‘Well, I think it’s wonderful that you’re able to be so playful,’ said Dr Carr. ‘Not so long ago that wouldn’t have even been a possibility.’

‘Anyway, I got a job,’ said Sebastian. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ he asked, beginning to loosen his tie.

‘Of course I believe you if you tell me you’ve been offered a job,’ said Dr Carr.

‘Yeah, I start on Monday afternoon.’

‘In the afternoon?’ asked Dr Carr.

‘Yeah, it’s in a kitchen, so they only need me to come in to clean up and prepare things for the evening. The owner said I was “the best possible candidate”.’

‘Well, congratulations,’ said Dr Carr, ‘that’s really tremendous news.’

‘I’m going to be gainfully employed,’ said Sebastian, savouring the last two words and readjusting his tie.

After the session, on the way back to the bus stop, Sebastian felt that he was more like an apprentice to Dr Carr nowadays, as well as being a patient, of course. He wasn’t just a patient, though. He could make deliberate Freudian slips, which Dr Carr had acknowledged was a clever trick, and they could work together on interpretations. Like the dolphins who had built the vaulted cloisters, they were collaborating on making a place where you could reflect quietly on what was really going on.

19

Francis ran the cleaver rapidly back and forth across the heap of dried liberty caps, chopping them into a coarse powder, which he then scraped on to the parchment paper next to the board. At a time when his thoughts were so often drawn to the vast and sometimes disturbing implications of fatherhood, of turning a love affair into a family, it was soothing to be engaged in such a practical and precise task. After drying his harvest of magic mushrooms in racks and dicing them up, he would scoop the powder into gelatine capsules, so as to make the dose as stable as possible. Mixing them up was a good precaution as the psilocybin content of each mushroom ranged from one quarter per cent to three per cent and encapsulating them helped reduce the indigestion they often caused. His arms and wrists were beginning to ache now, and it was time to switch to the finickity but less strenuous job of loading the powder into its little capsule. He needed a free day to deal with the magic mushroom assembly line. It was time consuming, not entirely legal and, as with cooking, he preferred to be left alone to follow his own rhythm and do what came naturally to him. He always gave George and Emma a bag of mushrooms; it was their land, after all, and he never lost his sense of gratitude and elation at being embedded in the middle of their wilding project.