Olivia was in far too good a mood to really mind, but she couldn’t help wondering why Lucy had chosen to meet at Noble Rot for such an early dinner. It was a dry, clear evening and Olivia had decided to walk from her publisher’s office. It had been tough negotiating for the inclusion of the intergenerationally traumatised mice, but her editor had totally seen the point and had agreed to the disruption of the proofs. Her weekend with Francis had stretched into four nights and she had only been able to focus on the mice that morning, her feet interlaced with his under the table on the train until they were wrenched apart at Victoria station. She had gone to her parents’ house and Francis had set off to a meeting of the Soil Association. Now, after nine long hours, they were converging on Lamb’s Conduit Street.
Driving home from the station last Friday, Francis had warned Olivia that his cottage was off the grid, at first tempering his confession with an apology, but soon admitting how pleased he was to be able to quit the hive mind of the internet and wander away, like a rogue bee, from the buzzing subjugation of the colony. They sank back for a while into the familiar hammock of ecological catastrophe, until Francis started to describe the counter-proposal being made by wilding and also conjectured that Gaia, a collective planetary intelligence, or at least an intelligent way of thinking about the planet as a whole, was beginning to have her revenge and would soon shrug off the human infestation that was poisoning the ‘critical zone’, that faint blue ring of air and water in which all complex life occurs. A few ancient families of bacteria, viruses, fungi and insects would no doubt survive, as unimpressed by the Anthropocene Age as they had been by the lumbering passage of the dim-witted dinosaur. Olivia wasn’t so sure about Gaia. She felt that the craving for domination and convenience was enough to consume its devotees, one drone delivery at a time.
‘With or without Gaia, we’re talking about the same basic angst,’ she said, as Francis drew up into the parking space on the far side of his cottage.
Instead of replying, he turned to her and smiled disarmingly, as if they both knew that these big topics had only been needed to enliven the journey from the station. Now that they had arrived in a place beyond the reach of tracking cookies, where the microphones and cameras on their devices couldn’t be switched on by invisible supervisors, a place with the timeless banality of simply being where it was, without advertising its location on the world wide web and provoking a cascade of Bayesian data mining, self-reinforcing behaviour patterns and tailored news, now, at last, they could give up working out precisely which great extinction they were taking part in and get down to the real reason for their being there in the first place.
Going straight to bed without taking her luggage out of the car, or being ‘shown around’, dispersed the expectations of awkwardness or unbridled passion that had been running through Olivia’s mind since she accepted Francis’s invitation. What she could not have imagined, along with the thick sky-blue and cream stripes of the wallpaper and the worn elm of the beams and the window frames, was the depth of trust she already felt for Francis, or spontaneously felt – it was hard to tell, since their only previous encounter had taken place in the kind of haze that can make impulsiveness look like spontaneity, and drunkenness feel like destiny.
When he had taken her upstairs in his cottage soberly and silently, they had soon cut through any lingering fog associated with that evening in Oxford, meeting face to face, holding each other’s gaze, not distracted by shyness or fantasy, smiling effortlessly at the delight they found in each other. And then, as they lay side by side, entangled but still speechless, not bothering with compliments or professions of bliss, because they both knew what had happened; in that vibrant stillness, her mind seemed to have obliterated all impressions except for her awareness of the vibrancy and the stillness. They started to kiss again, like two people who change their minds after taking a few steps across the burning sands of a tropical beach and decide to dive back into the breaking waves. They had too much to tell each other to go on talking. Words would only multiply distinctions that were being abolished by something that permeated and surrounded them, like a magnetic field, drawing iron filings into the shape of a flower.
Conversation returned when Olivia came downstairs after a bath. Her thick socks blunted the sensation of walking over the cool, uneven flagstones of the kitchen floor. Francis greeted her through the steam rising from the potatoes he was pouring into a colander. He was preparing dinner with what struck her as impressive calm. Her own cooking was a combination of monotony and panic, always making the same meal without losing the conviction that this time it was going to go wrong. She seemed to remember a distinction Steven Pinker had made in one of his immense books between ‘blending grammar’ and ‘analytical grammar’, or something of that sort. Cooking and painting, amazingly enough, turned out to be in the ‘blending’ category and she wasn’t any good at either of them.
‘That’s all the cooking I can do for the moment,’ said Francis, as he transferred parboiled potatoes to a pan, shook them around, blending them (grammatically, she supposed) with the olive oil and rosemary and then sliding the pan into the oven. He invited her into the sitting room, where they stretched out on the big sofa, with their heads cushioned at the far end, looking at the fire, smouldering and crackling on a soft pile of ash and embers.
‘God, I love it here,’ said Olivia.
Anticipating the rush to self-revelation that inaugurates every love affair, she had decided during her bath that she would tell Francis that she was adopted, unlike her brother Charlie, who was Martin and Lizzie’s biological child. And so, she let him know the bare facts and how her parents had told her when she was sixteen.
