It’s early March and Lucy Barton’s ex-husband, William – she’s still fond of him but they have lived apart for as long as they were married – calls to say he wants to get her out of New York. They’ll go to a friend’s empty beach house in Maine “just for a few weeks”, he assures her. He urges her to cancel all her appointments and bring her computer. “Everyone is going to be working from home soon,” he says, not least their two adult daughters – and he admits he’s “begged” them to leave the city as well.
Meanwhile, a friend of his has just died on a ventilator and there won’t be a funeral – because, William tells Lucy, we’re in “a mess”. As they leave, she’s perplexed to see surgical masks and rubber gloves on the backseat of the car. And still more nonplussed when the friend who’s lending them the Maine house won’t come out to greet them because, as William explains, coming from New York, “in his mind we’re toxic”. Still, at this point, Lucy tells us, she was “not all that concerned”.
