After waking up today, she had hobbled over to the window and drawn open the curtains, immediately shielding her eyes from the brilliance of an immaculate winter’s day of frosted fields and ice-coated puddles gleaming under a cloudless sky; bright and still and promising, like a silver flute lying on a page of music. She stood there for a while, dull and damaged, and frightened of the light, with her right leg feeling twice as heavy as the other one. When she lowered herself apprehensively down the steep staircase, without any sensation in her right foot, she either banged it down emphatically or hesitated above the step, unsure how far away it was. Her pallid cheerfulness over breakfast was compromised by an obsessive exploration of the thick bandage on her head. Unable to see the wound, she could only pat and stroke it again and again with the tips of her fingers, mapping its soreness and its size. Underneath the thick stitches was the hole that Mr McEwan had drilled. Before the operation, he told her that he still planned to do a needle biopsy, but that he would like to make the hole larger to give him more angles of approach. Since the tumour was wrapped in so much functional tissue, he wanted to be able to try alternative routes to ‘the hot spot’ he needed to sample, without having to drill additional holes.

Lucy opened her eyes wearily, recognised the fireplace, and realised that she had half drifted off again.

‘Oh, hi,’ she said.

‘Hi, darling,’ said Olivia. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’

‘Oh, I’m just drifting in and out.’

‘Is there anything I can get you?’

‘A new brain,’ said Lucy.

‘Let me just check if we’ve got one in the freezer,’ said Olivia.

Before Lucy had time to abandon, continue or complete their brain sketch, the thrum of an approaching helicopter became audible. Its whirring engine and chopping blades grew louder until, slow and deafening and low, it thundered over the roof of Francis’s cottage and receded on the other side.

‘What the hell?’ said Olivia, running to the cottage door to see what was going on.

Lucy felt the familiar tensing and tingling of a seizure grabbing at her leg.

‘Hi, Lucy,’ said Francis, hurrying through the room. ‘I’ve just got to check this out. I’ll be back in a moment. Nobody is allowed to land a helicopter here.’