‘Still,’ said Olivia, with one of the sudden waves of sympathy that seemed to be preparing her for the unrelenting demands of motherhood, ‘it’s difficult not to feel sorry for him. I mean, look, he’s obviously panicking under all that smugness.’
‘Stay strong,’ said Lucy.
‘Sorry, I must have testosterone on my amygdala again,’ said Olivia.
‘That’s just the sort of explanation he would approve of: putting magnanimity on a sound physical basis,’ said Lucy. ‘Oh, by the way, just to test the strength of those mercy hormones, guess who I just saw?’
‘I’m flooding my bloodstream,’ said Olivia. ‘Who?’
‘Hope.’
‘What? Why is she here?’ said Olivia. ‘Was she with Francis?’
‘Not really. She was talking to Hunter, and Francis was standing nearby, but in his defence, he seemed to be much more interested in the ceiling than in Hotel California.’
‘Yes, I think he decided that the exceptional architecture called for an exceptional dose of magic mushrooms, but what’s she doing here at all?’
‘Well, she is a friend of Hunter’s and it is his party…’
‘True,’ said Olivia, ‘it must be my…’
‘Hormones?’
‘Right!’
‘They sort of explain everything, along with genes and quarks and, well, everything, especially RNA.’
‘Now you’re just being trendy,’ said Olivia.
‘Okay, everything explains everything,’ Lucy conceded. ‘Let’s hold that beautiful thought.’
‘Where did you see them?’
‘Through there,’ said Lucy, pointing at the Palm Room.
* * *
‘Why are you staring at that waiter?’ asked Charlie. ‘Do you remember him from Broadmoor?’
‘No,’ said Martin, relieved that his son had overreached and allowed him to tell the truth. ‘He just looked a little lost, that’s all. As you know, it’s one of the shadows of my profession that I can’t entirely stop interpreting.’
‘I do know,’ said Charlie, ‘but you’ve got much better at disguising it.’
‘Stop flattering me,’ said Martin, laughing.
‘You’re like a constitutional monarch. You may have strong views, but you’re not allowed to give anything away.’
‘I’m sure the Queen and I could have hours of conversation on that particular topic – if either of us were allowed to discuss it,’ said Martin.
* * *
Francis heard the ominous appeals for silence that precede speeches and bolted up the stone staircase, against the advice of various people who seemed to think he must be longing to hear Saul’s promotional musings on Brainwaves, a subject that had already stolen days of his attention in Big Sur and Plein Soleil. Given the strength of the mushrooms and the scorpion’s nest of his conscience, Francis would have been driven into hiding whether there had been speeches or not. In a sense they were welcome, since he could now search for solitude in less crowded rooms, especially since all the people close to him would feel compelled by politeness to listen while Saul and Hunter were unveiling the technology of consciousness.
Once upstairs, Francis passed through the thinning population of guests loitering in a magnificent red silk room, with a green and gold ceiling of shallow domes, that he would normally have taken time to be enchanted by. On this occasion, the opportunity for promiscuous visual pleasure offered by every carving, every painting, every window pane glowing with reflected chandeliers, every detail, down to the serpentine pattern of golden metal entwined around the door handles, was being usurped by an emotional urgency that drove him deeper into the house, as far away from other people as possible. Eventually, he came to a smaller, intensely decorated room. The pieces of furniture that had been made specifically for the room were already cordoned off and occupied by polite notices requesting visitors not to touch them, but a caterer’s chair was still available for Francis to rest on. A couple stood in the bay window speaking quietly, and a man who seemed to be straining to give the impression that he was no stranger to such surroundings was squinting at the neoclassical decoration as if he had been asked to authenticate it, but was in no rush to lend his authority to the anxious owner. Otherwise, the room was mercifully empty. Francis calculated that it must be directly above the Palm Room where he had sat with Hope earlier in the evening. He was distraught from the recklessness of their conversation (not to mention the recklessness of the behaviour that had accompanied it), and by the fact that he seemed to have become addicted to her touch. It was a drug that created its own anguish. He hadn’t been anguished before he met her and then suddenly been relieved by her touch; he had become anguished by discovering her touch and the bleakness of its absence. In fact, it was deeper than that, they seemed to be part of the same organism, rather