‘Yes, you are.’

She knew all about his experiences in group and how much it helped him, once he got over his resistance.

‘Turns out I’m not any different to the rest of them,’ he’d said. ‘I’m so arrogant.’

‘You’re not arrogant,’ Bea had answered. ‘You felt left out.’

She turned onto her tummy and rested her chin on the back of one hand, tugging the blades of grass, but not breaking them. If she looked close enough the blades went into darkness and she could see the white part, before they turned green, and the soil.

‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,’ said Alex.

She looked up. The quotation was from a book of Simone Weil’s essays and letters that she had taken in to hospital for him, not that last time at the Priory, but the first, when she was still at university. She was twenty, he wasn’t thirty yet. She’d helped him check in, and gone every week from Cambridge to south-west London to visit, carrying books and cheap chocolate in a cotton bookshop bag. It had been summer. The bag would bump against her hip, the handles damp with sweat by the end of the journey. She used to cry on the coach on the way back to Cambridge, but never in front of him. They sat in his room, like a room in a Premier Inn, and talked. They talked about religion, travel and philosophy; her set texts, his desired enlightenment. They talked, but never about the thing they both knew best, their family. It was enough they had both been there.

‘Simone Weil is way classier than the serenity prayer,’ said Alex. ‘I mean, fuck sake, that’s some horrible writing. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change?’

‘Niebuhr’s original starts with “God grant me”,’ she said, ‘and it has Jesus in it. And it’s a bit better written.’

‘No,’ said Alex. ‘Fuck God. And Fuck Jesus.’

‘Simone Weil was a Christian.’

‘Yes, I realise that, she was practically a saint,’ said Alex, ‘but she wasn’t an arsehole.’

‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.’

‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It’s bigger than addiction, and personal power. It’s losing the self through being present.’

‘It’s a beautiful idea,’ she said.

‘Since we’re on the subject of morality. I was thinking I might convert to Catholicism.’

‘No you weren’t.’

‘I’m living in La France!’ he said. ‘Why not? And it’s all in Latin, so you don’t notice the silliness. It’s ideal for me. Incense. Architecture. Absolution.’

‘On the other hand, you’re an atheist,’ said Bea. ‘Potential stumbling block?’

‘Well, yes – the Christian God. I mean, it’s bullshit, isn’t it?’

She rolled over again onto her back, and risked the sun on her face. ‘Religion is a bit of a problem. But religion is a Western construct. God isn’t.’

‘Yeah, I don’t know if I’m an atheist,’ said Alex. ‘Atheism is a belief system in itself. And they’re such bullies. That Richard Dawkins doesn’t like Jesus because he wants his job. I refuse to be saved by anyone who thinks he has the answer.’