The women looked after him, then at each other. One of them shrugged. By then, Kearney was in the lavatories, shivering and throwing up. When he came out, he found Anna waiting for him. Heathrow was awake now. People were hurrying to make flights, make phone calls, make headway. Anna stood fragile and listless in the middle of the concourse, staring every so often at their faces as they brushed past her. Every time she thought she saw him her face lit up. Kearney remembered her at Cambridge. Shortly after they met, a friend of hers had told him: “We nearly lost her once. You will take care of her, won’t you?” He had remained puzzled by this warning—with its image of Anna as a package that might easily slip the mind—only until he found her in the bathroom a month later, crying and staring ahead, with her wrists held out in front of her. Now she looked at him and said:

“I knew this is where you’d be.”

Kearney stared at her in disbelief. He began to laugh.

Anna laughed too. “I knew you’d come here,” she said. “I brought some of your things.”

“Anna—”

“You can’t keep running away from it forever, you know.”

This made him laugh harder for a moment, then stop.

Kearney’s adolescence had passed like a dream. When he wasn’t in the fields, he was at the imaginary house he called Gorselands, with its stands of pine, sudden expanses of sandy heath, steep-sided valleys full of flowers and rocks. It was always full summer. He watched his cousins, leggy and elegant, walk naked down the beach at dawn; he heard them whisper in the attic. He was continually sore from masturbating. At Gorselands there was always more; there was always more after that. Inturned breathing, a sudden salty smell in an empty room. A murmur of surprise.

“All this dreaming gets you nowhere,” his mother said.

Everyone said that. But by now he had found numbers. He had seen how the same sequences underlay the structure of a galaxy and a spiral shell. Randomness and determination, chaos and emergent order: the new tools of physics and biology. Years before computer modelling made bad art out of the monster in the Mandelbrot Set, Kearney had seen it, churning and streaming and turbulent at the heart of things. Numbers made him concentrate more: they encouraged him to pay attention. Where he had winced away from school life, with its mixture of boredom and savagery, he now welcomed it. Without all that, the numbers made him see, he would not go to Cambridge, where he could begin to work with the real structures of the world.

He had found numbers. In his first year at Trinity someone showed him the Tarot.