Evensong

1

The pale wood door of the Boardroom stood impassively before him. Kicking it down, he decided, would be too theatrical, so he merely opened it (though without knocking) and strode in.

She was standing in the middle of the room, waiting for him. Gaetano stood behind her and to one side. She was wearing a long velvet dress in her usual style, this one in dark blue. He took in the fitted bodice almost painted over her slender upper body, and the long voluminous skirt that he somehow found more arousing than a short tight one. The front of his trousers started to tent.

“This pantomime!” shes pat. “You’ve taken five days out of our summit preparations!You’ve openly cancelled my orders! In my Cathedral! And,” pointing behind her at Gaetano, “do you know what he did to me when I tried to get into that damn room?”

Anwar glanced at Gaetano, who remained expressionless.

“I don’t know. Or care.”

“Have you any idea what stories we’ve had to tell the media? And at the end of it all, you got us nothing. You had us check the Patel people, yet again, and we got nothing. You spent five days in the Signing Room while they tore it apart, and you got nothing. You gave us five days of disruption, five days of the media laughing at us and Zaitsev’s people screaming at us, and you haven’t got shit. I was right about you the first time, you’re a—”

“Don’t call me a fucking autistic retard. I didn’t like it the first time you said it. If you say it again, I might forget who I am.”

“When did you last remember who you are?”

He looked at her, long enough for her to look away. Then she gathered herself, stared back at him, and said, “Oh no, you do not do that to me. You do not stare me down reproachfully.”

“I remember who I am,” he said quietly. “I’m the thing you rented for your protection. I may not be enough, because you haven’t told me enough about who’s trying to kill you; but I’m all you’ve got.”

She didn’t reply, but neither did she look away; she wouldn’t be stared down.

“And I remember who you are,” he went on. “You stand for things I admire, but inside you’re ugly.” He looked her up and down. “A velvet bag of shit.”

He heard Gaetano stifle a gasp.

She continued to return his gaze, but addressed Gaetano. “The retard speaks out for itself. What’s happened to it? It seems to have changed.”

“And,” Anwar continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, “in the Signing Room I was...”

“Yes, yes, I get that. You were trying to find what they’re sending to kill me.”

“And I made sure...”

“Yes, I get that too. You made sure it isn’t there yet, and you can make sure it won’t be there before the summit. But you didn’t ask anyone. You camped out in the Signing Room while they ripped it to pieces and caused five days of fucking chaos and you didn’t ask anyone!”

“Would you have asked anyone?”

“Of course not.”

“Exactly. I did what you do every day: leave people running around in your wake, clearing up after you.”

Again, without leaving his eyes, she spoke to Gaetano. “Hear that? It identifies with me. With my methods. Just because for once it does something a bit decisive, it thinks it’s turning into me.”

He threw out a hand, spread into a Verb configuration, at her throat. It stopped maybe a tenth of an inch before touching her. He was frighteningly fast. If he’d wanted to, he could have completed the blow and left her headless before Gaetano had even started to move. Before she had even started to register the shock she was now registering.

Molecules had rearranged to harden his fingers into striking surfaces. He allowed himself to brush her throat lightly, then withdrew his hand. He’d put his hands all over her before, over parts much more private than her throat, but this touch was different. It caused something between them to shift.

“That’s how easy it would be for me to put an end to this mission, and this conversation, and you. And the people I’m supposed to be protecting you from have apparently got something that kills people like me. And still you won’t tell me the truth about them.”

She seemed to be having trouble breathing. He turned to Gaetano, shrugged an apology, and turned back to her.

“You see, I really don’t buy what you’ve told me. Not all of it. These people who threaten you, they’re serious enough for you to get Rafiq to give you a Consultant, but not serious enough for you to tell me everything about them. Who, where, and why. All I’ve got is conspiracy theories. A cell of mega-rich movers and shakers operating indirectly through the founders, passing you handwritten notes. The rest of it, you just hint at. Almost coyly, like it’s some second virginity you might let me have one day.”

