When he had taken her upstairs in his cottage soberly and silently, they had soon cut through any lingering fog associated with that evening in Oxford, meeting face to face, holding each other’s gaze, not distracted by shyness or fantasy, smiling effortlessly at the delight they found in each other. And then, as they lay side by side, entangled but still speechless, not bothering with compliments or professions of bliss, because they both knew what had happened; in that vibrant stillness, her mind seemed to have obliterated all impressions except for her awareness of the vibrancy and the stillness. They started to kiss again, like two people who change their minds after taking a few steps across the burning sands of a tropical beach and decide to dive back into the breaking waves. They had too much to tell each other to go on talking. Words would only multiply distinctions that were being abolished by something that permeated and surrounded them, like a magnetic field, drawing iron filings into the shape of a flower.

Conversation returned when Olivia came downstairs after a bath. Her thick socks blunted the sensation of walking over the cool, uneven flagstones of the kitchen floor. Francis greeted her through the steam rising from the potatoes he was pouring into a colander. He was preparing dinner with what struck her as impressive calm. Her own cooking was a combination of monotony and panic, always making the same meal without losing the conviction that this time it was going to go wrong. She seemed to remember a distinction Steven Pinker had made in one of his immense books between ‘blending grammar’ and ‘analytical grammar’, or something of that sort. Cooking and painting, amazingly enough, turned out to be in the ‘blending’ category and she wasn’t any good at either of them.

‘That’s all the cooking I can do for the moment,’ said Francis, as he transferred parboiled potatoes to a pan, shook them around, blending them (grammatically, she supposed) with the olive oil and rosemary and then sliding the pan into the oven. He invited her into the sitting room, where they stretched out on the big sofa, with their heads cushioned at the far end, looking at the fire, smouldering and crackling on a soft pile of ash and embers.

‘God, I love it here,’ said Olivia.

Anticipating the rush to self-revelation that inaugurates every love affair, she had decided during her bath that she would tell Francis that she was adopted, unlike her brother Charlie, who was Martin and Lizzie’s biological child. And so, she let him know the bare facts and how her parents had told her when she was sixteen.

‘Do you think that’s why you became a biologist?’ he asked.

‘Probably, but it took me a while to work out. My father was very restrained in not interpreting my choice of A levels: Biology, Chemistry and Sociology.’

Francis laughed and held her closer.