Driving home from the station last Friday, Francis had warned Olivia that his cottage was off the grid, at first tempering his confession with an apology, but soon admitting how pleased he was to be able to quit the hive mind of the internet and wander away, like a rogue bee, from the buzzing subjugation of the colony. They sank back for a while into the familiar hammock of ecological catastrophe, until Francis started to describe the counter-proposal being made by wilding and also conjectured that Gaia, a collective planetary intelligence, or at least an intelligent way of thinking about the planet as a whole, was beginning to have her revenge and would soon shrug off the human infestation that was poisoning the ‘critical zone’, that faint blue ring of air and water in which all complex life occurs. A few ancient families of bacteria, viruses, fungi and insects would no doubt survive, as unimpressed by the Anthropocene Age as they had been by the lumbering passage of the dim-witted dinosaur. Olivia wasn’t so sure about Gaia. She felt that the craving for domination and convenience was enough to consume its devotees, one drone delivery at a time.

‘With or without Gaia, we’re talking about the same basic angst,’ she said, as Francis drew up into the parking space on the far side of his cottage.

Instead of replying, he turned to her and smiled disarmingly, as if they both knew that these big topics had only been needed to enliven the journey from the station. Now that they had arrived in a place beyond the reach of tracking cookies, where the microphones and cameras on their devices couldn’t be switched on by invisible supervisors, a place with the timeless banality of simply being where it was, without advertising its location on the world wide web and provoking a cascade of Bayesian data mining, self-reinforcing behaviour patterns and tailored news, now, at last, they could give up working out precisely which great extinction they were taking part in and get down to the real reason for their being there in the first place.

Going straight to bed without taking her luggage out of the car, or being ‘shown around’, dispersed the expectations of awkwardness or unbridled passion that had been running through Olivia’s mind since she accepted Francis’s invitation. What she could not have imagined, along with the thick sky-blue and cream stripes of the wallpaper and the worn elm of the beams and the window frames, was the depth of trust she already felt for Francis, or spontaneously felt – it was hard to tell, since their only previous encounter had taken place in the kind of haze that can make impulsiveness look like spontaneity, and drunkenness feel like destiny.