‘That’s exactly what I asked the Australian nurse who took the cannula out. She said, “Oh yeah, we do it all the time. It’s just so we can see certain structures more clearly.” “What kind of structures?” I asked her. “Well, structures,” she said, and I got the impression that I wasn’t going to get anything else out of her. She stayed very cheerful, taped on a bandage and said, “Okey-dokey, you have a good evening now.” It was late and I felt they were all keen to get to their spinning classes, or to have a drink in the Queen’s Pantry, the pub on the corner of the square, named after the building where Queen Charlotte kept special provisions for George III when he was mad with porphyria.’

Olivia could tell that Lucy was shaken. She was talking rapidly and seemed to be overflowing with impressions.

‘Talking of pubs, let’s have a drink,’ she said.

‘I looked at the wine list when I arrived,’ said Francis, ‘and you can order small glasses of lots of different wines. It gives an educational atmosphere to getting incrementally drunk.’

‘That’s right,’ said Lucy, ‘“compare and contrast”. Let’s do some of that.’

As the three of them worked their way down the list of red wines, vacillating between Portugal and the Rhone, Australia and the Veneto, Burgundy and Bordeaux, Lucy seemed to relax and put her taxing day behind her, and Olivia also relaxed, realising that Francis and Lucy liked each other both for her sake and independently. As Francis had predicted, the number of glasses was beginning to outweigh the size of the samples and they all agreed that they should have just one more. Lucy decided that such an important choice required her to google the comparative merits of the Californian and Chilean wines that they hadn’t yet tried. When she looked at her phone, Francis and Olivia expected her to embark on reading the hilarious list of random objects: blackcurrant leaves, saddles, long notes, cigars and ripe cherries that make wine prose into a cryptic branch of literature that can only be deciphered by drinking the wine it fails to describe, but instead they saw Lucy’s face contract into a frown.

‘Sorry, there’s a message I should respond to,’ she said.

Olivia assumed that Hunter was making some further ludicrous demand on Lucy’s time.

‘Dr Hammond wants me to come in first thing tomorrow,’ said Lucy.

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Olivia immediately.

‘Thanks,’ said Lucy. ‘Jesus.’

‘It’s probably the nerves that got torn in that cycling accident,’ said Francis.

‘Or “structures”,’ said Lucy. ‘Structures.’

6

In the consulting room, Olivia reached out and put an arm around Lucy’s shoulders.

‘I feel like someone dropped a car battery in the bath,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ve never felt like this before: these waves of terror coursing through me. Can I have some Xanax?’