All this in a flash as I squeezed between two crowded tables to get to her. She raised her right hand and in mock formal fashion I bowed and kissed it. As I sat down she gazed at my sling with evident pity.
‘Poor darling.’
The waiter – he looked sixteen and serious– came with glasses, and filled them while holding his hand behind his back. A professional.
As we raised and clinked them across the table, I said, ‘To Adam not breaking more of my bones.’
‘That’s rather limiting.’
We laughed, and it seemed as though laughter at the other tables followed and rose with ours. What a wild place we were in. She didn’t know how much, how little, I knew. I didn’t know what to believe about her, whether she was the victim or perpetrator of a crime. It didn’t matter. We were in love and I remained convinced that even if I came to know the worst, it would make no difference. Love would see us through. It should have been easier, therefore, to broach any of the issues that my cowardice inclined me to suppress. And I was on the edge of doing just that, of saying more about my broken scaphoid, when she took my good hand in hers across the white linen.
‘Yesterday was glorious.’
I was giddy. It was as if she had proposed that we make love in public, now, across the table.
‘We could go home right now.’
She did a comic little double-take. ‘You haven’t opened your present.’
She pushed it across with a forefinger. While I unwrapped it, our boy waiter refilled the glasses. I found a small plain cardboard box. Inside was a z-shaped piece of strip metal with padding on the parallel surfaces. A wrist exerciser.
‘For when your plaster comes off.’
I stood and went around the table to kiss her. Someone nearby said, ‘Oi-oi!’ Another person made the sound of a barking dog. I wasn’t bothered. Back in my seat I said, ‘Adam says he’s disabled his kill switch.’
She leaned forward, suddenly serious. ‘You’ve got to get him back to the shop.’
‘But he loves you. He told me.’
‘You’re making fun of me.’
I said, ‘If he needs reprogramming, you’re the one he’ll listen to.’
Her tone was plaintive. ‘How can he talk about love? This is madness.’
Our waiter was hovering and heard everything we said next, even though I murmured quickly. ‘You helped choose the kind of guy he is – the sort who falls in love with the first woman he sleeps with.’
‘Oh Charlie!’
The boy said, ‘Have you decided yet, or shall I come back?’
‘Stick around.’
We passed a couple of minutes choosing and changing our minds. I ordered at random a twelve-year-old Haut-Médoc. It occurred to me that I was the one paying for my birthday treat. I cancelled the order and asked for a twenty-year-old bottle of the same.
The waiter left and we paused to consider where we were.
Miranda said, ‘Are you seeing someone else?’
The question astonished me and for a moment I was stuck for the most reassuring and convincing reply. At the same time, I noticed that the chef, who was also the owner, had come from behind the counter and was making his way between the tables to the door. The waiter was following him. I glanced over my shoulder and saw through the glass two figures out on the pavement. One of them was folding away an umbrella.
I must have looked evasive to Miranda. She added, ‘Just be honest with me. I don’t mind.’
She clearly did mind and I gave her my full attention.
‘Absolutely not. You’re all I care about.’
‘When I’m out all day at seminars?’
‘I work and I think about you.’
I felt a draught of cool air on my neck. Miranda’s gaze shifted from me to the door and I felt I could turn again and look. The chef was helping two elderly men out of their long raincoats which he dumped into the arms of the waiter. The men were led to their table – set apart and the only one with a lit candle. The taller man had swept-back silvery hair and wore a brown silk scarf loosely knotted around his neck and some kind of artist’s cotton jacket that drooped from his shoulders. A chair was held out for him and before sitting he looked around the room and nodded to himself. No one else in the restaurant seemed interested. The man’s style of bohemian grandeur was not so unusual in Soho. But I was excited.
I turned back to Miranda, still aware of her surprising query, and placed my hand on hers.
‘Do you know who he is?’
‘No idea.’
‘Alan Turing.’
‘Your hero.’
‘And Thomas Reah, the physicist. Invented loop quantum gravity more or less single-handed.’
‘Go and say hello.’
‘That would not be cool.’
So we returned to the question of the someone else I was not seeing, and once she appeared satisfied, we went back to Adam and discussed how we might overcome his resistance to the kill switch. She suggested hiding the charging cables until he was too weak to resist us. I reminded her of his instant origami sailboat. He would improvise a power cable in minutes. My concentration was poor during this exchange. I kept looking at her, hallucinating a glow around her head and shoulders, and thinking about the time when we would be alone, travelling the smooth and rising curve to ecstasy. Even as I was hobbled by a state of continuous sexual arousal, it excited me to be in the same room as a great man. From pre-war meditations on the idea of a universal computing machine, to Bletchley in the early years of the war, to morphogenesis, to his glorious patrician present. The greatest living Englishman, noble and free in his love for another man. In his seniority, dressed with the flamboyance of a rock star, a genius painter, a knighted actor. I could see him only if I turned rudely away from Miranda. I resisted. I distracted myself with the usual list, the buried suspicions, all we had not touched on – the Salisbury court case and the death threat being the most rank. Where was my courage when I lacked the clarity to raise these subjects, when they tormented me while they remained unspoken?
‘You’re not even listening.’
‘I am, I am. You said Adam’s got a screw loose.’
‘I didn’t. Idiot. But happy birthday.’
We raised our glasses again. The Médoc was bottled when Miranda was two years old and my father was moving out of swing into bebop.
The meal was a success, but the bill was a long time coming. While we waited we decided on a parting cognac. The drinks the waiter brought were double measures, on the house. Miranda returned to the business of her father’s illness. The new diagnosis was lymphoma, of a slow-acting kind. He was likely to die with it rather than of it. He had much else to die of. But there was a pill he now took that made him cheerful and assertive – and even more of a handful. Impossible projects filled his thoughts. He wanted to sell the Salisbury house and buy an apartment in New York, in the East Village, not the current one, she suspected, but the Village of his youth. On a rush of self-belief, he had signed a contract to deliver a coffee-table book on the folklore of British birds – a vast project that he could never hope to complete, even with a full-time researcher. On a strange whim, given his views, he had joined a fringe political group dedicated to taking Britain out of the European Union. He was up for election as treasurer at his London club, the Athenaeum. Every day he phoned his daughter with new schemes. Everything I heard made me gloomier about our proposed visit, but I said nothing.