Sunday

I dreamt of you last night.

I dreamt of you last night. I was talking to you on the phone in my childhood bedroom, in the highest room in the tallest tower, and my mother was trying to hurry me downstairs, even sending servants to hurry me, because dinner was ready. And I was saying, I’ll just be a moment, I’ll just be a moment. (One of the servants went to a lower room where he could watch me through the window. The house was somehow bent, and through that window was visible my window.) But as we were saying goodbye your voice broke and you started crying. You told me that something had happened to you. "What happened?” I asked, full of pain. You said, “I got into a car wreck... in a field of cornflowers...”

And I saw in my mind’s eye this spectacular and beautiful tragedy.

Went to some drinks after church on Sunday, organised by an exuberant American man whose WhatsApp picture is him smiling next to a horse. He took control of the table and ordered several bottles of wine. One girl confessed to the room at large that she only drank water and could not eat anything she didn't prepare herself. Though she was not a sullen anorexic but a kind of cheery one, apparently dazed by her malnourishment. She was forty years old but looked twenty. I wondered if it was her extreme thinness that made her seem so youthful but I decided that it was because she was Asian. She had a little black purse and a high clear voice like a bell which was especially charming when she laughed.

At some point a man called George started boasting about his work in neurotrauma surgery. I don't like this man and get a weird feeling about him. He is overfamiliar with women in a kind of 1970s way, touching them a lot and winking incessantly. I once bumped into him behind the church, where he exclaimed “Give me a kiss!” and crushed the side of my head against his face. I think he's a compulsive liar. He’s vague about the details of his incredible achievements and none of his stories seem to fit together. Hardly anyone’s a brain surgeon. It’s like being a rocket scientist—it’s a joke job. So I was needling him about the difference between different types of neurosurgery to see if he’d trip up. And as always he talked pompously and evasively, saying nothing. Of course it’s possible to be an unlikeable brain surgeon, but I just don't believe he's clever enough to be a doctor. He comes off like a beast, like a horse, and he can't keep his story straight. He also says that he’s a commodore in the Royal Navy and that he's opening a wine bar in Chelsea. I said, “How are you going to run a wine bar and work as a brain surgeon at the same time?” And he was like, “It's easy.” I shot an incredulous look into the bottom of my glass. I'm noticing more and more that people don't even pick up on the weirdness of others. Massive social weirdness just floats under the radar. Even the investment banker, who was the most normal person at the table, didn't seem to find George strange. Or at least he was good at hiding it.

The dark-haired girl sitting across from me wore sunglasses at first, which made it difficult for me to talk to her. I don't know how people wearing sunglasses are feeling, and I don't know which part of the black screens to fix my eyes on. I even feel like I can't hear their words properly. Anyway, she took them off after a while, and told me she was studying data analysis at the London School of Economics. I asked what that meant, and she explained, and I was none the wiser. The man George was still waffling on about neurosurgery and I said to her confidentially, "I want to ask him whether the eyes are a part of the brain." She laughed, but seemed disturbed. I went home and started looking up clairvoyants and quacks and all sorts else.