than individuals who had chosen to enter into some kind of relationship. As an ecologist, he was always going around saying that life occurred in a world of processes and not things, but he had been thinking of biology, not love, and he was somewhat taken aback that the fervently mutual life he had been observing with binoculars and analysing in soil samples and talking about with passion, while he catalogued the wilding of Howorth, had suddenly broken into what he had secretly persisted in regarding as a private sphere. Far from being a private sphere, it turned out to be a tropical ecosystem over which he had no individual control, and in which, perhaps, he had no individual existence. No, he really didn’t want to have that thought. It was all very well to chop a carrot mindfully, acknowledging the shop and the van driver and the farmer and the farmer’s children and the microorganisms in the soil and the seed and the history of the plant and the rain and the clouds and the evaporating oceans: the endless sprawl of interdependent causes and conditions, but being the person who was holding that awareness with practised logic and easy inclusiveness was quite another matter from feeling like a microorganism in the soil of another process in which his own decisions and judgements were devoured and dissolved. The mushrooms were not helping, if the idea was for him to preserve any sense of control, or they were helping, if the idea was to see what a waste of time it was to cling to that illusion.
Oh, shit, the connoisseur was homing in on him, with the pedantic smirk of a man who is always ready to take a masterpiece off the hands of the ignorant fools who happen to own it.
‘Christopher Spandral,’ said the connoisseur.
Francis seemed incapable of saying his own name and simply stared.
‘As you probably know,’ said the connoisseur, rushing past the obvious historical facts, ‘this room suffered some damage during the war, but rather wickedly, I have to admit that I actually prefer—’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Francis, ‘I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve come here to be alone. I’ve just had some rather overwhelming news.’
The connoisseur nodded, with a slightly raised eyebrow that indicated that in his day he had been no stranger to fierce emotion, but that he had stamped on that spitting cobra long ago, without being in the least surprised to see it flaring up impressively in the lives of lesser mortals. He slipped from a room that had ceased to amuse him; while at the same time the couple who had been whispering in the bulging, pregnant window, chose to wander off, leaving Francis unexpectedly alone. He closed his eyes to deepen his solitude, but instead of the darkness and peace that he craved, he found that his eyelids had turned into hectic and vivid screens. He seemed to be hurtling through a V-shaped space towards an infinitely postponed convergence, rushing past charged but indecipherable clips from a cutting-room floor, subliminal advertisements for products that didn’t exist and were impossible to desire.
‘To hell with that,’ said Francis, opening his eyes without dispelling his unease.
He was in trouble. It turned out that Hope was going to see her mother in Portugal in order to persuade her to leave her considerable fortune to Not on Our Watch, a consortium of rich environmentalists that was buying up thousands of squ
are miles of Amazonia, in order to preserve them and their indigenous inhabitants from predation. She wanted him to help run Not on Our Watch. She wanted him to go with her to Eastern Ecuador where they had one of their bases, since Ecuador was the first country to have included The Rights of Nature in its constitution. Francis was longing to go with her, to make love on the equator, among the swirling info-chemicals, with the full heat of the world weighing down on them. She said it would be a richer life, not a double life; that she would be sharing him, not stealing him, but, in the end, he didn’t even know if the story of the bracelet she had told in his cottage was true. He wavered between paranoia and adoration – variants of credulity – without finding anything he could believe. At the most mundane level, he was unclear how he was going to run an Amazonian non-profit while looking after a newborn child in a cottage in Sussex.
‘Oh, so that’s where you are.’
‘Oh, hi. Hi, yes. Sorry, overdid the mushrooms a bit.’
‘I see,’ said Olivia. ‘Is that why you’re hiding up here?’
‘Yes. All quite full-on downstairs. It’s nice to see you. Sorry.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Ultimately, yes, but I’ve got to metabolise rather more psilocybin than I bargained for.’