He paused, glanced again at Gaetano, and continued. He still spoke quietly, but his voice took on an edge.

“And there’s something else you haven’t told me. Not world-picture stuff about the founders, but something quite specific.Afinaldetailwhichoverturnseverythingelse.Iknow it’s there. What is it?”

“I never said...” She stopped, caught her breath, and began again. “I never said anything about some final detail.”

“No, you didn’t. That was me.”

“Then you’re putting words in my mouth.”

“No. Of all the things I’d like to put in your mouth…”

She looked up at him, as if reminded of something she’d forgotten. An instant of scalding attention, then she turned to Gaetano. “Leave us,” she said hoarsely.

Gaetano was almost relieved to do so. He didn’t know what he’d been doing there in the first place.

As the door closed behind Gaetano, they faced each other.

“You still haven’t answered my question. After we’ve done here, I’ll ask you again.”

“After we’ve done here, I’ll give you an answer.”

They started circling.

“I should get showered and cleaned up first.”

“No you shouldn’t. I want it now.”

“I haven’t shaved or washed,” he told her, “in five days. Or cleaned my teeth, or changed my clothes.” They were only token objections. He was surprised at how much he’d been looking forward to returning to his routine. Nothing else with her was simple or uncomplicated, but sex was.

“Yes,” she said, “you smell like shit. The suit still looks good, though.”

“You get what you pay for,” he said, lifting her onto the table. He pulled up her skirt, carefully and tidily. She was wearing silk knickers which, with equal care, he pulled down and left around her knees; an encumbrance, but the essence was to disarrange, not denude.

She waited, patiently but uninterested, while he did all this, even while he made some final adjustments of her skirt upwards and her knickers downwards; then, after pausing to admire his handiwork, he entered her. That was his part done, and now she began hers, taking him inside her voraciously. Such particular intimacies, to a normal couple, might have meant something; but Anwar and Olivia were neither normal nor a couple. It was an arrangement, simple and self-contained, where each party did what he or she wanted, without regard for the feelings of the other. Masturbation for two.

By now she was well into her part. Where he’d been painstaking and obsessive, she was greedy. After five days, greedier than ever. For a moment he felt she’d never let him out again, at least not the way he’d come in. Eventually she did, but only to go another time, and another.

Who was it she was taking into herself like this? Not a real person but a device, a designer dildo. And who was it that he was entering like this? Not a real person but a container, into which he was pumping his contents. It suited both of them perfectly: only a Consultant would have the constitution and stamina to match her appetites.

Afterwards, they sat at opposing places on the table. She smoothed down her skirt; so careful had he been in his preliminaries that it looked no tidier rearranged than it had been when he’d pulled it up.

She usually looked at him without noticing, or noticed him only in passing, and he realised he’d been doing the same to her. But now he noticed. Her face looked drawn, as if she too had spent the last five days in the Signing Room. There was a feverishness in her stare and a downturn, accentuated by lines, at the corners of her mouth. A sort of desperation about her. Arden never looked like this.

“Not enough,” she said hoarsely.

He hoisted her up on the table again, and was about to restart his ritual, but she stopped him. “No. You prefer it naked, don’t you?”

Surprised, he nodded. They started undressing.

Of all the things I’d like to put in your mouth… He did put it in her mouth. Then her hands. And then her vagina, and that surprised him, because this time she took it less greedily. She’s trying to share, he thought incredulously. She was clumsy at it because it was alien to her, and it made him feel embarrassed; and also uneasy, at the apparent shift from their previous routine.

“Don’t do that again,” he said afterwards. “It didn’t work.”

“The other way wasn’t enough.”

“That way was too much.”

She looked away. Then she gathered herself, like she’d done when he tried to stare her down. “I said it wasn’t enough! Go again. It’s not enough any more.”

Like the Reith Lecture, he thought, a small animal baring its teeth. But none of the attacks in the Reith Lecture had unsettled her like this. Not even the one on her life.

