ ‘on’ and then, as he was wearing Eric’s suit, but it was Spanish ham, ‘erico’. The ‘Ib’ was a bit random, but he’d just have to remember to stick it in.
And so, he set off into the stone hall tucked in behind John and Gabriella, watching their every move. In the hall there was a huge statue of one of those beasts that was half horse and half man, like in Harry Potter. In the old days it might have totally thrown him to see a magical beast crouched at the foot of the stairs, but as he knew it was on Harry’s side, it was sort of okay. In fact, it definitely would have thrown him in the old days. ‘Might’ was a funny word, because it meant strong and it also meant uncertain. Same opposites.
He knew they had to separate, and it was quite difficult, but then, as if she could read his thoughts, Gabriella turned around and winked at him and whispered, ‘Go Sebastian!’ in a way that was really encouraging. She was such a warm person, he wished he could live with her.
The next thing he knew he was standing in front of a tall, gaunt man in a bright red dress with a huge cross hanging on a chain around his neck. Camp as Christmas, but live and let live, right? People in glass houses. Who was he to complain? He could have done without some of the comments about his appearance over the years, so he wasn’t about to say anything about the dress, just stick to the script.
‘Would you care for a canapé?’
‘What is it?’ asked the Chinese-looking gentleman with a French accent who was standing next to the tranny.
‘Jam on Erico and asparagus,’ said Sebastian.
‘After you, Monseigneur,’ said the Frenchman.
‘Ah, Jamón Ibérico,’ said Monseigneur. ‘It was always used in Spanish homes to catch out Jews who had made a false conversion; or a whole leg would be hung in the kitchen window to show that such people were not welcome. A great tradition.’
He impaled the asparagus firmly and popped it in his mouth.
‘I’m good,’ said the Frenchman, which Sebastian thought was quite boastful and not really relevant.
‘Is it your first time serving?’ asked Monseigneur with a waxy smile.
‘Yes,’ said Sebastian.
‘Well, you’re doing very well, my son,’ he said, impaling a third canapé. ‘Now, you must take these away, or you will tempt me to eat them all. Such a great tradition, Jamón Ibérico.’
And then it was as if he didn’t exist and Monseigneur continued to talk to the Frenchman, ignoring Sebastian completely, like when his father hadn’t looked up from the paper when he came down to breakfast in his giant school uniform.
‘As you can see, I didn’t have time to change out of my vestments,’ said Monseigneur, ‘which makes me a very conspicuous target, but whether, in the age of terrorism, a priest needs to have bullet-proof clothing is another question. You say they would look identical.’
‘Indistinguishable,’ said the Frenchman. ‘The ceramic filaments can be interwoven with silk, or any other fabric. It’s a new technology we’ve developed from our ceramic armour. You could try it out with the College of Cardinals to begin with and, of course, His Holiness.’
‘Incredible, incredible,’ said Monseigneur, who was obviously a bit of a shopaholic.
Sebastian moved into the enormous room, but before he could make much progress, he became enthralled by a pair of golden lions with vine leaves bursting from their ears and bunches of grapes hanging inside their wings. They were supporting a great slab of pinkish marble with their heads, and Sebastian felt that they deserved a rest, but if they flew away the whole table would collapse, which would freak everybody out completely. He imagined supporting the marble on his own back, while the lions went out through one of the big glass doors and swooped and glided around the park for a while. He could probably only last a few minutes under that sort of strain. While he was staring at the lions, quite a few people seemed to have had a go at his canapés because when he looked down at the tray again, there were far fewer than before. He had to pull himself together and set off across the dark blue carpet with its complicated patterns that were easy to get lost in if you didn’t concentrate: splayed cream flowers with red centres and red flowers with cream centres, entangled with twisting stems, like an exotic garden where Aladdin might be hiding at night. A lad insane. David Bowie. He needed a Ziggie on the terrace to calm his nerves. He had to get across the rug before it dragged him down, with all its tangled associations and its tangled vines clutching at his ankles. He headed for the big glass doors where the rug ran out and there was a solid wooden floor, but it was like the Khyber Pass, with people picking off his canapés one by one. He couldn’t stop, because he had to be the sole survivor, like the doctor who was presented to Queen Victoria in person. He was seeing Dr Carr in person tomorrow, thank god.
