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door if they thought things were too quiet.’ But soon the Selves’ place in her life was taken by a visiting professor of mathematical physics. This man, Michael Kearney,
    uncommunicative, narcissistic and easily depressed, turned out to have his own problems. They were married fast and divorced even faster; yet, sustained perhaps by its fiercely mutual structures
    of manipulation, the relationship proved more durable than either of them believed, lurching along in its disordered way until Kearney ended it on the eve of the Millennium by walking into the
    Atlantic just north of Scituate, Massachusetts.
    At this remove, the mathematician became unidentifiable. He had no family Helen Alpert could trace; while Anna claimed to have ‘forgotten everything’, and wouldn’t be certain
    about his age or even the colour of his eyes. When she could be persuaded to speak about Kearney, he was transformed into careful fiction. Vague one day, meaninglessly particular the next,
    Anna’s revision of Kearney presented him as a gap in her life even as he had filled it.
    Publicly there was a little more. He had written, probably as a joke, a pamphlet on randomness and the Tarot. Some topological speculations – stimulated by exchanges with the reclusive
    mathematician Grigori Perelman – had been published a year or two before his death, to cautious peer approval. Otherwise Michael Kearney’s contribution to science lay in an unfinished
    quantum computing project, most of the work on which had been done by an unassuming experimental physicist called Brian Tate. Tate – newly divorced, unequal even to the brief publicity
    surrounding Kearney’s suicide, and wrong-footed by a minor funding scandal involving the venture capital firm MVC-Kaplan – went down with the ship. His results proved
    unrepeatable. With his collaborator dead, and his claim to have coaxed massive parallel processing from a train of cheaply modified desktop PCs dismissed as junk science, he faded from view in a
    month. All this was a matter of record.
    By that time, Anna’s parents were plaques on a chapel wall somewhere in East Cheshire. She had no friends. The Millennium was over, the fireworks had gone out. Everyone else seemed to
    know what they wanted. Back in London, she bought a self-help manual and taught herself to eat again. She entrapped Tim Waterman and, still confused but with a growing sense of
    self-preservation, set about reducing the chaos in her life. Waterman was a kind and successful man whose work often took him abroad. The first time he went away, Anna found she could cook.
    She put on weight, toyed with the Women’s Institute and, discovering a gift for flowers, the Prettiest Village competition. Tim, who had known her briefly during the Michael Kearney era,
    seemed calmly amused by it all. She brought up their daughter with care, the best humour she could manage, and a real sense of the worth of that.
    But everything, Helen Alpert reminded herself as she put away the file and locked the consulting room door behind her for the day, is language.
    Pushing her old car west along the Thames through heavy evening traffic, she recalled Anna’s description of ‘fucking in a blind panic’ with her first husband. ‘In fact
    I always quite liked sex to be that way,’ Anna had added. ‘It made it seem more central somehow, a means of saying something urgent about yourself. The problem was always what could
    happen next.’ Then, when Helen Alpert raised her eyebrows at this, Anna laughed suddenly and advised: ‘Never do anything unless you’re lost or on fire, Doctor. Otherwise how
    will you remember it?’ Balked by the Mortlake roundabout, gazing vaguely at a thick red sunset behind layered fringes of trees, Dr Alpert wondered how she could make sense of this except as
    bravado. Anna Waterman had reinvented herself with the century: now she was discovering that Anna Selve remained the disordered substrate beneath it all. Whatever had drawn