He sat in Anna Kearney’s bedroom and threw the dice again.
How could you know which way to look at them?
With a shiver he saw that he had thrown the Stag’s Horns. He turned it over quickly, shovelled the dice back into their leather bag. Without them, without the rules he had made up to govern their combinations, without something, he could no longer make decisions. He lay down next to Anna, supporting himself on one elbow, watched her sleep. She looked hollowed-out and yet at peace, like someone very old. He whispered her name. She didn’t wake, but murmured, and moved her legs slightly apart. A palpable heat came up from her.
Two nights previously, he had found her diary, and in it read this passage:
I look at the images Michael made of me in America, and I hate this woman already. Here she stares out across the bay from Monster Beach with one hand shading her eyes. Here she undresses, drunk; or picks up driftwood, her mouth full of smiles. She dances on the sand. Now she is seen lying back on her elbows in front of an empty fireplace, wearing light-coloured trousers and a soft wool jumper. The camera moves across her. She is laughing out at the lover behind the handicam. Her legs are raised at the knees and slightly parted. Her body looks relaxed but not in the least sensual. Her lover will be disappointed because of this: but even more because she looks so well. Is it something about the room? That fireplace betrays her instantly, it makes too bare a frame, it throws her into high relief. Her energy is projected beyond the picture space. She is making eye contact. It is a disaster. He is used to a thinner face, gaunt cheekbones, body language pivoting between the grammars of pain and sex. Neither folded in on herself nor quivering with need, she is no longer the woman he knows. He is used to more urgency.
He will not be so attracted to someone this happy.
Kearney turned away from the sleeping woman and pondered the justice of this. He thought about what he had seen on Tate’s flatscreen monitor that afternoon. He would have to talk to Sprake again soon; he fell asleep thinking about that.
When he woke up, Anna was kneeling over him.
“Do you remember my Russian hat?” she said.
“What?”
Kearney stared up at her, feeling stupid with sleep. He looked at his watch: 10 a.m. and the curtains were open wide. She had opened the window too. The room was lively with light, the sound of people, traffic. Anna had one arm behind her back, and was leaning forward with her weight on the other one. The neck of her white cotton nightgown had fallen forward so that he could see her breasts, which for some complicated reason of her own she had never encouraged him to touch. She smelled of soap and toothpaste.
“We went to the pictures in Fulham, to see a Tarkovsky film, I think it was Mirror. But I went to the wrong cinema, and it was bitterly cold, and I was sitting on the steps outside waiting for you for an hour. When you got there, all you could look at was my Russian hat.”
“I remember that hat,” Kearney told her. “You said it made your face look fat.”
“Broad,” said Anna. “I said it made my face too broad. And you said, without a moment’s hesitation, ’It makes your face your face. That’s all, Anna: your face.’ Do you know what else you said?”
Kearney shook his head. All he really remembered was angrily searching the cinemas of Fulham for her.
“You said: ‘ Why spend any more of your life apologising?’ ”
She looked down at him, and after a pause said, “I can’t tell you how much I loved you for that.”
“I’m glad.”
“Michael?”
“What?”
“I want you to fuck me in my Russian hat.”
She brought her arm from behind her back and there it was in her hand, a silky grey fur thing the size of a cat. Kearney began to laugh. Anna laughed too. She put the hat on her head and instantly looked ten years younger. Her smile was wide and pretty, as vulnerable as her wrists. “I never could understand someone who wore a Russian hat to watch Tarkovsky,” he said. He gathered her nightgown up into the small of her back and reached down. She groaned. He was still able to think, as he often thought, Perhaps this will be enough, release me at last, push me through the wall between me and me.
He thought: Perhaps this will save her from me.
Later he made a phone call, and that afternoon, as a result, found Valentine Sprake wandering up and down the taxi rank at Victoria station with two or three blackened pigeons running in and out between his feet. They were all lame. Sprake looked irritated.
“Never phone me on that number again,” he said.
“Why?” asked Kearney.
“Because I fucking don’t want you to.”
He showed no signs of remembering what had happened when they last met. His engagement with the Shrander—his flight, if it could be described like that—was as private as Kearney’s, as private as madness: a dialogue so internalised it could only be inferred, partially and undependably, from the sum of his actions. Kearney got him in a cab and they went through the coagulated traffic of Central London then out to the Lea Valley, where the shopping parks and industrial estates were still embedded with a vestigial tissue of residential streets, neither clean nor dirty, new or old, inhabited by midday joggers and half-dead feral cats. Sprake stared sullenly out the windows at the alloy siding and empty buildings. He seemed to be whispering to himself.
“Have you seen this Kefahuchi thing?” Kearney asked him tentatively. “On the news?”
“What news?” said Sprake.
Suddenly he pointed out a display of flowers on the pavement in front of a florist’s. “I thought those were wreaths,” he said, with a bleak laugh. “Sombre though colourful,” he added. After that, his mood improved, but he kept saying, “News!” under his breath in a contemptuous fashion until they reached the offices of MVC-Kaplan, which were hushed, warm and empty at the end of the working day.
Gordon Meadows had begun his career in gene-patenting then, after a series of high-profile drug launches for a Swiss-based pharmaceuticals house, moved laterally and with ease into money. He specialised in ideas, kickstarts, original research. His style was to blow a pure, weightless bubble: boost capitalisation, float, talk the stock up, and profit-take a stage or two before the product was due onstream. If you didn’t get that far, he dumped you for what he could get. As a result, Meadows Venture Capital had the whole of a curious bolted-glass structure which glittered uneasily between the tailored alloy façades of a Walthamstow “excellence” park; and no one remembered Kaplan, a puzzled highbrow who, unable to meet the challenge of free market thinking, had returned only briefly to molecular biology before becoming a teacher in a Lancashire comprehensive.
Meadows was tall and thin, with a kind of willowy fitness. When Kearney first knew him, fresh from his pharmaceutical triumphs, he had favoured the merciless saffron haircut and goatee of the internet entrepreneur. Now he wore suits from Piombo, and his workspace—which had a grim view of trees along the towpath of the old Lea Valley Navigation—seemed to have been furnished from an issue of Wallpaper. B&B Italia seating faced a desk made from a single slab of re-melted glass, on which stood, as if they had something to do with one another, a Mac Cube and Sottsass coffee pot. This he sat behind, eyeing Valentine Sprake with a cautious amusement.
“You must introduce us,” he told Kearney.
Sprake, who had worked himself up into a fever in the lift, now stood with his face pressed up against the glass wall of the building, staring down at two or three lumps of packing material the size of refrigerators, floating along the canal in the gathering twilight.
“Let’s talk about him later,” recommended Kearney. “He’s got a great idea for a new drug.” He sat on the end of Meadows’s desk. “Brian Tate is worried about you, Gordon.”