Preparations for the surgery had started on Friday afternoon. Olivia joined Lucy in a gloomy hospital room overlooking a brick wall. Its only decoration was an artistic black and white photograph of a lamp-post in the square outside, hung there, presumably, as compensation for not having one of the rooms across the corridor which enjoyed a view of the lamp-post itself.

‘They’re just going to drill a little hole in my skull and take a sample with a needle,’ said Lucy, unpacking her pyjamas and a soft down pillow she had brought from home. ‘There’s a less than one per cent chance of death from this procedure, and I have huge confidence in Mr McEwan’s skill with the drill. Also—’

Lucy’s deluge of anxiety was interrupted by a knock on the door. A friendly Filipino nurse came in to manacle a plastic identity tag to Lucy’s wrist and ask her to wash her hair before the doctor came to shave her.

‘Shave me?’

‘Yes, the doctor will explain,’ he said, handing Lucy a bottle of bright red Hibiscrub.

Soon enough, a young doctor came in carrying a Ziploc bag. She spent much of the first few minutes managing her own mane of glossy brown hair, tossing it from side to side and pushing thick cables of unruly abundance out of her eyes and behind her ears, but eventually she extracted a disposable Bic razor from the bag and started shaving six patches on Lucy’s skull, each about the size of a two-pound coin. As she did her work, she threw thin strands of Lucy’s bright blonde hair into a yellow metal bin covered with warnings about how to dispose appropriately of toxic waste and sharp objects. She then placed a small, sticky, white plastic doughnut on each shaved patch as well as across Lucy’s forehead and temples, explaining that they were needed to make the pre-op MRI more precise and to generate a 3D model of the tumour. That model would help Mr McEwan’s computer-guided needle to take the best sample with the least risk. Using a black permanent marker, she then drew a circle around the position of all the fiducials, as they turned out to be called, with a black dot at its hollow centre, in case any of them fell off in the turbulent hours ahead.

After the doctor left the room, Lucy stood in front of the mirror, in her striped silk pyjamas, and started to cry. ‘It’s not that I look ugly,’ she said, ‘although I do. It’s just that I left home looking like a healthy woman in her mid-thirties, with no obvious problems; and now I look like a cancer patient.’