They went again, and it still didn’t work. Still trying to share, and she still wasn’t much good at it—her reciprocal movements were clumsy and unsynchronised to his, and she didn’t pick up quickly enough on what he liked her doing. He preferred it when she didn’t care what he liked. This way gave him nothing. He didn’t think to wonder what she might have wanted from it, only that gave him nothing.It didn’t work and it wasn’t the same. Something had shifted.

He stood up abruptly, and started dressing. After watching for a while the play of his almost nonhuman musculature, she too started dressing.

“What’s this about?” he asked, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice.

“What do you...”

“Don’t say, ‘What do you mean.’ You know what I mean. Why isn’t it enough? Why does it have to be different?”

“Something you said in Brighton, about if I hated people less and understood them more.”

“What has that got to do with what happened here? I was talking about fundamentalists, about how you treat your enemies.”

“You were talking about how I treat everyone. I can deal with media and mass audiences, but not with individual people, whether they’re enemies or friends. I’ve never noticed them. I’ve never had a relationship that works both ways, not with any of them. So...”

“So you decided to practice on me?”

“Not practice. Start.”

He laughed out loud. “Start a relationship, with a Consultant?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, not that kind of relationship.” She hurried on, conscious that she’d immediately backed down at the first sign of derision, and was now fighting only for her fallback position. “And I have to start with someone. And I got Rafiq to send you here, and I never really stopped to notice you. And when I asked you things about yourself, I’d forget your answers even before you finished speaking. And—” She was conscious of too many Ands, as if she was scrambling for anything she could find. She took a breath and began again. “—And you’d be only the first. I have to start somewhere.” She knew how lame it sounded, and added “After you I could go on to real people.” She’d meant it to cover her retreat, but it sounded worse; gratuitous, and ugly.

He stopped laughing. “Then skip the part with me and go straight to real people, because this didn’t work. It was embarrassing.”

He wasn’t merely embarrassed, he was burning with embarrassment.It was knotting his stomach. A woman in her thirties trying to learn the elements of courtship, of pleasing a partner. Sucking me into herself. Or, if he believed her fall-back position, trying to learn how to notice and value people. Either way she had years to make up, and he couldn’t see beyond mid-October.

He strode over to the full-length Boardroom window. The early evening view of the Brighton foreshore and the i-360 Tower was beguiling as always, but he wasn’t really looking at it; only turning his back on her.

This mission had threatened to overturn his life, and he’d staved that off by the change that had come over him since meeting Rafiq—the change that had made him take decisive action and let others do the worrying and pick up the pieces. And now that change, and her reaction to it, was in turn threatening to overturn his life. The same threat, from another direction.

“You’re different since you’ve come back,” she said, and immediately knew how fatuous it sounded; she’d only said it to avoid saying other things. When he didn’t reply, shea dded, “Was it your meeting with Rafiq?”

“Yes.”

“What happened there? Tell me about it.”

He told her. As with Gaetano, he omitted references to the names and number of Consultants, and left out the conversation with Arden Bierce, but he was grateful to be able to retreat into the detail. It stopped him saying other things.

“Well,” she said when he’d finished, “it checks out.”

“What checks out?”

“Gaetano told me all that yesterday, and his account was almost exactly the same as yours. He practices—” she hurried over the word “—eidetic techniques. He works very hard at it.”

He would, Anwar thought. Not like me, I was made. He has to work at it. And he’d work with quiet persistence and thoroughness. With near-obsessiveness. He’d make a good Consultant. In fact, maybe he was. Another labyrynthine move of Rafiq’s? A secret twentieth Consultant, unknown to the others? No, now a secret nineteenth. No, eighteenth.

He turned away from the window and faced her. “You said you’d answer my question about that final detail.”

“You started this. You shouldn’t have said that to me in Brighton. If Rafiq had sent someone else, I’d never have heard it.”

“Answer my question.”

