Olivia knew from her brother that it had not been easy for him to make the visit, despite its blatantly compassionate nature. Lucy occupied a place of special jealousy in his girlfriend Lesley’s pantheon of rivals. She suspected that Lucy was ‘the real love of Charlie’s life’ and that she was just ‘good wife material’ – Lesley was one of those people who thought that originality consisted of a fluent and knowing use of cliché, vigorously imprisoned with inverted commas to make sure it couldn’t escape the further boredom of being vaguely ironic. Although she was right about Charlie’s nostalgia for Lucy, Olivia fervently hoped that she was wrong about being ‘good wife material’ for her brother.

‘Oh, great,’ said Lucy, reaching for her bag and beginning to rummage for the woollen cap she had been intending to keep for after the operation.

There was a knock on the door. Olivia and Lucy braced themselves for the trauma of another medical briefing, but it turned out to be Charlie, bearing a bottle of the same champagne he had drunk with Lucy on their first anniversary when they were still undergraduates. It was a romantic, or at least a sentimental gesture, which touched Lucy, who hadn’t seen him in a long time, and wanted to be reassured that the palace coup being mounted by her brain had done nothing to reduce his passionate admiration for her mind and body, and that he would stand beside her in defending them. She had pulled her woollen cap down to her eyebrows and over her ears and looked as if she was about to set off for a walk on a frosty morning. Charlie extracted some flimsy plastic cups from a dispenser by the sink and poured the champagne.

‘I associate these cups with urine samples,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see them playing a more primary role.’

‘Upstream,’ said Lucy.

‘Exactly,’ said Charlie.

‘You missed your vocation as a sommelier,’ said Olivia, ‘sweet-talking people into enjoying their wine even more than they would anyway.’

Lucy tried to wrap up the rough, sharp edges of the day with layers of description, as anyone would, but only succeeded in provoking an animated discussion, typical of the Carr family, about the psychopathy of surgeons; the most audacious and godlike healers, who were also the only group of people encouraged to slice open human bodies, saw off limbs, cut out flesh, remove organs and excise brain tissue, operating at the edge of paralysis, stroke and haemorrhage. It was a profession that seemed to fuse compassion and brutality, without having to reveal which was the dominant impulse, as long as both were accompanied by a high degree of precision.