Chapter 5: The Premium Health Plan

The restaurant had a staircase, which Talia clocked on the way in the way she clocked all exits now, and a corner table that had been chosen – she could tell – by someone who had eaten here before and by someone who intended to eat here again. Donald stood when she arrived. He did the standing the way he did everything, as if it had been scheduled and passed by committee.

“You look well,” he said.

“You look punctual,” she said, and he accepted the exchange as if both sentences had been priced, and perhaps they had.

She had done her own reading, over the five weeks – not much, because he left no handles, but some, because she never left handles unused. Whitmore, D. Private company: Decatur & Co., a holding structure with a Mayfair letterhead and a website like a vault door. Prior exit: a firm called Kestrel Behaviour Systems, sold the year before last for a figure the business pages had rounded upward. She had read the sale coverage twice, at the kitchen table, with Jennifer revising flashcards opposite, and had come away with a portrait of a man who had made his money teaching machines to predict what people would do next – insurance, logistics, that world – and had then retired from it at thirty-one into foundations and board seats and a philanthropic habit of underwriting other people’s self-improvement. Behaviour systems, she had thought, and thought no more about it, because the phrase meant nothing – because it was the name of a company the way Aurelia was the name of a plan, a word on a door, furniture of somebody else’s career. She had filed him under safe, and rich, and patient, and interesting in the specific way of men who listen, and she had told none of this to Jennifer, because telling Jennifer was not in the spreadsheet either. No wife. No scandal. A club. The one photograph the press used was a decade old. It was not a dossier. It was a schoolgirl’s index card, and she knew that, and she brought it to dinner anyway, the way you bring a knife that you know is too small.

She had also come to the dinner owing money. That was the fact she carried in with her, under the dress the allowance had technically already bought – the first Friday of the month had come and gone, term was three weeks from exams, and the overdraft had gone from a theory to a permanent resident. She had done the arithmetic on the bus, which was where she did all her worst arithmetic, and the number had not improved with company. The £52,000 was still two years away. The spreadsheet was still sound. Sound, and screaming.

He let her order first. He ordered the same thing he always ordered, which was whatever the kitchen was proudest of, and asked the wine list one question – “which of these does the chef actually drink” – and got the answer and the waiter’s respect in the same movement of the man’s shoulders. The table was round, which she noted for the file: no corners to put things on. Everything at this table would have to be held.

“Talia,” he said, when the first course was settled, “I want to talk about your health.”

There were sentences a woman learns to hear the way a driver learns to hear ice. This was one. She put down her fork and gave him her whole face, which was the professional version of flinching.

“In what way?”

“In the way that I’ve watched you work since March,” he said, “and I’ve watched you run yourself the way you run everything – to the margin. You sleep like a student. You eat like one. You’re about to do three weeks of examinations on adrenaline and oats, and I’m forty minutes away in a taxi, and it offends me.” He let that sit. “My partner can’t live on the NHS. Can she.”

It was not, grammatically, a question. She felt the shape of it arrive – the old sentence from the earlier dinner, grown into its adult form – and she did what she always did with a sentence like that, which was to price it while appearing to taste the wine.

“That depends what the plan is,” she said.

“Would you like to see the plan?”

And there it was on the tablecloth between them, where a florist would have put the flowers: a box. Heavy card, no logo on the lid, the weight of something with hinges. She took her time. She was aware of being watched taking her time, and of the awareness, and she opened it anyway, because the other choice was not opening it, and she did not do business with people by not looking.

The band lay inside on a bed the colour of a dental office, thin as a watch strap, matte, silvered at the clasp, with a charging coil and a booklet. A leaflet, she thought, before she had even touched it – the paper stock was leaflet stock, expensive the way some NHS leaflets were expensive – and across the front of it, in a typeface that had been focus-grouped within an inch of its life, a single word: AURELIA.

“Private medicine,” he said. “Premium tier. The plan is mine – I mean that mechanically; the subscription is in my name, and nobody will ever bill you, not once, not for so much as a text message – and what the plan does is look after you. Sleep, load, recovery. A routine, if you’ll take one; the routine is the part that works.” He turned his glass a quarter-turn. “I’ve read the literature. It’s wearable wellness of the kind your generation already volunteers for, with better doctors and fewer adverts. You’d wear the band. There’s an app. Enrolment’s part of the plan – five minutes on my phone tonight, if you’re willing; I’d have you paired before the coffee. You’d hate it for a week and then wonder how you ran without it.”

“You’ve thought about the week where I hate it,” she said.

“I’ve thought about whether you’d hate it,” he said. “The week I don’t need to think about. You’ve never once kept a system you didn’t improve.”

She looked at the band. The band, being an object, said nothing, which she was beginning to understand was the doctrine of everything he bought.

“The second thing,” he said, “is the arrangement. I’d like to make the arrangement formal. Written, signed, lawyer-drafted on my side, and read on yours at whatever speed you like – I mean that, take it home if you want it, though I hope you’ll take the dessert hour. A proper document, because a proper document is a courtesy. It protects you. It says what I provide.” A pause the length of the waiter filling his water glass. “And what I’ve understood so far.”

She heard the clause before she saw it, which was – she would file this later, in the drawer where she filed things that had no name – the first honest sentence of the evening. What I’ve understood so far. Not what he wanted. What he’d understood. The document was going to be a mirror, and she was going to be asked to sign the reflection.

“I’d like to read it,” she said, “properly. Before I sign anything.”

“Of course.” And the paper was there – not a printout, she noticed; her own phone had been quietly returned to the table’s attention by the waiter, with a document open on it – and Donald ordered dessert for them both without consulting her, which she allowed because she was reading, and reading, at her speed, was the whole of the courtesy he was selling her.