“And you should go and get cleaned up. And I must go, too. I have an organisation to run, and a summit in seven days. And I need to eat.” She looked at him. “Alone.”

“My question.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t answer it.”

“You said...”

“I can’t. But if we survive this, you’ll know why I can’t.”

2

He walked through the early evening, across the Garden from the Cathedral to the New Grand. He walked through the lobby and up to his suite. He shaved, cleaned his teeth, took a long shower, and changed his clothes. It took him over an hour to clean off the last five days, particularly the last hour of the fifth day.

His book, the replica of the Chalmers-Bridgewater edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, was on his bed where he’d left it. He picked it up and held it in his hands. He thought, I’ve only really known two women, and in the space of five days I’ve refused them both. I had to. One’s a colleague, and the other’s an obscenity. And a threat.

Relationships could kill you, he knew, or at least rape you. Being that close to someone was a kind of violation. They’d suck you dry, or touch parts of you nobody else should be all owed to touch. But he wished he hadn’t laughed out loud at her. What she’d said was embarrassing, but laughing out loud was worse.

He looked at the book for a moment longer, then did something he’d normally have thought impossible: he tore out a page.

It was the page with Sonnet 116. He ringed the first four lines, and wrote I want you to have this. A. His handwriting was a neat italic, done with an old-fashioned fountain pen. Hers, he remembered from random documents where he’d glimpsed her annotations, was large and untidy, with strong loops and vertical downstrokes, done with any old pen which happened to be at hand.

He’d often thought that getting to know someone’s handwriting was one of the opening stages of intimacy. But that was appropriate only for simple sexual relationships or complicated loving ones, or perhaps for close friendships. He sensed that the first had ended and knew that the other two would never begin.

He went up to the next floor. He walked past the door leading to her apartments, nodding politely to the guard (not Proskar this time), and on to Gaetano’s office.

Gaetano looked tired, but stood as he entered and greeted him courteously. The office was tidy as always, but in the last five days it had become crowded. Several monitor screens had been added, some free-standing and some fixed to the walls. They showed readouts and status reports for various aspects of the summit preparations. The first members of the delegations would start arriving tomorrow—not VIPs but support staff, and not in New Grand suites but in smaller hotels in Brighton. Anwar recalled the exhaustive and painstaking description Gaetano had given him of his, Gaetano’s, involvement in the security for the summit: a huge edifice, for which he was solely responsible. Meatslab or not, he’s there by his own efforts. Me, I was just made. Enough. I must stop telling myself that. It’s his problem, and he knows what he’s doing. I’ve got other concerns.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Gaetano, “what did you say?”

“I said something changed tonight between you and her. I didn’t like it.”

“Neither did I.” But neither of them felt disposed to elaborate. After a brief but uncomfortable silence, Anwar went on. “And what was all that about, speaking to me through you, and calling me It? Has she ever done that before?”

“No. I didn’t like that either. And when you made that play of striking at her...”

“Yes, I’m sorry about that.”

“I couldn’t see any other way you could shut her up. You seemed to know what you were doing.”

Thanks, Anwar thought, but didn’t say. It would have sounded like over-egging the pudding. His working relationship with Gaetano was satisfactory, but not exactly comfortable, and delicately balanced.

Another silence ensued, which Gaetano broke. “What’s that bit of paper you’re holding?”

“Something I want to her to see. Will you take me to her apartments?”

“She won’t be there, she’s in meetings.”

“I know. I’d like to leave it for her. On her bed.”

“On her bed?”

“I’ll explain when we get there. Will you take me?”

Never look surprised, was one of the maxims from his training.When he saw her bedroom for the first time he managed to mask his surprise, but only just. The one interior, on the whole of the New West Pier, that wasn’t pearlescent white and silver. And what it was, was even more surprising than what it wasn’t.