‘Do you think that’s why you became a biologist?’ he asked.
‘Probably, but it took me a while to work out. My father was very restrained in not interpreting my choice of A levels: Biology, Chemistry and Sociology.’
Francis laughed and held her closer.
‘I had certainly worked it out for myself by the time I was an undergraduate,’ said Olivia. ‘I was totally invested in refuting the idea that the most important contribution to my formation was a genetic inheritance handed down to me by a couple of strangers.’
She had chosen not to track down her biological mother, feeling that it would be a betrayal of her real parents in favour of the outsider who had chosen to give her away. It was only when she was twenty-six and a friend of hers had her first baby, that Olivia’s resolve was broken. She was allowed to hold her friend’s newborn child in her arms and felt the encircling tenderness that sprung up spontaneously between them in the few minutes before the baby’s mother reached out to take him back, craving, despite her exhaustion, the need to comfort and protect her child. The experience inflamed Olivia’s imagination, making her wonder about her mother’s motives for giving her away, and so she finally set about arranging to meet Karen Hughes, as the culprit turned out to be called.
On the day of the visit, Olivia woke at four in the morning in her parents’ house, bathed in sweat. She was in that superstitious state of mind in which everything seemed overloaded with metaphor and meaning. She wanted to stay at home, the home she actually lived in with her loving family, not the home she might have had in the meaningless dimension of a conditional past tense. She left Belsize Park far too early and was so preoccupied on the Underground that she overshot her stop by two stations. She decided to work her way back to Karen’s neighbourhood, exchanging so many texts and calls with Lucy and Charlie that the battery on her ageing phone went flat. She would have to ask someone the way – although she certainly wasn’t going to ask that hollow-cheeked man who was being dragged towards her by the rolling gait of his bulldog. The grey tower blocks across the road were darkened by patches of rain and so densely studded with satellite dishes that they looked to her like the tentacles of an octopus. At their centre, a balding patch of grass was planted with bushes that discouraged vandalism, not only with their ferociously serrated leaves, which stuck out like a gargoyle’s tongue, but also through their perfect ugliness, which it was impossible to enhance. Two of them had taken the further precaution of dying. Olivia was disgusted by her attitude to her unfamiliar surroundings. Bloody psychotherapy, it ruined the random discharge of negative emotion. The mixture of terraced houses and blocks of flats was typical of dozens of areas she had walked around in London, but now she was projecting her fear of meeting a treacherous parent on to some rain-soaked buildings and a man walking his dog; and her fear that it might turn ugly on to some neglected plants.
She told Francis that her paranoid state of mind had been temporarily dissolved by a friendly passer-by who told her that Mafeking Street was, ‘Second on the right, can’t miss it’, but that it rebuilt itself as she approached the turning. Her pace slowed. What, in the end, did any of this have to do with her? A sense of hysterical reluctance weighed down her steps. Whatever reservoir of genetic information lay inside Karen’s house was already, for what it was worth, inscribed in her own body. She suddenly felt that she must turn back, but then the front door opened and a tired, but kind-looking woman with thick, loosely stacked grey hair was standing in front of her in an old sweater and a pair of jeans.
Karen led her into a little sitting room crowded with books. They were on the shelves and on the tables, but also on the floor beside the armchair. The room was quite dim apart from the pool of light around the armchair and the glow of an electric fire, which lit up some black and orange logs with the brazen fraudulence of what would have been kitsch, if the rest of the room hadn’t pointed towards austerity and indifference. In the first awkward minutes Karen poured some tea and Olivia turned down a biscuit. Once Karen was sitting in the armchair, a tortoiseshell cat jumped into her lap and she began to stroke it with an emphatic haste that seemed to have more to do with her own state of mind than any needs the cat might have.
‘There was an unframed photo lying flat on one of the lower bookshelves,’ Olivia told Francis. ‘It looked to me like a younger Karen holding a baby in her arms. Is that burning?’ she interrupted herself.
‘Oh, fuck,’ said Francis, jumping over her. ‘I was too caught up in your story. Tell me what happened over dinner,’ he said, opening the smoking oven and salvaging the unusually crispy potatoes and chicken.
She did tell him the rest of the story over dinner and felt even closer to him than before. They stayed close for the next three days until they were forced apart that morning. Soon, mercifully, they would be back together.
As she approached Noble Rot, Olivia could see through the big glass windows that Francis had already arrived and that Lucy was there also, but at a separate table. It was strange to see two people she knew so intimately sitting in the same room, alone and unknown to each other, waiting for her arrival to create a new compound, like a clear liquid suddenly swirling with colour as a third solution is poured into it. At least, she hoped that’s what would happen. Francis got up while she was still outside, as if he had already seen her, or sensed her in some other way, although he had been reading when she first spotted him. He opened the door for her and kissed her hello. Lucy was slower to notice her arrival, but soon came over and gave Olivia a big reunion hug. After Olivia had introduced her friends to each other, they were all led to a table at the far end of the restaurant, where Lucy sat down in the corner with her back to the wall, facing Olivia and Francis.
