Lucy had sat next to Hunter at a dinner party three weeks earlier, and so impressed him with her background in science and business that by the time they were sipping their fresh mint tea, he had invited her to double her salary and head up the London office of Digitas, the digital, technological and scientific venture capital firm he had founded after selling his legendary hedge fund, Midas, only a few months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. She had been persuaded to make the move from Strategy, the consulting firm she had been working for, partly because of the excitement of a new opportunity, but also because of the collapse of various aspects of her personal life. Hunter was so eager for her to get to London that he had thrown in a fortnight in his apartment in St James’s Place while she looked for somewhere reasonable to live. It was a generosity that would inevitably lead to an anticlimax. The floorplan of the penthouse duplex, sent by Jade in an email with enough bullet points to start a civil war, made it clear that Lucy would be falling off a cloud when she eventually moved into a flat she could afford. Still, it was a kind gesture, as was this luxurious seat, and the limo to the airport, and all the rest of it. She tried to feel spoilt, but she was too bewildered to be entirely convinced.

Lucy was accustomed to attracting favours and special treatment and she always reciprocated with her own forms of generosity. Her need to magnetise a certain level of protection was rooted in the drastic uncertainties of her childhood: when Lucy was five, her mother had been sectioned after a manic episode and had been taking drowsy Lithium ever since; and by the time she was sixteen, her handsome father had drowned in a whirlpool of alcohol. There was no doubt in Lucy’s mind that her parents were loving and well-intentioned, but they had been incapacitated by their afflictions. Seeing them was like watching someone you love climb aboard the wrong train and then having to run down the platform trying to warn them of their mistake as the train draws out of the station. For much of her childhood Lucy had been forced to look after the people who should have been looking after her. She had developed a penetrating sensitivity to the moods of anyone she was close to and a longing for a level of security that would put her beyond the corrosive financial anxiety of her childhood. In a sense her whole life had been a rather fraught dialogue between her resolute drive for independence – her ‘shield maiden’ persona, as she thought of it, in honour of her mother’s Swedish ancestry – and her effortless ability to find a granite harbour – as it had become in this extended Viking metaphor – by attracting the protection of powerful men.