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Not being a clan that does things by halves, we are decamping from Camden to our house in deepest, darkest Norfolk, the better to appreciate our near-solitary confinement. Spare a thought for millennial Phoebe, who now faces a week of patchy wi-fi.
Emma was evidently more anxious about Haag than Andrew had realised. She had barged into the smoking room earlier, jabbering about the unfortunate Irish doctor who had the virus. Trying to explain that this didn’t mean Olivia was next was a lost cause. Emma kept saying, ‘But Andrew, she knew him. I met him, at Heathrow, when I fetched her.’ ‘And did she know him in the Biblical sense? Did you lick his eyeballs? Did Olivia bid him a passionate farewell, with tongues?’
How much else did he know? Bugger the internet. Had anything wrecked families, relationships, bloody normality more efficiently than the internet? Andrew didn’t think so.
Google returned thousands of results. At the top was a row of grisly pictures of people, or perhaps corpses, on stretchers. She clicked quickly on the NHS website, a beacon of first-world safety, to escape the images.
‘I had such a nice chat with a young man at the airport yesterday,’ said Emma, hoping to distract her daughter before the mood put down roots.
Was there anything, thought Andrew, more dismal than a family of adults wearing paper hats?
The cruelty of Haag is that it is transmitted by compassion. Mothers catch it, because they can’t bear to leave a vomiting child alone. Nurses are infected by patients they have tended too well
The way she could switch her anger off, for good manners, was formidable. It was a product of her breeding.
The only giveaway that they were father and son was their identical height. Side by side, they looked like chopsticks.
Instead, she said, ‘Anything wrong with being homosexual?’ She kept her tone light, but realised she was holding a wooden spoon rather threateningly.
Each regret seemed to summon another, as if he’d turned over a log in his mind and revealed a writhing mass of woodlice.
‘God, Liv, it was so stressful! How do you work in a hospital every day? You were like the one person who’d know what to do, and you were lying there being no bloody use!’