It was like the bedroom of an upmarket whore: deep-pile carpet and shot-silk wallhangings, deep-buttoned velvet upholstery and satin sheets, all in voluptuous dark purples and blues and reds, the colours of her dresses. And her untidiness was daubed over it like slogans: an unmade bed, clothes left over chairs and on the floor, chocolate wrappers strewn everywhere, and scraps of paper with notes scribbled in her large handwriting with its loops and downstrokes.

Her ginger cat was there too, fixing him with a baleful amber glare and hissing furiously. “Yes,” he agreed, “and Fuck You too.”

They’d walked through some of her other rooms—reception, library, office, sitting room, dining room—to get here, and all were exactly like rooms everywhere else on the New West Pier. It was as though this was her last personal refuge. He felt like he shouldn’t have seen it.

Anwar gave the page to Gaetano, who read it and handed it back. Carefully, Anwar put it on her bed; then, in case it got lost amid the tumble of unmade bedclothes, he put it on her pillow.

“I don’t like this, it’s wrong,” Gaetano said.

“It’s only a gesture.”

“I warned you before: don’t read too much into how she behaves with you.”

“I’m not. Particularly after tonight.”

“I think you are. That Shakespeare quote is hardly ambiguous.”

“Ambiguous is exactly what it is.”

“Then I’ve got another quote, just for you. ‘The verb To Love is hard to conjugate. The past isn’t simple, the present isn’t indicative, the future is very conditional.’ I read books too.”

Or perhaps just quotation dictionaries. “Yes, Cocteau knew he was being clever when he wrote that, but in this case it’s irrelevant. I’ve got another quote too: Velvet Bag of Shit. That’s what I think of her, Gaetano, that and nothing else. I’ll protect her because it’s what my mission says and I don’t walk away from missions, but otherwise...”

“Then why,” Gaetano asked, “put that on her bed?”

“Because it might remind her of something I said in Brighton, just before I showed her that page in my book and watched her read those lines.”

“You’ve torn a page out of a book for her?”

“Yes.”

When he’d recovered from what seemed like genuine surprise, Gaetano said, “I’ll warn you again, don’t imagine things she didn’t intend. She’s no good at relationships.”

“Neither am I.”

“So what did you say to her in Brighton?”

“Something about hating people less and understanding them more. It’s one of the few times she’s actually noticed me.”

“Is that where she got this idea for an Outreach Foundation?”

“Yes. I was talking about how she treats her political and religious enemies, but she widened it into building relationships...Relax, I don’t mean those kinds of relationships, and I don’t mean with me.” He gave Gaetano only her fallback position; not her primary one, which he’d laughed into nonexistence. “Relationships generally. She said she wants to start noticing people and valuing them. God knows, I had no idea that what I said would lead to that.”

“I don’t like it. If you harm her...”

“I know. You said all that before. I haven’t forgotten.”

3

Early evening in Brighton was early morning in Kuala Lumpur; the beginning of the following day. Arden Bierce had been working through the night.

She’d been reading and re-reading transcripts: of Anwar’s questioning of Carne and Hines, of her own questioning of the five others like Carne and Hines, of Anwar’s conversations with Olivia and Gaetano, and of her report to Rafiq given from Opatija as she stood over Asika’s remains. Something was in there, hiding in plain sight.

In the villa at Opatija, she’d hoped that Asika had been killed by a swarm of opponents and not a single opponent. But a single opponent was what she sensed then and still felt now.

Even Levin couldn’t have done that to Asika without suffering damage himself. In fact Levin couldn’t have done it at all, because Asika was better. And it was academic anyway, because Levin was as dead as Asika. Carne and Hines had told Anwar, and five others like Carne and Hines had told her: Levin died first, then Asika. But what they’d done to Levin was worse. There wasn’t even enough of him left to make a corpse. And they all remembered his face, when he realised he couldn’t defend himself. So what have they got that kills Consultants? How and where did they make it, or create it?

She had originally joined UN Intelligence as a field officer. She proved effective, not because she was particularly ruthless but because she understood people instinctively, whether colleagues or opponents. With colleagues, she established good working relationships and sensed what they needed from her. With opponents, she sensed what made them tick and how they’d act or react.

