On the day of the visit, Olivia woke at four in the morning in her parents’ house, bathed in sweat. She was in that superstitious state of mind in which everything seemed overloaded with metaphor and meaning. She wanted to stay at home, the home she actually lived in with her loving family, not the home she might have had in the meaningless dimension of a conditional past tense. She left Belsize Park far too early and was so preoccupied on the Underground that she overshot her stop by two stations. She decided to work her way back to Karen’s neighbourhood, exchanging so many texts and calls with Lucy and Charlie that the battery on her ageing phone went flat. She would have to ask someone the way – although she certainly wasn’t going to ask that hollow-cheeked man who was being dragged towards her by the rolling gait of his bulldog. The grey tower blocks across the road were darkened by patches of rain and so densely studded with satellite dishes that they looked to her like the tentacles of an octopus. At their centre, a balding patch of grass was planted with bushes that discouraged vandalism, not only with their ferociously serrated leaves, which stuck out like a gargoyle’s tongue, but also through their perfect ugliness, which it was impossible to enhance. Two of them had taken the further precaution of dying. Olivia was disgusted by her attitude to her unfamiliar surroundings. Bloody psychotherapy, it ruined the random discharge of negative emotion. The mixture of terraced houses and blocks of flats was typical of dozens of areas she had walked around in London, but now she was projecting her fear of meeting a treacherous parent on to some rain-soaked buildings and a man walking his dog; and her fear that it might turn ugly on to some neglected plants.

She told Francis that her paranoid state of mind had been temporarily dissolved by a friendly passer-by who told her that Mafeking Street was, ‘Second on the right, can’t miss it’, but that it rebuilt itself as she approached the turning. Her pace slowed. What, in the end, did any of this have to do with her? A sense of hysterical reluctance weighed down her steps. Whatever reservoir of genetic information lay inside Karen’s house was already, for what it was worth, inscribed in her own body. She suddenly felt that she must turn back, but then the front door opened and a tired, but kind-looking woman with thick, loosely stacked grey hair was standing in front of her in an old sweater and a pair of jeans.