‘Can I point out that I’m not finding it comforting to have my surgeon compared to a serial killer?’ said Lucy, and because they were all tipsy and anxious and tense, they burst out laughing, and for a moment it was like it had so often been, twelve or fifteen years ago, when the three of them had sat in the King’s Arms, laughing about a ridiculous tutorial or a disastrous night out.

When Olivia finally stopped preparing lunch, she went upstairs to have a shower, but found Francis already in the bathroom, shaving, shirtless, half his face covered in foam, the other already done.

‘How come I’ve managed to chop eight different kinds of vegetables and you’ve only managed to shave half your face?’ she asked, kissing him on the shoulder.

‘The early days were just designed to rope you in,’ said Francis. ‘Next weekend I’ll still be in bed when you come up from the kitchen.’

‘That’ll be nice,’ said Olivia, peeling off her sweater.

Lucy lay on the sofa, curled up and still, like a wounded animal, staring at the fire in Francis’s grate, or more precisely, at the mound of ash on which it smouldered. She couldn’t think of a time when she wouldn’t have sprung up and loaded more wood on to the fire-gouged logs decaying radiantly in front of her, but in her current state, it was absurd to imagine doing anything so strenuous and affirmative. Fire, like cancer, destroyed its host and by doing so, led to its own extinction. Couldn’t she come to a deal with her tumour that allowed them both to keep going, like coming to an ‘accommodation’ with a blackmailer? The tumour had found accommodation in her brain without asking her, but now it was time to negotiate. The few people she had told about her medical difficulties had all at some point generalised about death, volunteering that they might be run over later that afternoon, but it was not as if she had renounced the opportunity to have a fatal accident by getting cancer. Everybody had a question mark hanging over their head; she had an additional one lodged inside it.

Whatever combination of psychological qualities lay behind Mr McEwan’s calling, Lucy had grown to like him. He had popped in to say that the biopsy had gone ‘perfectly’. She didn’t labour the point that she could hardly walk but did mention that her stitches were throbbing painfully. This, it turned out, was ‘perfectly normal’, due to the tightness of the skin on the skull, which meant that the flaps made by the incision around the drill hole had to be sewn back robustly with the strongest thread.