UN Intelligence was a source from which Rafiq drew many of his personal staff, and she was quickly promoted. She was the obvious choice for her present role, as the staff member with responsibility for The Dead. Only she could instinctively know what made them tick. Or Rafiq, who was even more impenetrable.

But after the meeting with Anwar, she wasn’t so sure about Rafiq. The meeting still worried her. Rafiq had told her beforehand how he would play it, how he would try to tease ideas out of Anwar by pretending to be struggling to understand these new opponents. She was unconvinced then, and remained unconvinced now, about how much he was acting. She sensed something in him which, in anyone else, might almost have amounted to uncertainty.

She’d never met Olivia del Sarto, or spoken to her directly, but she knew all about her. Why weren’t she and Rafiq closer? They stood for similar things. They should be natural allies. She was about to park that question for later, but then thought, Didn’t Anwar ask him that too?

Anwar. She rarely made errors of judgement, but her near-offer to him after the meeting was an error. Not a crucial one, but she wished she hadn’t made it. Or maybe it wasn’t an error, and her instincts were correct. It had made Anwar tell her, by the strength of his denial, how Olivia was sucking him into herself.

She normally ran relationships with Consultants by giving them space, by not crowding them. She always felt that she needed to find Anwar some extra space, for the way he worried about his lack of ability compared to some of the others. And for his obsessiveness, his insularity (he was solitary but not lonely), and his need for routine and a comfort zone, all of which were now being torn to pieces by this mission as it got more complicated and far-reaching than even Rafiq had suspected.

Or maybe Rafiq was still holding something back. It wouldn’t be the first time. Surely he’d have picked someone other than Anwar, if he’d known how this mission would turn out. Unless he knew something else about it. And Rafiq knows everything. Doesn’t he?

Anwar had told Rafiq of a detail that he sensed and that bothered him, a final detail that might overturn everything. She had also felt something, first at Opatija and again more recently, when it almost surfaced in Anwar’s questioning of Carne and Hines, and her own questioning of the others like them. She didn’t yet know what it was, or even if it was the same thing Anwar had sensed. But she felt that it, too, might overturn everything, and she would work until she found it.

Her style of work was careful and reflective and thorough, like that of Anwar. But she had something he’d never had: her empathy, her instinctive feeling for people. Though she suspected, because of how this mission was turning on him, that he might acquire it.

Or it might acquire him.

4

Anwar left the New Grand and walked back across the Garden to the Cathedral. Early evening was turning into night, and the night air carried the astringent scent of witch hazel to counterpoint the smells of damp earth and grass.

He entered the Cathedral. It was almost empty, with just a few worshippers in the pews. He only needed a glance, and an assessment of their positions and postures, to confirm that they were worshippers and nothing more. The Cathedral air was cool and still, with the usual hint of citrus.

He walked to the front of the pews, in the space before the altar where he’d fought Bayard and Proskar and six others and where she’d ridiculed him. He looked up at the silver cross on the altar. Like all New Anglican crosses it was plain and unadorned, with no figure of Jesus nailed to it. A cross, not a crucifix.

He felt a movement in the air, and ramped up his senses. He knew, before he turned around, that she had entered and was walking towards him. The air she displaced was her shape.

He didn’t know how to greet her after what had happened between them. But she solved it for him, to the surprise of the few worshippers.

“Fucking autistic retard.”

“Velvet bag of shit,” he replied.

They sounded like he and Levin had once sounded, greeting each other. Muslim filth. Jewish scum.

“About what you left for me,” she said. “I liked reading it again. But you tore a page out of a book.”

“Yes.”

“Nobody’s ever done something like that for me, except maybe Gaetano.”

“Tell me, why do the New Anglicans only have plain crosses and not crucifixes?”

He was steering her away from what happened in the Boardroom by getting her to talk about what she knew best. That suited her, too.

