After Stuart’s departure, Kate took up with a man called Ted Stennett, who was the husband of a woman she had met through the school’s Parent-Teacher Association. Evelyn Stennett and Kate became good friends, chatting in the school playground as they collected their children, calling on one another for tea, going for walks at weekends, for Ted, like Stuart, was something of an absent father, though for opposite reasons. Stuart was lazy, Ted was busy. Ted’s career had been even more spectacular than Kate’s, though it had not been so exposed to the public eye. Born in Huddersfield, the son of a local government official, he had progressed from Grammar School to Leeds University, where he studied zoology. He went on to do research on the life cycle of aedes aegypti, the yellow-fever mosquito, and was given a scholarship by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to continue his work in Gambia, on the role of monkeys as carriers. (It was in Gambia that he met Evelyn, who was then working for the Friends’ Service Council.) His work in Africa persuaded him he didn’t want to be a microbiologist but a doctor, so he came back to England and read medicine, he and Evelyn produced two children during this period. Having qualified, he decided he didn’t want to be a doctor after all and returned to mosquitoes, monkeys, and tropical diseases. His interest in pure research was diverted by an increasing number of invitations to sit on committees advising the government on exotic illnesses, quarantine, and such matters: he is on various WHO advisory lists, and frequently flies off to the Medical Research Council in Gambia, and to conferences and emergency investigations of epidemics. He has a special interest in the history of epidemics, and has written a book on the subject. He is passionately interested in his work, too interested to spend all his time in laboratories. Hugo Mainwaring (again, what a name, as Kate was wont to say in the first days of their friendship, widening her eyes in appreciative mockery), who is Evelyn’s first cousin, once spent a flight to Nairobi being lectured by Ted on the collapse of the Panama canal project in 1884 through yellow fever, and on the similar but much-hushed-up collapse of a dam-building project in Africa in 1967, which Ted claimed was the greatest scandal of our time.

But Ted likes disasters. He has a new apocalyptic vision of the end of the world, of a world united not bybrotherhood or multi-national combines or oil crises, but by illness. A new pandemic, brought about by increasing air travel, increasingly resistant strains of mosquito and rat, brand-new illnesses from new tissue cultures. Increasing communion and technical sophistication engendering increasing disease. Not exactly the vision of the World Health Organisation, which prides itself on its success in eliminating smallpox. “You don’t really think medical science is fighting a losing battle, surely,” people say to him, and Ted smiles and says, “No, not really”: nevertheless the notion of international disaster excites him, clearly he thinks we deserve it, and that the wrath of God is due to fall once more. Not that he believes in God, of course.