But the frantic preparations of those early days had now given way to gloomy, suffocating hours. All the pieces had been laid on the board; all hands were shown. They had no threats left to make other than ones they’d already shouted from the rooftops. What stretched before them now was only time, a ticking down to the inevitable collapse.
They’d issued their ultimatum, sent out their pamphlets. Westminster Bridge fell in seven days, unless. Unless.
This decision had left a bad taste in their mouths. They’d said all there was to say, and no one wanted pick apart the implications. Introspection was dangerous; they only wanted to get through the day. Now, more often than not, they drifted to separate corners of the tower, reading or researching or doing whatever it was they did to make the time pass. Ibrahim and Juliana spent all their waking hours together. Sometimes the rest of them speculated whether the two might be falling in love, but they found they could never sustain that conversation; it made them think of the future, of how this might all end up, and that made them too sad. Yusuf kept to himself. Meghana occasionally took tea with Robin and Victoire, and they would exchange stories about their overlapping acquaintances – she’d graduated recently, and had been close to both Vimal and Anthony – but as the days drew on she also started withdrawing into herself. And Robin wondered, sometimes, whether she and Yusuf were now regretting their decision to stay.
Life in the tower, life on strike – at first so novel and strangely exciting – took on a routine, monotonous air. Things were hard going at first. It was both funny and embarrassing, how little they’d learned about how to keep their living quarters in order. No one knew where the brooms were kept, so the floors remained dusty and littered with crumbs. No one knew how to do laundry – they tried producing a match-pair using the word bleach and words derived from the Proto-Indo-European root bhel (‘shining white, to flash, to burn’), but all this did was temporarily turn their clothes white and scorching-hot to the touch.
They still congregated for meals three times a day on the hour, if only because that made rationing simpler. Their luxury items had quickly disappeared. There was no coffee after the first week; they were close to running out of tea by the second. Their solution to this was to dilute the tea more and more until they were drinking little more than slightly discoloured water. There was no milk or sugar to speak of. Meghana argued they ought to just enjoy the last few teaspoons in a properly, full-brewed cup, but Professor Craft vehemently disagreed.
‘I can give up milk,’ she said. ‘But I cannot give up tea.’
Victoire was Robin’s anchor during that week.
She was furious with him, he knew. The first two days they spent together in begrudging silence – but together, still, because they needed each other for solace. They spent hours by the sixth-floor window, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the floor. He did not press his point. She made no recriminations. There was nothing more to say. The course was set.
By the third day the silence became unbearable, so they began to talk; small nothings at first, and then everything that came to mind. Sometimes they reminisced about Babel, about the golden years before everything turned upside down. Sometimes they suspended reality, managed to forget everything that had happened, and gossiped about their college days as if the most important matter at hand was whether Colin Thornhill and the Sharp twins would get into fisticuffs over Bill Jameson’s pretty, visiting sister.
It was four days before they could bring themselves to broach the subject of Letty.
Robin did it first. Letty had lingered in the back of both their memories like a festering sore they didn’t dare touch, and he couldn’t keep circling around it anymore. He wanted to take a burning knife and dig into the rot.
‘Do you think she was always going to turn on us?’ he asked. ‘Do you think it was difficult for her, what she did?’
Victoire didn’t need to ask who he meant. ‘It was like an exercise in hope,’ she said after a pause. ‘Loving her, I mean. Sometimes I’d think she’d come around. Sometimes I’d look her in the eyes and think that I was looking at a true friend. Then she’d say something, make some off-the-cuff comment, and the whole cycle would begin all over again. It was like pouring sand into a sieve. Nothing stuck.’
‘Do you think there’s anything you could have said that might have changed her mind?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Victoire. ‘Do you?’
His mind did what it always did, which was to summon a Chinese character in lieu of the thought he was afraid of. ‘When I think of Letty, I think about the character xì.’ He drew it in the air for her: 隙. ‘It’s most commonly used to mean “a crack or a fissure”. But in Classical Chinese texts, it also means “a grudge, or a feud”. According to rumours, the Qing Emperor uses a bar engraved with the xì-feud match-pair installed under a stone mural of the imperial lineage. And when cracks appear, it shows that someone is plotting against him.’ He swallowed. ‘I think those cracks were always there. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done about them. And all it took was pressure for the whole thing to collapse.’
‘You think she resented us that much?’
He paused, deliberating the weight and impact of his words. ‘I think she killed him on purpose.’
Victoire observed him for a long moment before she responded, simply, ‘Why?’
‘I think she wanted him dead,’ he continued hoarsely. ‘You could see it on her face – she wasn’t scared, she knew what she was doing, she could have aimed at any one of us, and she knew it was Ramy she wanted.’
‘Robin . . .’
‘She loved him, you know,’ he said. The words came out of him like a torrent now; the floodgates were broken, and the waters could not be stopped. No matter how devastating, how tragic, he had to say it out loud, had to burden someone else with this awful, awful suspicion. ‘She told me, the night of the commemoration ball – she spent nearly an hour weeping into my shoulder because she wanted to dance with him, and he wouldn’t even look at her. He never looked at her, he didn’t . . .’ He had to stop; his tears threatened to choke him.
Victoire gripped his wrist. ‘Oh, Robin.’
‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘A brown man refuses an English rose. Letty couldn’t bear that. The humiliation.’ He wiped his sleeve against his eyes. ‘So she killed him.’
Victoire said nothing for a long time. She gazed out over the crumbling city, thinking. At last, she pulled a rumpled piece of paper from her pocket and pressed it into his hand. ‘You should have this.’
Robin unfolded it. It was the daguerreotype portrait of the four of them, folded and refolded so many times that thin white lines crisscrossed the image. But their faces were printed so clearly. Letty, glaring proudly, her face a bit strained after such a long time. Ramy’s hands affectionately on both her and Victoire’s shoulders. Victoire’s half-smile; chin tilted down, eyes raised and luminous. His own awkward shyness. Ramy’s grin.
He took a sharp breath. His chest tightened, as if his ribs were constricting, squeezing his heart like a vice. He hadn’t realized he could still hurt so much.
He wanted to rip it to shreds. But it was the only remaining likeness he had of Ramy.
‘I hadn’t realized you’d kept it.’
‘Letty kept it,’ said Victoire. ‘She kept it framed in our room. I took it out the night before the garden party. I don’t think she noticed.’