‘Technically. She is – was . . . she’s very slim, very light. If she’d been a full-grown adult or much heavier, then the – she would have died pretty much straight away, the rope would . . . she wouldn’t have . . .’

‘I’m lost,’ Jeff said, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re trying to say.’ He was annoyed, angry, irritated, all of those. Greta still knew him.

‘Olivia is technically alive, because we are keeping her alive – the machines are. They are breathing for her, making the blood pump round her body, but her brain was starved of oxygen and as you can’t say how long it was that . . . you see, the brain can only be starved of oxygen for minutes, five or six, give or take . . . before it dies. Hypoxia – when the brain isn’t receiving oxygen. That’s the state.’

‘Are you telling me she’s going to be brain-damaged?’

‘Us. Telling us.’

‘No, what I am saying is that she already is brain-damaged . . . damaged beyond repair. That’s what happens.’

‘So, she’ll be . . .’

Each one waited for the other to say it. Or for him to say.

‘I don’t think you quite understand. We are keeping Olivia alive with machines . . . if we switch those off . . . when we switch them off, then she will die. She can’t do anything else. She isn’t keeping herself alive. If you follow me.’

They did. They did not.

‘What will happen to her?’ Greta stood up suddenly and shouted at him. ‘WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN?’

‘Greta, sit down. Greta . . .’

He put his hand on her arm and kept it there, and eventually, she felt it, turned in surprise, because he had touched her.

‘Sit down,’ Jeff said quietly.

She sat.

‘We’ll wait. We’ve done some initial brain-function tests but we want to wait . . . hypoxia can take different forms, different . . . she’s young, she’s healthy, so we wouldn’t make any changes, any decisions . . . not yet. Not for perhaps twenty-four hours.’

‘But then what do you do?’

‘We perform all the tests again, very systematically, we check absolutely everything we can check. It may be . . . it could possibly be –’

His pager sounded and he leapt up and rushed out of the door looking at it, desperate to get to whatever it was, desperate to get away. That was the clearest thing of all, how desperate he had been to leave the room, leave them.

‘They don’t have any idea,’ Jeff said. ‘No idea at all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He didn’t. So now what? Do we wait here or . . . ?’

‘Someone will come and tell us.’

‘Yes. Though I suppose it depends, how much – how busy they are and what else is going on, it all depends. But someone will come.’

After a long time, Greta said. ‘Hadn’t you better ring . . . her? She’ll . . . she hasn’t rung you though. You’d think . . .’