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to be vintage port and, while vaguely aware Richard was a neuroscientist, he was clearly struggling to understand his new colleague’s particular field, synaptic plasticity.
    ‘Yes, I think my wife does that,’ the Master had remarked after much thought. ‘She’s very keen on it.’
    ‘Synaptic plasticity?’ Richard masked his surprise. He had met the Master’s wife earlier. She was goggle-eyed with a receding chin and had talked almost exclusively about her cats. She had not seemed interested in the frontiers of brain research.
    The Master of St Alwine’s had grabbed a passing sausage. ‘Every Friday morning in the church hall,’ he explained. ‘She wears loose trousers. She says it keeps her fit.’
    It emerged that he meant Pilates.
    ‘Synaptic plasticity is about how the brain makes connections,’ Richard explained through gritted teeth. The Master was patently making no connections whatsoever, apart from with more passing canapés.
    He had been rescued by a kindly classics professor who had made strenuous efforts to connect her subject with his, but Richard, while grateful for her solicitude, was unable to pick up any of the many lines she threw him. He had lost the knack of small talk, which had always been Amy’s department anyway. At parties she had flitted engagingly about, chattering brightly, charming all. Her ability to always say the right thing had consistently amazed Richard and sometimes, when examining slices of brain through microscopes in his laboratory, he had tried to spot this skill. It had been possible for some time to trace the physical process of thought, but charm, seen only in the eye of the beholder, left no such trace.
    No one last night had seemed to find him particularly charming, unless you counted the junior research fellow, squiffy on the Branston house white, who had stumbled into his personal space and, over the thrusting cleavage, bursting out of her low-cut, red satin top, slurred, ‘It’s true what they say about you.’
    He had met her unsteady gaze with his own, flinty one. ‘Which is what?’
    ‘That you’re the sexiest neuroscientist in the business. Talk about cortex interruptus !’
    Once, Richard knew, this would have made him laugh out loud. Now he merely gave her a freezing look. It did not, however, appear to register; either alcohol had dulled her senses or the skin so abundantly on show was a very thick one. It looked it, certainly.
    ‘Well, Prof,’ she said breathily, leaning confidingly into him. ‘When you need a night off from the neurons just give me a call.’
    Richard had strode away, appalled at the implication that he was somehow available and looking for love. That there could be anyone after Amy was unthinkable, least of all some inebriated postgraduate, pushing her flabby white breasts in his face.
    The evening had ground on. There had been speeches to endure, then a terse reply of his own. Only then had Richard been able to escape.
    He had bowed tightly at the assembled company and hurried off, knowing they would talk about him after he had gone. ‘Poor man,’ the women would witter. ‘He’s so closed-up, isn’t he? Of course, you know he lost his wife a couple of years ago. Yes; didn’t you know? Dreadful. Cancer. Mmm. She was quite young, too. They met when she was one of his students. Quite romantic, really. So tragic. No, no children.’
    In his more philosophical moments, Richard felt that his situation as a widowed and grieving neuroscientist was an oxymoron. It was a contradiction in terms, a philosophical joke almost. More than most, he was aware that he and Amy’s entire marriage, viewed from one angle, had been nothing more than a sequence of neurons firing in a particular way. They had both been mere collections of habits, preferences and impressions, all products of excitation and inhibition in the flabby grey computers they carried in their skulls. At one stage he had hoped that thinking of it like that would help him