She subjected him to her… I was going to say her most intense gaze, but her gazes were almost all equally intense. “Has he?”

“Yes. I was wondering if you could clear up some of the finer points of their behavioural relationship with ant colonies.”

My God. Was this what love felt like?

“I’d be delighted to.” Dr. Fairclough looked the closest to happy I’d ever seen her. Which wasn’t very. “But it’s an intricate subject, and there are too many distractions here.”

Oliver drew Dr. Fairclough gently aside in search of a better rove beetle/ant colony interaction discussing location, leaving me awash in gratitude and hopefully better placed to salvage Kimberly Pickles.

“That Dr. Fairclough,” she began, “is a right cow.”

It wasn’t language I would have personally used, but I could see where she was coming from. “I’m afraid academics can be quite single-minded about their interests.”

“No fucking kidding. She genuinely finks that dung beetles are more important than people.”

I offered a conspiratorial smile. “I’d say you have to get to know her, but no. She genuinely does.”

She didn’t smile back. “And you really fink it’s right, do you? For people to give their money to you instead of a women’s shelter in Blackheath or fighting child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Thing is, she wasn’t totally wrong. CRAPP wasn’t a cool charity, and it wasn’t even high up on those effective-giving lists that help nerdy mathlanthropists evaluate exactly how to save the most lives per dollar. But it was my cause, and I’d fight for it, and from what I knew of Kimberly Pickles, she liked a fighter.

“Well,” I said, “if I worked for a women’s shelter in Blackheath, there’d be people asking me why people should give money to that instead of malaria prevention or de-worming initiatives. And if I worked for a charity that tried to prevent child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, there’d be people who asked me why they should be sending money overseas when we’ve got problems enough over here.”

She relaxed a bit, but she still wasn’t buying it. “It’s fucking dung beetles, mate.”

“It is.” I gave a you got me kind of shrug. “And although they are ecologically important, I’m not going to pretend we’re saving the world here. We’re not even saving Bedfordshire. But your missus isn’t going to run out of cash any time soon, and she clearly enjoys throwing it at slightly silly things that make her happy.”

“She does enjoy laughing at you,” Kimberly admitted.

“Yes, so do a surprising number of our donors. It’s why we’ve never changed the acronym. Well, that and because Dr. Fairclough would never let us because she feels it’s the most accurate and succinct description of our operation.”

That made her cackle like Adele. “Awight, but tell your boss to stop insulting donors’ wives.”

“Sorry, what was that about insulting my wife?”

Not the best time for Charlie Lewis to rock up. I’d met her through the James Royce-Royces, because she and James Royce-Royce had briefly worked for the same terrifying investment bank doing terrifyingly complicated mathematics with terrifyingly large sums of money. She was built like a fridge, wore her hair like Elvis, and had glasses like Harry Potter. And, right now, did not seem happy with me.

“It’s nuffin, babe.” Kimberly turned and kissed her wife on the cheek. “Just the professor being weird.”

Charlie gave a heavy sigh. “Not again. Why does she bother trying to talk to bipeds?”

“I think,” I suggested, “she feels it’s expected of her. If it’s any consolation, I know for a fact she hates every second of it.”

“Maybe I’m not as ’orrible as you, Luc, but it doesn’t ’elp.”

“I’m helped.” Charlie smirked. “I like the idea of people who cross my wife being miserable.”

Kimberly whacked her affectionately on the arm. “Will you stop being such a fifties patriarch? Which one of us sits in an office all day moving other people’s money around wiv a bunch of prats who went to Oxford? And who spent the last three months interviewing coyotes in Central America?”

“Yes, and you’ve got back and an annoying woman is being rude to you at a party.”

“Yeah, a party you made me come to. Because you still want to spend money saving bugs that eat shit.”

I hoped this was cute partner banter, not the start of a blowup that was going to jeopardise their relationship or, more relevant to me, our donation. “As a representative of the shit-eating bug community,” I said, “we’re very glad you’re both here.”

Kimberly made a conciliatory gesture. “I’m awight really. I like the male voice choir. There’s one in Bangor does really good work with disadvantaged teenagers.”

Okay, I was pretty sure salvaging had been accomplished. And, actually, from what I knew about her, Kimberly wasn’t the sort of person who’d sabotage a charitable donation in a fit of pique. If anything, she was the opposite of that sort of person, and in the interests of maintaining independent identities, she and Charlie tended to very pointedly champion different causes. Even so, there were limits. Of which “insulting your wife to her face about her deeply held beliefs” was a fairly obvious one. Obvious, that is, to everybody except Dr. Fairclough.

“Let me leave you to it for now,” I said. “I’d love to catch up after dinner.”

Charlie gave me one of those city bastard handshakes. “That’d be splendid. If not, let’s do lunch some time. And give my love to James. There’s always an opening for him at CB Lewis.”

“Will do.”

Leaving them bickering happily about their various life choices, I took a meandering route past several other important donors to the nook into which Dr. Fairclough had managed to manoeuvre Oliver. She was still, as far as I could tell, talking about the behavioural relationship between rove beetles and ant colonies and, if I knew her at all, wouldn’t have paused for breath in the last ten minutes. I’d been in Oliver’s position myself a bunch of times because Dr. Fairclough seemed genuinely unable to comprehend that other people might not find beetles as fascinating as she did, and I’d never mustered even half as much poise, grace, or straight-up sincerity as Oliver was showing right now.

It was just so fucking…heart emoji that I actually had to take a moment.

And then I realised that the longer I stood around in a sea of swoon, the longer Oliver was going to have to talk about bugs. So I went to rescue him.