He went everywhere with her after that. He was attracted by her cleverly chosen clothes, sudden bursts of laughter, dissembled narcissism. At nineteen, her fragility was already obvious. She had a confusing relationship with her father—some kind of academic in the north—who had wanted her to attend a university closer to home. “He’s sort of disowned me,” she said, looking up at Kearney with a soft, dawning surprise, as if it had just happened. “Can you understand why anyone would do that?” She had tried to kill herself twice. Her friends, in the way students are, were almost proud of this; they took care of her. Kearney, they intimated fiercely, had responsibilities too. Anna herself seemed only embarrassed: forgotten for a minute, though, she began to waste away. “I don’t think I’m eating much,” she would say helplessly on the telephone. She had the air of someone the simplest levels of whose personality must be held together, hands on, daily.

Kearney was drawn to her by all that (not to say by a species of deep gallantry he detected in her, the presence at some level beneath all these gestures of panic and self-defeat, of a woman determined to have what life her demons would allow). But it was her way of having sex that kept him there. If Kearney wasn’t precisely a voyeur, Anna wasn’t quite an exhibitionist. Neither of them ever knew quite what they were. They were a mystery to one another.

Eventually that in itself would enrage them: but those early encounters were like water in a desert. They married in a register office two days after he got his doctorate—he bought for the occasion a Paul Smith suit. They were together ten years after that. They never had children, though she said she wanted them. He saw her through two stretches of therapy, three more bouts of anorexia, a last, almost nostalgic attempt to do away with herself. She watched him follow the funding from university to university, doing what he called “McScience” for the corporates, keeping track of the new discipline of complexity and emergent properties, all the time staying ahead of the game, the Shrander, the body count. If she suspected anything, she never spoke. If she wondered why they moved so often, she never said. In the end he told her everything one night, sitting on the edge of her bed at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, staring down at her bandaged wrists and wondering how they had come to this.

She laughed and took his hands in hers. “We’re stuck with each other now,” she said, and within the year they were divorced.