Lucy was flying in from New York this evening. It would be lovely to have her back after her six years in the States. They had been so close as undergraduates and had both stayed on at Oxford but Lucy, unlike Olivia, had grown sick of academic life and had gone on to work as a corporate consultant in London and later New York. It was all very well for Olivia to say that she wanted to pursue pure knowledge, but she also knew that Lucy had no back-up, no inheritance in the pipeline, whereas Olivia’s parents had slowly acquired their large house in Belsize Park over decades of hard work. It was now preposterously valuable and would one day be coming down to her and to Charlie. It was naïve to underestimate the psychological impact of that difference. They had kept closely in touch, inter-continentally, but it was exciting that Lucy was now going to be fully back in her life.

Olivia finally switched off her phone, packed the proofs in her rucksack and took her overcoat down from the ledge overhead. There was no way for her to be more prepared without loitering by the carriage door and getting in everybody’s way during the next two stops. She sank back in her seat, turning slightly sideways so she could raise her knee and tuck it against the edge of the table. She gazed across a field, enjoying the complicity between the colours of the autumn woods and of the fiery evening sky stretching behind them, but soon her attention folded back on to the volatile thrill of imagining herself so close to someone she hardly knew.

4

‘Everything happens for a reason,’ said Saul, holding the silver straw delicately between his thumb and forefinger, ‘but unfortunately, when it really matters, we don’t know what the reason is.’

Saul had always spoken rapidly, but on that Monday morning he was sprinting to the next full stop like an athlete trying to break a record.

‘For instance, the exact nature of the correlation between electro-chemical activity in the brain and the experience of being conscious is entirely obscure, and since everything we know depends on being conscious, the description we give of reality, however coherent it seems, hangs over an abyss.’

He leant down and sniffed up the softly gleaming powder; perfect cocaine with the texture of crushed pearls, its curving lines like claw marks across the glass surface of a silver-framed photograph of Barry Goldwater. All the presidential candidates, Democrat and Republican, going back to Nixon’s failed contest against JFK in 1960, had given Hunter’s father signed photographs. He hadn’t had to wait for Wall Street to teach him about hedging his bets, he just used to totter into the library and read all the warm messages inscribed to his father by America’s bitterest rivals.