Eventually, a hand goes up.

‘Yes, Annika?’

‘This is more of a comment than a question,’ Annika says, ‘but I feel very uncomfortable with this homogenising process that’s going on in librarianship, like we’re trying to turn everything into McDonald’s, everything being done in exactly the same way all over the world, when before we had all these independent restaurants that served different kinds of foods from different traditions, and were just more representative of what actually the human experience of discovering and taking in knowledge really is, something personal and unrepeatable, not this corporate bullshit, pardon my language.’

Scattered laughter.

‘I mean, it’s my profession, it’s how things work, and of course I have to do it, but I can still feel – you know, in myself – resistant to this process, critical about it.’

‘Yes, Annika,’ says the director from the back of the room, ‘we are all familiar with your opinions on this subject’ – but there’s a warmth in her tone that Claire finds utterly bewildering. Something throbs behind her eyes. She feels a heat in her throat, the sting that augurs tears, and she blunders the session to a close. The director vanishes. Everyone else filters out, except for Annika, who says, ‘I upset you.’

‘Oh, no, you didn’t.’ Claire goes from table to table, collecting the laminated sets. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Well, that’s good.’ Annika pauses. ‘I’m going to go meet a couple of friends for a drink. Do you want to come?’

Claire would certainly like a drink, but the thought of sitting there with Annika, accepting Annika’s pity, knowing that she thinks Claire is some sort of repulsive globalising capitalist of knowledge, is awful.

‘Thank you, but I’ve already got plans.’

This isn’t entirely a lie. Tonight she is meeting Jerome at the Franz Hals – he’s made friends with the security guard, who lets him stay late – so that he can show her the painting of Claesz’s he is working on. But there are two hours to kill before that.

Jacqueline’s sleep deteriorates. It’s the rich food Patience is making; the pain she cannot cure. At night she lies awake looking at the smoke alarm, but she doesn’t put the lamp on, she doesn’t bother to read, and Patience never comes.

In the daytime, she channel-surfs. She remembers how she once hid the flicker and told Claire it had disappeared. It hadn’t: she was sitting on it – the buttons nudged her piles – but Claire didn’t think to check beneath her mother’s bony bum, and she spent all night hunting, pulling up the cushions, putting them back. When Jacqueline had finally stood up to go to bed, and the flicker fell to the floor, Claire froze, then burst into tears. Her mother’s protestations of innocence made no difference to her. She flounced from the house, and did not return until the following night.

There is no point hiding the flicker with Patience, though. Patience can probably change the channels with her mind.