Made it. The wood felt much better. Mr Morris had complete confidence. There were three canapés left. Perhaps they were his colleagues and they were all survivors together. ‘May I present Sergeant Jam on Erico, Your Majesty,’ he imagined saying to Queen Victoria, ‘who comported himself with the utmost valour in the Khyber Pass.’ And then he heard a voice saying, ‘Can I have one, please?’ And he looked down and there was a very pregnant lady with a very nice face sitting on a golden chair.
‘Would you care for a canapé?’ said Sebastian, zooming back to the task in hand.
‘Yes,’ she said, laughing, but not in a humiliating way, more like they were sharing a joke, because she had just asked for one.
‘You’ll need two,’ said Sebastian, ‘one for you and one for the baby.’
‘Oh, thanks, I’m really hungry.’
‘Or you could have all three, if you’re having twins.’
‘Well, I’m not having twins.’
‘You could pretend you are, so I can take the empty tray back to the kitchen.’
‘Do you want to sit down?’
‘I don’t think I’m allowed to,’ said Sebastian.
‘Well, the people giving the party are my friends, so I think I’m allowed to invite you,’ said Olivia. ‘You look like you need to take the weight off.’
‘I do,’ said Sebastian. ‘How did you know?’
‘I know the feeling,’ said Olivia, resting her hands on her bulging tummy.
‘Thanks,’ said Sebastian, sitting next to her, with his tray tilted at a dangerous angle.
‘Okay, you’ve persuaded me,’ said Olivia, taking the last canapé. ‘For my fictional twins.’
‘That’s a relief,’ said Sebastian, with a smile, resting the tray flat on his knees. ‘I think this is the most beautiful room I’ve ever been in.’
‘It used to be the dining room.’
‘The dining room,’ said Sebastian. ‘Imagine having that many friends!’
‘Well, the house was built as a temple to love, hospitality and the arts.’
‘How come you know?’
‘I was given the tour before Brainwaves decided to take it.’
‘Love, hospitality and the arts,’ Sebastian repeated. ‘Not bad.’
‘Yeah,’ said Olivia, ‘not bad. I’d like science to get a look-in.’
‘Maybe science is an art. Like psychoanalysis is a mixture of both,’ said Sebastian. ‘What’s wrong, did I say something stupid?’
‘No! It’s just that both my parents are shrinks and I think they would agree with you.’
‘Well, actually, I was quoting something my doctor said.’
‘Hey, Seb…’
Sebastian and Olivia looked up and saw another waiter standing beside them.
‘John,’ said Sebastian.
‘You should get back to work, mate.’
‘Sorry, it’s entirely my fault,’ said Olivia. ‘I was feeling a bit strange and I asked Seb to sit with me. He’s been very kind.’
‘Oh, okay, right, great,’ said John, and moved on.
‘Thanks,’ said Sebastian.
‘I told you I had your back,’ said Olivia. ‘Still, you probably…’
‘I know,’ said Sebastian. ‘What’s this party for, by the way?’
‘A Brainwaves product. Its nickname is Happy Helmets.’
‘What?’ said Sebastian. ‘You put on a helmet and you feel happy?’
‘It helps,’ said Olivia cautiously.
‘I imagine everyone would want one of those,’ said Sebastian, getting up.
‘I think that’s what they’re counting on.’
‘Well, I haven’t put on a helmet, but I feel much better now,’ said Sebastian.
‘So do I,’ said Olivia, ‘nice meeting you.’
‘You too. You’re a very nice lady.’
Sebastian set off back to the kitchen, eager to fetch another tray. He used to think the world was full of monsters, and obviously there must be a few of those lurking around, but there were so many good people, like Gabriella and Carol and Mr Morris and Dr Carr and this lady he had just met. It was enough to make a grown boy cry.