Evensong

JUNE 2061

They’d wish her dead if they knew what she’d done. But they are only a congregation, mostly elderly and infirm, and they know nothing about her.

Some of them look round as she enters. This is the third consecutive Sunday that Olivia has come to Evensong at Rochester Cathedral, and they are beginning to notice her. She is shabbily dressed, her blonde hair lank and greasy. She looks like someone they would once have recognised.

Habit makes her glance round every few minutes, though she doesn’t expect to see those hunting her. Not yet. It normally takes them a few weeks, but they always find her—after what she did, they’ll never give up—and then the cycle begins again: flight, to another rundown flat, in another rundown neighbourhood. She thinks, Anwar would have handled the last few months much better, but Anwar is long gone.

The choir is singing the evening’s first psalm. She recognises the words from other Evensongs at other churches.

For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter.

He shall defend thee under his wings,

And thou shalt be safe…

It is a pleasant summer evening. The sunlight is the colour of burnished copper; it deepens and enriches the red-brown of the pews and puts alternate light and dark bands across the aisle. Above her the Cathedral is vaulted and groined, with stone Gothic arches curving up into a dark wooden ceiling. Twilight floats there, bobbing against the ceiling like a helium balloon after a party, waiting to float down and become night.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace...

The words of the Nunc Dimittis always sound to her like they should be the closing words, but Evensong doesn’t finish there; there are some responses and collects, a short sermon, and a hymn. Then they file out through the West Door into the Cathedral precincts: College Yard, with lawns and park benches, magnolias, and a huge spreading catalpa tree hun- dreds of years old. Something still remains of the copper evening sunlight, and there are some refectory tables in the courtyard and around the trees, where some of the congre- gation have stopped for coffee.

She avoids eye contact and hurries past them. She has lost many things in the last few months, including her need for companionship. And her capacity to return it.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace…

Olivia’s flat is only a few minutes’ walk from the Cathedral, at the other end of the old High Street. It is above a computer repair shop, a low-rent business in a low-rent area: only poor people need to repair computers, and her landlord, who owns the business, is only marginally better off than she is.

The walls of the stairway and landing are painted dark green and cream. The landing smells of damp. So does her flat,when she opens the door, but it also smells more strongly of something else: nonhuman urine.

“Fuck you” is the ginger cat’s probable meaning as it meows at her indignantly; not for the first time, she’s for- gotten to put down its litter tray. She cleans up the mess (leaving a few more dark patches on the carpet, as though an old map had suddenly grown some new continents) and goes through to her bedroom. In there is the only genuine souvenir of the old days.

Anwar had once torn a page out of one of his books (an impulsive act, for someone who valued books as he did) and had left it on her bed. She has kept it ever since. It contains the first four lines of a Shakespeare sonnet: his favourite Shakespeare sonnet, and now he is as long gone as its author.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.