‘You’ve got to nail this Open Placebo thing,’ said Hunter.

‘I’m on it,’ said Saul.

‘I’m in it,’ said Lucy.

‘How about the known benefits of an early lunch, before Saul leaves for the airport?’

‘Perfect,’ said Lucy, swinging out of the hammock with a sense of gratitude at being looked after so well and at the same time with a bruise of sadness about the cloud encircling this peak of kindness and goodwill in her life.

16

For Lizzie, it was a cause for unalloyed celebration when Olivia told them that she and Francis were going to have a baby. She loved Francis, looked forward to having a grandchild, and felt that Olivia’s desire to bring a child into the world, despite knowing that she had been an unwanted child at birth, was a deep reparation of her troubled history. For Martin, who had seen Sebastian earlier that day, there were dimensions to the situation, beyond his genuine delight, that he couldn’t discuss with anyone around the table, or even fully appreciate himself, in the atmosphere of jubilation that followed Olivia’s announcement. She had chosen to have the baby at the Royal Free, just up the road from her parents’ house, and had gone on to ask if she and Francis could stay for a while at Belsize Park during the first days of its life. Martin’s need to disguise the disorienting suspicion that his most disturbed patient, who came to the house three times a week, might well be his grandchild’s uncle had prevented him from thinking clearly about the implications at the time.

Olivia had now set off to Howorth and Martin was able to retreat to the sanctuary of his consulting room fifty minutes before his first patient arrived. Sitting in his worn armchair, staring at the mid-summer garden, he couldn’t stop thinking about Sebastian’s tendency to burst outside in moments of high tension, nor could he shake off the memory of Charlie and Olivia tottering around that same garden as small children or resting there, after being wheeled back and forth across the lawn until they fell asleep in their big old pram – which Lizzie was proud not to have thrown away, all those years ago, despite the children’s slightly anxious mockery of her sentimentality (who was she keeping it for?) and the memorable struggle of hoisting it sideways into the loft. The collision of these two images recurred several times while Martin got up to make a cup of coffee, standing at the back of the room by the cupboard where he kept a small fridge, a kettle and some biscuits, hidden from his hungry patients.