Reminded, I asked Stella: ‘Have you got any greens? I’m out.’
Stella fetched a freezer bag from the kitchen, full of unopened tubes: ‘Here. I don’t take them any more.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘I’ve been rayed.’ And when I didn’t understand: ‘Georgy rayed me. At the Gurwitsch. I’m resistant now, or so he says. It’s a new treatment he’s been developing.’
‘That’s—’ I fumbled a green into my mouth, crunched it, swallowed it down. ‘That’s amazing.’
Stella shrugged, as if developing an inoculation against radiation poisoning were just another of her ex-boyfriend’s eccentricities. Which, perhaps, from her perspective, was just what it was.
Remembering to drop the affectionate anglicisation of his name must have taken effort. It was something she wanted me to notice.
I duly noticed it: ‘What’s happening between you and George?’
Sighing, Betty hopped down from her chair and left the room. She had been here throughout, a witness to their break-up. I could not begin to imagine how awkward that had been.
Stella sat down at the dining table and lifted Betty’s Operation game, buzzing angrily, onto the floor. She drew a tissue from her pocket and absently worked at one of the old, indelible stains in the zinc. ‘I suppose you were right, after all,’ she said. ‘I suppose the differences between us and the Bund are becoming unbridgeable.’
‘But he took you to the Gurwitsch. He’s been treating you. Why didn’t he just—’
‘What?’
‘You know. Why didn’t he make you—’
‘“One of them”?’ She shook her head. ‘He offered. He suggested it many times. But why would I want that?’
I had nothing I could say to her. For a long while now I had wanted nothing else. Of course I wanted to be ‘one of them’. A Bundist. Bright – genuinely bright, not just over-educated. Odd. Different. A match for Fel, since as I was, I was – what? A companion? A pet?
I think Stella sensed my turmoil; anyway, she squashed it flat. ‘The Bund hands out the treatments it wants to hand out, to people it wants to hand them out to. It’s a cult. It’s always been a cult.’
‘It’s certainly a business,’ I conceded.
‘It’s a cult. I honestly think I prefer those nutters causing trouble in Palestine. At least they don’t pretend to be doing everyone else favours. How is the house?’
‘The house?’
‘My house.’
She meant the house in Shropshire. ‘Oh. Good. It’s good. I hope. I mean, I hope you like it.’
‘I’ll probably just put it on the market.’ Stella sighed. She saw my disappointment: ‘Well, I did tell you not to go to all that effort, didn’t I?’
‘Yes. You did. You might still have warned me.’
‘I didn’t know I’d need the money then.’
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Everything is fine. The network wants a third season of DARE, so I need to free up some capital to tide me over next year.’
‘That’s good,’ I said, uncertainly.
‘Don’t tell Fel. The ink’s not dry and I still have to think about casting.’
I couldn’t imagine Fel losing sleep over whether or not she would get yet another chance to strut around one of my cardboard sets in a purple fright wig.
‘Does Georgy know?’
Stella woke up to what she was doing with the tissue, the pointlessness of her scrubbing, balled the tissue up in her fist and tucked it into the pocket of her dressing gown. She frowned at the stain in the zinc. ‘I’m going to have to get rid of this table. These marks don’t bear thinking about.’
I looked at it. It was a dreadful thing. ‘Where did it come from? Could you take it back?’
‘From the Gurwitsch,’ Stella said. ‘They don’t want it, they threw it out. I found it in a skip.’
It was some ungodly hour of the morning on Boxing Day. Fel was sitting up in bed with her bedside light on. She was unclothed, a sheet over her knees and a book balanced open in the shallow nook of her thighs. I had just woken out of a deep sleep. I sat up, drinking in her spare and pale body, and she held up the book to shield herself. Playing along, I bent forward and read the faded spine. She laughed at my surprise: Virgil’s Aeneid. And, closing the book, she said: ‘The old stories are the best.’
I kissed her. She touched my face. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said.
I don’t know how much later it was but when I woke again, I found the bed empty. The sheets were cold. The room was in darkness. I turned on the light. I felt certain that there was someone in the room with me. Someone behind me. Someone hiding out in the corner of my eye. I got out of bed and went to the window. The Moon was rising behind the flats of the Barbican. It was a very different Moon from the one I had seen with Fel just a couple of weeks earlier. It was a new Moon, bright with artificial light. The light was spread unevenly over the Moon’s surface, gathering in streams, knots and pools which, to the informed observer, might well have echoed the geographic features of the Moon itself. At a glance, however, the far stronger impression was one of regularity: off-kilter lines of longitude and latitude gridded the Moon’s sphere.
I thought of bacteria and bell jars. I thought of clocks and curves. I thought of the exponential function. The HMS Victory would have to hurry if it was to land the first living people on the Moon. Even then, their efforts would only be token. The evidence was shining there above our heads: whole Bundist cities were rising from the regolith, empty and bright and inviting. Some people found it strange that the Bund, for all their activity on the Moon, had built no rockets worth the name, no spaceships, no Space Force. But it was not the way of the Bund to waste time on a journey. To them, the destination was everything. I had been to Ladywell. I could guess well enough the means by which the Bund would one day settle the Moon – if indeed it had not already begun. I wondered which of those lights up there were hospitals.
I heard Fel in the living room, turning over playing cards. I slipped on a dressing gown and went to join her. She was sitting on the floor, laying down cards, gathering them up. She was playing Set.
If no set can be found in the twelve-card array laid out at the start of a game of Set, three more cards are added. The odds against there being no set now increases from 33:1 to 2500:1. 1080 distinct sets can be assembled from the deck. Though there is no such thing as a ‘good’ card, or a ‘good’ pair of cards (each of the 81 cards participates in exactly 40 sets, and each pair of cards participates in exactly one set), some players have hypothesised that the ratio of no-sets goes up as sets are removed from the array.
Fel paid no attention to me. She was focusing on the cards. She played too fast for my eye to follow. In the space of two minutes she had ordered the whole deck, leaving three discards. She gathered them up, shuffled and began again.
I said, ‘Why did you ever play me at this?’
She saw me and put down the cards.
‘You always won. But you made it look hard.’
She shook her head.
‘Yes you did.’ I came and sat opposite her. ‘You made it look as though it was a game worth us playing.’
She gazed at the cards. ‘I liked playing this with you.’
‘Why?’
‘It was fun. Playing you.’
‘Humouring me.’
She shook her head. ‘If that’s what you think.’
‘What else am I to think?’
It was a stupid question. A mean question. She was right not to answer it. There were tears in the corners of her eyes.