of your EEG patterns shows us what is the nature of the activity going on in your head. Alan told you that when you are asleep your EEG patterns show that you seem to be in a near permanent pre-arousal state, that it is very rare to see any EEG stage 4.
– EEG stage4? you asked, alarmed.
– What we call deep slumber.
– No deep slumber? I have little or no deep slumber? Is that bad?
– Well, nothing worth writing home about.
The Book of Transfiguration
Lady Haigh ambushed him as he was going through the post in the hall. Bill, bill, circular, freesheet, bill, circular…
‘Lorimer, dear, you really must come and see this, it’s extraordinary.’
Lorimer obediently entered her flat. In the sitting room her ancient dog, Jupiter, lolled panting on a hair-clogged velvet cushion in front of a soundless black and white TV. Lady Haigh’s imposing, cracked-leather, winged armchair was flanked by two single-bar electric fires and lit by an early-model cantilevered reading lamp. The rest of the furniture was almost invisible beneath piles of books and sheaves of magazine and newspaper clippings – Lady Haigh was an avid snipper-outer of articles that caught her interest, and loath to throw them away. Lorimer followed her through into the kitchen, its antiquated components burnished and scoured to museum-standard levels of cleanliness. Beside the thrumming fridge was a plastic basin full of Jupiter’s dog food – giving off an astringent, gamey smell – and beside it a cat-litter (for Jupiter, also, he supposed; Lady Haigh detested cats, ‘Selfish, selfish creatures’). She wrestled with the numerous locks and chains on her back door, opened them and, picking up a battery torch, led Lorimer out into the night, down the iron steps over the basement well to her patch of rear garden. Lady Haigh, Lorimer knew, slept in the basement but he had never ventured or been invited down there. From here the one window he could see was stoutly barred, the glass opaque with grime.
The garden was bounded by the angled walls and recent extensions of the abutting houses, and at its end was overlooked by the rear elevations and small curtained windows of the houses in the parallel street. Great brittle tangles of clematis teetered on the rotting wooden fences that marked the garden’s narrow rectangular boundary, and in one corner a gnarled acacia gamely grew, each year producing noticeably fewer leaves and more sterile boughs, though it added, in summer, a hopeful, trembling presence of pale green leaves against the dirty, crumbling brickwork. Lorimer had a view of the small garden from his bathroom and he had to admit that, when the acacia was in leaf and the clematis was out, and the hydrangeas, and the sun angled down to strike the green turf, Lady Haigh’s little verdant rectangle did possess a form of wild invitation that, like all green things growing in the city, did console and modestly enchant.
But not tonight, Lorimer thought, advancing into his condensing breath as he squelched across the lawn following the torchbeam, his shoes rapidly dampening from the unkempt grass (Lady Haigh disdained lawnmowers of any variety – when she couldn’t use sheep, she used hedge clippers, so she claimed). At the foot of the acacia the sepia coin of light illuminated a small patch of ground.
‘Look,’ Lady Haigh said, pointing, ‘a fritillary, now isn’t that astonishing?’
Lorimer crouched and peered and sure enough there was a tiny bell-shaped flower, almost grey in the torch light, growing out of the scumbled earth, but with a distinct darker checkerboard pattern on the thin, papery flute.
‘Never seen one so early,’ she said, ‘not even at Missenden, and we had masses there. And we didn’t have any last year – I thought the frost had got them.’
‘You must have a little micro-climate going here,’ Lorimer said, hoping that was the sort of intelligent comment one made. ‘It certainly is a beautiful little flower.’ Not up Marlobe’s street, he couldn’t help thinking.
‘Ah, fritillaries,’ she said with touching nostalgia, then added, ‘I did put a mulch down for the acacia, you see. Nigel gave me a couple of buckets from his border. That may have encouraged it.’
‘Nigel?’
‘That very nice Santafurian in number 20. Sweet man.’
Back in the kitchen Lorimer gently declined her offer of tea, pleading work that was waiting for him.
‘After you with the Standard, if I may,’ she asked.
‘Please take it, Lady Haigh. I’ve flicked through it already.’
‘What a treat,’ she exclaimed. ‘Today’s Standard!’ Jupiter chose this moment to waddle effortfully