‘Is that all? Because George and Emma were saying that Hope Schwartz is trying to steal you away to run some Amazonian project…’
‘No, no, no; I mean, yes: there is an Amazonian thing that Hunter is involved with and Hope and lots of rich people…’
‘And how are you going to be involved?’
‘Technology,’ said Francis boldly. ‘Drones are going to patrol all the land owned by Not on Our Watch and they’ll have sensors to detect pollution, gold prospecting, deliberate fires, and so on.’
‘Hmm,’ said Olivia. ‘And you’re going to process all this information with your Nokia Brick while living off the grid in the ecological Langley of Willow Cottage.’
‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to compromise,’ said Francis.
‘What other compromises are you planning to make?’ Olivia asked.
‘None that I can think of,’ said Francis.
Other guests started to wander into the room.
‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ said Olivia, ‘when you’ve metabolised.’
‘Yup, definitely, just need a while to get my head straight.’
What was he doing? He did not want to live a divided life. On the other hand, he already was. It was divided by his overwhelming attraction to Hope. There was nothing wrong with the attraction; it was grasping at Hope that was splitting him in two. He mustn’t be distracted by his yearning for Hope, but he also mustn’t be distracted by his loyalty to Olivia. Resolution couldn’t lie in siding with either part of the divide; it must be deeper than that.
He tried to pull himself together and concentrate. The way out was not to constrict the underlying feeling of attraction, but to expand it. As he allowed its full force to rise up in him, it seemed to push Hope aside, like the bud on a tree pushing aside its sticky scales as it breaks into flower and opens to the sun.
What a feeling.
He still wanted to fuck her, there was no getting away from that, but for the moment he didn’t have to shield himself with guilt when he could open himself to something even more thrilling than her touch.
Phew. Okay. Back in the saddle. See how long that lasts. Better get back down to the party.
* * *
‘Hey, Saul,’ said Hunter, calling over his friend. ‘Great speech. I wanted to make sure you know that before I sack you.’
‘Sack me?’ said Saul, chuckling. ‘You always had a twisted sense of humour. The speech was great, right? You just said so.’
‘It was adequate,’ said Hunter, ‘but the reason I’m sacking you is because I’ve seen the email trail between you and John MacDonald.’
‘That is a private email exchange, at a private address on a personal device,’ said Saul. ‘Whatever you think you found by hacking my emails, which by the way are totally exploratory, is inadmissible and I can sue you for violation—’
‘No hacking, Saul. MacDonald sent me the whole exchange and wanted to know if I would make a better offer. I could. So, we’ve signed and you’re out.’
‘Hunter, it’s not like it looks. These inventors are sometimes so on the spectrum, they’re off the spectrum, if you know what I mean. Out there. They need special handling—’
‘Saul,’ said Jade, ‘Chrissy is standing in the hall flanked by two security guards. She’s not looking happy, more like a shoplifter being handcuffed in Macy’s in front of her children. The longer you delay this, the longer she’s going to be having that feeling and the more she’s going to hate you.’
‘Hunter?’ Saul pleaded.
‘Get him out of the building,’ Hunter said to Jade.
‘Hunter!’ said a delighted William Moorhead, moving into the space vacated by Saul and Jade. ‘What a truly magnificent party; the best possible setting, perfectly organised and what an impressive crowd. Talking of which, I was wondering if you could put in a good word for me with some of your pals at Google. There’s a position there that I think would suit me rather well and help keep the roof on Little Soddington.’
‘Jesus,’ said Hunter, ‘have you still got that place? Shouldn’t you downsize after the divorce? Isn’t there a Very Little Soddington Manor? Or a Tiny Soddington Manor?’
‘You mustn’t hit a fellow when he’s down,’ said Moorhead.
Hunter put a hand on Moorhead’s shoulder and addressed him with apparent tenderness.
‘Listen, William, ever since I heard a Google exec say, “It is our intention to manage the knowledge of the world,” I’ve been longing to clip their wings. That’s far too great a weight for a single corporation to take on. Although you would clearly be a liability to any organisation that employed you, I can’t just pick up a rusty nail file from the pavement when I clip those giant wings, I’m going to need a chainsaw.’
