Lynda is in and out of hospital between bouts of attempted wellness and refusing to take her medication. She even tries to be a proper wife to her husband, everything short of sharing his bed. She tries to excel as a hostess to their many dinner and cocktail parties where the most fascinating icons of the new swinging London mingle. Martha is fascinated by the course of her friend's mental illness and is determined to share in the suffering with her as a way of recovering her own authentic self. They spend several weeks alone together in the basement apartment, going without proper sleep or nutrition and Martha finds herself entering into Lynda's illness with her. She begins to have aural hallucinations, especially of the Self-Hater, the dark shadow that inhabits everyone. Both women lose a great deal of weight. When they are finished with their ordeal of self-induced psycho-sickness they both feel a sense of enlightenment, of a kind of spiritual purity. They clean themselves up, get their hair done and all made up and dress in vintage costumes from the Edwardian era and the Roaring Twenties waiting in Mark's study where they study his map of the world and all the pins he has stuck on global and strategic hotspots. Paul comes in and is so intrigued by his aunties' extreme fashionable glamour that he takes them out for dinner where he can proudly show them off.
Martha again embarks on a psychic safari, this time alone. Her "nephew" Paul has become an adept wheeler-dealer at the tender age of twenty-one and has already amassed a fortune flipping houses. Martha sequesters herself in a room in one of these houses where she fasts, goes without sleep, and without anything to divert or distract her as she begins to descend again into self-induced madness. She barely comes out of this one but believes she has discovered valuable truths about the human condition and has finally recoverered some essential truths about herself.
She also believes that she is becoming psychic, a kind of radio transmitter and that Lynda also has this talent. In fact, that Lynda's deteriorated mental health condition came as a result of her inability to reckon well with her psychic condition.
While Martha is still locked away inside Paul's house she receives notice that an aged couple she had always been at odds with in Rhodesia are in London and they specially want to see her. She meets with them-they are now in their eighties-in a fashionable restaurant staffed with beautiful gay male waiters and she herself is fashionably thin and fashionably attired in a tight fitting white dress, red broad-rim hat and sunglasses. The couple hardly recognize her, nor the swinging spectacle their formerly staid London has morphed into. They pile a mound of banknotes on top of the table, which one of the pretty waiters makes a spectacle of blowing on and dusting off and give her the money for the education of their granddaughter who will soon be arriving in London.
The young woman arrives in a few months and again things begin to change.
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