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The hallway and the downstairs bathroom had been painted in what she called ‘Caribbean colours’. The bathroom windowsill was full of shells she’d collected from North Sea beaches; little piles of sand fell out of them.
    â€˜How can you live like this?’ she’d said the first time she went home with him. She hardly listened to his objection that the chaise longue and the wood-and-leather stool were design objects.
    She stood in front of his bookcase for a while, head tilted to one side, then said: ‘Have you actually read all these books?’
    â€˜And remembered them,’ he said.
    His scanty household goods were gradually subsumed by the flood of things and doo-dads she brought in. She had her own study upstairs, where she finally completed her thesis, not out of any inspiration but from a sense of duty implanted in her by earlier generations. When she had started furnishing the room it had contained nothing — not one moving box or saggy chair. There was a possibility that he had actually been in that room once before, he figured, on the day the agent had shown him around the house. But, as he commented in reply to her amazement, there had never been a reason to go in there after that.
    â€˜Bluebeard’s chamber,’ she said, ‘with nothing in it.’
    In the meantime she had started working four days a week for a foundation that studied the financial behaviour of households, and she served as advisor to the Ministry of Social Affairs concerning the financial-economic situation of vulnerable groups. Once, they had both been on TV on the same evening, with her talking about hidden poverty among the elderly, and Edward discussing the threat of bio-terrorism. ‘Par for the course,’ she said. ‘You on the commercial channel, and me on national public TV.’
    Their trip to Aspen had revealed to her the closely knit interests of science and industry, and even though he tried to explain to her that things had to be that way, that otherwise all kinds of fundamental research could never be funded — his professorial chair, in fact, was also sponsored by Danone and GlaxoSmithKline — it did nothing to lessen her disgust. ‘I believe you, it’s not that,’ she said. ‘But it shouldn’t be that way. It’s not right. How can you be objective about that? What do they make anyway, pills?’
    â€˜Pills, all kinds of things.’
    â€˜You can’t tell me that they’re not expecting something in return for a vacation to the States like that.’
    â€˜It’s been that way forever in the exact sciences,’ he said. ‘The researcher motivated by pure intellectual curiosity, standing with his back to the world, is a thing of the past. That’s how it’s been for a long time.’
    â€˜But that still doesn’t answer my question.’ She kicked off her shoes, which had something ominous about it under the circumstances.
    â€˜It’s probably all very complex,’ he said, ‘but at the very start of the process, it’s really quite simple. We try to solve problems, so that the doctor won’t have to throw up his hands when you’re bitten by a tick or when you’ve had unsafe sex in the Gambia.’ He reached out to her. ‘But now that I mention it, speaking of unsafe sex …’
    â€˜We’re having a conversation, goddamn it.’
    She had slipped into a polemical mood; he knew she would now defend her standpoint to beyond the borders of the reasonable.
    â€˜What do you want me to say?’ he said. ‘That I’m a pawn of the industry? Well, I’m not. Is there any danger of becoming one? Yes, there is. I know guys who push the limits, who even step over the boundaries at times, but that doesn’t mean you can relegate everyone and everything to the same scrap heap, that —’
    â€˜As far as I could tell, everyone was at that conference.