Martin had spoken to Hunter and Francis at some length over dinner about what Lizzie called ‘the bee in Martin’s bonnet’: the way in which psychotherapy as a treatment for the most serious mental illness was denigrated by those who thought that it belonged to some fanciful realm beyond the proper objects of scientific enquiry: brain mapping and biochemistry.

‘The fanciful realm of emotion,’ Martin had said to Hunter, ‘of symbolic language, psychological conditioning and cultural context …’

‘Hang on a moment,’ Hunter pretended to object, ‘culture is invited to the party, once it’s been atomised into “memes”, to give it the boost of making its particles rhyme with “genes”.’

‘Yes, the “meme” is probably the luckiest break for civilisation since the invention of gunpowder,’ said Martin. ‘The idea that emotion and psychological conditioning should be rigorously excluded from science or included only as far-flung provinces of a Celestial Empire whose capital is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN belongs in a satire by Swift but, sadly, he’s not around to write it.’

‘I agree,’ said Hunter, the agreeable guest. ‘Science is a subset of human nature and not the other way around. It has its own oppressive sociology of funding and peer review and publication and profit, and it shares all the emotions of rivalry, intuition, conformity, anxiety and generosity that inform every other field of activity.’

‘At the beginning of my career,’ said Martin, ‘I spent a good deal of time in hospitals run by psychiatrists who were more or less unsympathetic to my approach. One of the patients whose incarceration was renewed year after year under the Mental Health Act of 1959 complained that he had Christ-like nails driven through his feet, not through his hands but through his feet. The psychiatrist doing the rounds explained as patiently as he could – he was not a cruel man, but it was rather exasperatingly obvious – that this claim was proof that the patient was hallucinating and therefore that it was the correct decision to keep him in the hospital. The patient turned to me, knowing that I had an interest in the workings of the human mind, and said, “Some of these doctors don’t seem to have ever heard of a metaphor.”’

‘That’s hilarious and tragic,’ said Hunter.

‘Mainly tragic,’ said Martin.

‘Are you a fan of Ronald Laing’s?’

‘It was hard to be an unreserved fan of Laing’s,’ said Martin, ‘he was so incredibly drunk; but he did show moments of genius in analysing the dynamics running through schizophrenic families, and his wild and sometimes misguided experiments have to be understood in the context of the world I was just describing, where incarceration and sedation and at times barbaric treatment were seen as the only possibilities.’