Hunter slapped Moorhead rather too hard on his shoulder and walked away without giving him the chance to reply.
* * *
Plagues were sweeping across the world: Ebola, sweating blood out of West Africa; rabid dogs roaming and foaming in India; superbugs crawling up hospital walls. If you thought about it, thought Sebastian, hospitals were really for looking after germs, not people, to make sure that they learnt how to survive all the antibiotics known to man. You were never going to get human beings who survived one hundred per cent of the insults thrown at them, but these superbugs were entering a realm of immortality. We were preparing them to be the gods of the next era, when humans were dinosaurs. The real point, though, like the tip of a syringe, like a syringe giving you a flu jab, was that this year there was a very nasty flu virus doing the rounds and a lot of his workmates had been struck. They were bedridden now, with superbugs parachuting from the ceiling into their compromised immune systems. Mr Morris, whose son had taken his own life in a mental health tragedy, used the word ‘colleagues’, but Sebastian couldn’t handle that. It was more than he could bear to think he was important enough to have a ‘colleague’. Once you had a colleague, you might end up with ‘an opposite number’ and, once you had an ‘opposite number’, you might get cancelled out, like being eaten in a video game, or like anti-matter – which he wasn’t quite clear about, but it didn’t sound good, did it, from the point of view of matter? And nowadays he did take the point of view of matter, although at one time he had probably been more anti-matter-minded.
‘My opposite number in Washington,’ said Sebastian to himself, in his super-posh voice, checking out Eric’s suit in the mirror again, but then Washington seemed so far away that he got a bit upset. ‘My opposite number in Dalston,’ he said, to make it less frightening, but in the same voice, otherwise it would be cheating. Dr Carr said that they were his voices and that he was learning to have a more playful relationship with them.
There was no d
isguising it, he was feeling extremely, extremely nervous. Mr Morris had called that morning to say that so many of his ‘colleagues’ had been struck down by the flu that he was going to have to ask Sebastian to help serve the canapés at tonight’s event. He said that Sebastian had been a valuable and reliable ‘member of the team’ washing the dishes, and that he had ‘complete confidence’ that Sebastian could ‘step up to the plate’ and help with the canapés tonight. Sebastian had become very confused for a moment because he was still thinking about the dishes and ended up picturing himself stepping on a plate of canapés, but Mr Morris brought him back to his senses by saying that he was having Eric’s suit couriered over to the venue, because Sebastian and Eric were ‘roughly the same fit’.
‘Roughly’ was one way of putting it, although in fact it was quite slippery and slithery getting into Eric’s suit and also, since the shoulders sloped off the end of his shoulders and the sleeves practically came down to his knuckles, it was in fact totally the wrong fit. He looked like a boy who was in a uniform that would fit him in three years, like the one his fake mum bought him, saying there was no point in wasting money. But then Carol, who was very, very nice, had taken some of the tissue paper from the coat hanger and worked it into the shoulder pads and managed to raise the sleeves by a couple of inches and make the shoulders look as if they belonged to him.
About lunchtime, his nerves had got so bad he’d thought of taking some of his old meds. Dr Carr had said that he was doing really well without them, but that it was all right to keep them at the back of the medicine cabinet as an insurance policy. They had been talking a lot about the side effects recently. He had told Dr Carr all about the dry mouth and the dullness and the weight gain, and the tremors, but they had also discussed some long-term studies – he was always online, reading up on his meds. Dr Carr was careful not to be negative about the meds, because he knew that compared to an episode, they were like a packet of cigarettes and a tub of ice cream in the park. It was the studies that were negative, showing that anti-psychotics lowered people’s life expectancy, which wasn’t good – unless you wanted to kill yourself, of course. ‘The exception that proves the rule’, as people liked to say. But even if you wanted to commit suicide, they weren’t much good, because they didn’t kill you outright, they just caused cardiovascular complications, and other stuff, that made your life, on average, shorter. Lots of people wanted to live for a long time, and quite a lot of people wanted to kill themselves, but you really had to look long and hard to find people who were gagging to make their lives shorter and nastier, on average, over quite a long period. Not that lots of people didn’t manage to do that.
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