‘I love this restaurant,’ said Olivia, leaning gently against Francis, ‘but I thought you said Hunter’s flat was in St James’s.’
‘It is,’ said Lucy, ‘but I had to go to the Neurology Hospital in Queen Square.’
‘Oh, no, are you okay?’ said Olivia.
‘It’s probably just stress, but I’ve been having these muscle spasms. I had a particularly strong one last night, so I called Ash – remember him? – and he arranged for me to see a neurologist this morning, Dr Hammond. We marvelled at the body’s capacity to somatise psychological states. “Those poor men who came back with shell shock from the First World War: truly astonishing cases. Neurologically speaking, it made no sense,” he said. Still, he arranged to fit in an MRI for me “just to tick that box”. That’s why I booked a table here because they gave me the last slot at the scanning centre around the corner.’
‘When do you get the results?’ asked Olivia.
‘Next Tuesday, after my very long weekend with Hunter, The Boss Who Never Sleeps. That starts on Thursday when my alarm goes off at five in the morning.’
‘It sounds like you’ve got enough alarms going off already,’ said Olivia.
‘If it isn’t stress, it might be nerve damage from that accident I had when we went cycling in Ireland.’
‘Oh god, that was terrible,’ Olivia explained to Francis. ‘I was behind Lucy and half-saw her flip over a gate further down the lane. At first it looked like a perfect somersault, and I almost expected to find her standing in the field, like a gymnast, with her feet together and her arms stretched out. Then I heard a scream and it was all ambulances and X-rays and crutches.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Francis, ‘that might well be it. How was the MRI? I’ve never had one.’
‘They were all very friendly and upbeat,’ said Lucy, ‘dressed as if they were about to go running, in sportswear and trainers, even though they spend most of their day filling in forms and pressing buttons. I felt rather calm and cosy in the scanner. When you work for Hunter it’s quite a treat to be able to lie down and do nothing. So, I just closed my eyes and lay in corpse pose.’
‘You make it sound like a spa treatment,’ said Olivia.
‘It was a bit on the high-tech side, but I was taking a spa approach to the earplugs, and the juddering and the squawking that sounds like an evacuation alarm but signals that you have to lie absolutely still. After a while I could just make out, over the muffled racket, a female voice saying, “We’re just going to pop you out of the scanner for a moment.” She told me they wanted to inject me with some contrast fluid. It felt cold, spreading all around my body as they “popped” me back in for another fifteen minutes.’
‘Do they always give people contrast fluid?’ asked Olivia.
‘That’s exactly what I asked the Australian nurse who took the cannula out. She said, “Oh yeah, we do it all the time. It’s just so we can see certain structures more clearly.” “What kind of structures?” I asked her. “Well, structures,” she said, and I got the impression that I wasn’t going to get anything else out of her. She stayed very cheerful, taped on a bandage and said, “Okey-dokey, you have a good evening now.” It was late and I felt they were all keen to get to their spinning classes, or to have a drink in the Queen’s Pantry, the pub on the corner of the square, named after the building where Queen Charlotte kept special provisions for George III when he was mad with porphyria.’
Olivia could tell that Lucy was shaken. She was talking rapidly and seemed to be overflowing with impressions.
‘Talking of pubs, let’s have a drink,’ she said.
‘I looked at the wine list when I arrived,’ said Francis, ‘and you can order small glasses of lots of different wines. It gives an educational atmosphere to getting incrementally drunk.’
‘That’s right,’ said Lucy, ‘“compare and contrast”. Let’s do some of that.’
As the three of them worked their way down the list of red wines, vacillating between Portugal and the Rhone, Australia and the Veneto, Burgundy and Bordeaux, Lucy seemed to relax and put her taxing day behind her, and Olivia also relaxed, realising that Francis and Lucy liked each other both for her sake and independently. As Francis had predicted, the number of glasses was beginning to outweigh the size of the samples and they all agreed that they should have just one more. Lucy decided that such an important choice required her to google the comparative merits of the Californian and Chilean wines that they hadn’t yet tried. When she looked at her phone, Francis and Olivia expected her to embark on reading the hilarious list of random objects: blackcurrant leaves, saddles, long notes, cigars and ripe cherries that make wine prose into a cryptic branch of literature that can only be deciphered by drinking the wine it fails to describe, but instead they saw Lucy’s face contract into a frown.
‘Sorry, there’s a message I should respond to,’ she said.
Olivia assumed that Hunter was making some further ludicrous demand on Lucy’s time.
‘Dr Hammond wants me to come in first thing tomorrow,’ said Lucy.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Olivia immediately.
‘Thanks,’ said Lucy. ‘Jesus.’
‘It’s probably the nerves that got torn in that cycling accident,’ said Francis.
‘Or “structures”,’ said Lucy. ‘Structures.’