For the time being, he had the cottage to himself. He had his fading solitude, but not the mental freedom he associated with solitude. The trouble was that when he was alone these days his thoughts were dragged back to California. Although it was only six weeks ago, his memories of the visit had the improbable depth of childhood recollections, as if he had lived with them for decades and they had played a deep role in his formation. No doubt this had something to do with Big Sur’s precipitous Pacific landscape, and the clouds of Monarch butterflies and the smooth unfolding of the wilding project, and Hunter’s house, which seemed like a concrete fantasy, something he might have dreamt before finding out that it existed. Above all, though, it was Hope’s swimming pool that was pinned to his memory, like a beetle in a showcase, its black wings glinting with greens and petrol blues under a museum spotlight. He couldn’t stop remembering every moment and every sensation that had led up to his agonising moral triumph in that sulphurous water. Hope was hanging from his throat until he said, ‘I can’t do this; it’s just not fair’, and then she dropped him, as if she didn’t really mind either way, and swam off with a few firm strokes, changing the subject without a hint of reproach or regret. He was left to reproach himself, while regretting he had so little to reproach himself for. He had done nothing – or nothing much – except, it turned out, to surrender his sexual imagination to a woman he hadn’t even fucked, although she had been willing enough. He was on the moral high ground, but only in the way that a ‘zombie ant’, invaded by the Cordyceps fungus, is forced to climb into the canopy and, after biting involuntarily into a leaf, is consumed by the parasite, which drives a stalk through its host’s head to make a chimney for the dissemination of its spores. Francis was not an ant, of course, and the appropriation was not complete, but it sometimes took control of him at night, when he was not wearing his ethical armour or feeling his love for Olivia, but was almost entirely submerged in his unconscious, like a hippopotamus barely breaking the surface to breathe before returning to wallow in the silt and the reeds. He really must stop identifying with one non-human animal after another. He was a Sapiens, after all, and would regain mastery over his night mind – sooner or later.