“We don’t do guilt and pain and misery, that’s for the Catholics. We do affirmation and aspiration. We don’t deny that they nailed Jesus to a cross, but we don’t need to wallow in it.”

“But you do have images of him. I’ve seen them.”

“Yes. Replicas of the statues in Lisbon and Rio, Cristo Rei and Cristo Redentor. Jesus with arms outstretched, offering benediction. Not only benediction, but encouragement. Even urging. Be all you can be, for me. Those are my words,” she added proudly. “I wrote them.”

“Yes, I can hear your voice in them. Even more than His.”

If his remark had any subsurface meaning she didn’t notice it, and she continued the direction of their conversation. It kept them on surer ground.

“I’m proud of the New Anglicans. We’re rich and powerful and assertive. As much a corporation as a church, but a properly-run corporation. We pay all our taxes. We declare all our salaries. We declare all our investments.”

“And,” he said, remembering their dinner, “you declare all your costs. Have your finance people given you an amended operating statement yet?”

She didn’t hear his question. She was in full flow. “You know, Archbishop was a title I inherited five years ago, but it doesn’t sound right now. In a few years, when the New Anglicans are a finished product, I might change my title. To CEO. Or—” she glanced at him “—Controller-General.”

Or, he thought, Archbitch. The word was already in his store of privately-invented names, like Meatslabs and Lucifer’s Lesbian and Levin’s Levities. They were all rather anal-retentive: a reflection of how much time he spent alone, adding building-blocks to his interior world. A world that was ordered and comfortable, and about to collapse.

“You know,” she said, “you’ve made yourself ridiculous here. No one would ever say so, not to your face, but they’re laughing behind your back.”

“You mean because I shut myself in the Signing Room?”

“Yes.”

“But you know why I did that.” This was more safe ground, and it suited him. Operational detail. “We’ve made sure there’s nothing of theirs in there. The signing ceremony is scheduled for October 23. So if that was their preferred option, it’s gone.”

“So it could be any time.”

“Yes. But you said they wanted it live and in public at the summit. So any time during the nine days commencing October 15.” When she didn’t reply, he hurriedly added, “But it was their preferred option. This one will be...”

“Less preferred. But earlier. Look, I was wrong, let’s not waste those few days. Let’s go back to how it was.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes. Let’s go back to just fucking each other senseless,and each of us takes what we want from it.” She watched him as he visibly lightened. It was as though a weight was slipping off him. She added, “I mean it. No relationships, just relations.”

“I’d like nothing more,” he said, then added, as the relief spread through him, “but not here in front of the altar?”

“I can find somewhere better.”

Later, in her bedroom, they went back to how it was. This time she raised her bottom slightly to assist him in pulling down her underwear. He didn’t seem to notice consciously, though he was aware that his preliminaries worked a little better. She knew how he liked her passive during this part, so he could enjoy doing his part slowly and artistically.

It was a minor embellishment which might, indirectly, help her. Just a detail, and later she’d add others. Build empathy in careful penny pieces. Not all in one lump, as she’d tried so clumsily and embarrassingly before. The next detail— the thought came to her quite suddenly—could be to find a replacement for his book.

“Retard,” she murmured afterwards.

“Bag of shit,” he replied, and they went again.

How many times have we gone tonight? she thought. He’s like a pistol. As one chamber’s spent the next one comes around. And keeps coming.

She was learning empathy, though her version of it, unlike Arden’s, didn’t come naturally. And—because of who she was— there was something oblique and sinuous about it. Starting a relationship with him by accommodating his embarrassment at the idea of a relationship. Sharing with him his wish not to treat sex as something to be shared.

She would work at it, carefully and quietly. Not her usual style of working, but it was worth it. He was obsessive and strange, potent and vulnerable, but he was the only one with a chance of protecting her. That, at least, was the obvious reason to draw her to him, but that—she told herself over and over until she almost believed it—wasn’t the only one. There was something else.

Empathy had found her, and it would find him. And—the admission frightened her—she wanted it to find him. Nobody else would do.