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reddening in the firelight.
    ‘I live just two doors down.’
    ‘Handy.’ She searched her handbag, found a packet of cigarettes. Winston. With one of these new filter tips. She offered him one.
    He shook his head. ‘Are you staying in London?’
    ‘Near Grosvenor Square,’ she said as she lit her cigarette. ‘My father works at the American Embassy. My mother stayed in the States but I thought I’d come over with him. Try to do some painting . An American in London, that’s me.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘You know. Like the movie with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron.
An American in Paris.’
    ‘Never heard of it.’
    ‘Maybe it hasn’t come over yet.’ She smoothed down her skirt over her knee. ‘I’m not always like this.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘This outfit. I did it for the King. I thought it would be appropriate.’
    ‘I don’t think he noticed.’
    She laughed. ‘I meant that I’m a sweater and jeans kind of girl. Thought you should know, that’s all.’
    He shrugged. ‘I don’t pay much attention to fashion. Too wrapped up in my studies.’
    ‘So what was the visit to Westminster then?’ A long drag on her cigarette, purses of smoke released to the air. ‘A night out on the town?’
    It was his turn to laugh. And then he dared to say on the first rush of alcohol to his head: ‘I did get to meet you.’
    ‘You certainly know how to flatter.’
    He had no idea how to flatter. He had gone to an all-boys grammar school. His first year at university had been spent in a daze at actually having female students right there with him in the lecture rooms. Later on, he had managed a few heavy petting sessions at parties and rag balls, one girl masturbating him until he ejaculated inside his trousers. He was more embarrassed than relieved by the event, eventually finding a handkerchief so she could wipe her hands clean. He never saw her again. He was still a virgin, with all the blood of his sexual interest preferring to flush his cheeks rather than to fortify his penis.
    She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray, quickly lit another, her fingers moving with a fussy energy, the painted nails scratched clean here and there. Her head leaned in towards him, elbow on the table, chin cupped in her hand. Brown eyes, flecked with bronze. Dark smudges of tiredness below the rims. The sleeve of her blouse slipping down slowly off her wrist, letting the silky down of her bare forearm flicker in the firelight. ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Who are you?’
    Edward thought that if he had been a spy, he would have confessed everything to her there and then. Take all the documents, the names, the codes, the microfilms. The secret radio. The frequencies . Just be my lover. Please be my lover. Instead he told her about his studies with an enthusiasm he hadn’t previously believed he possessed. He spoke about the intriguing formality of the Japanese language. The ephemeral quality of beauty in
The Tale of Genji
. Thewitty delight of Sei Shonagon’s court diaries from
The Pillow Book.
How the simple poetry of the
haiku
could compress the essential qualities of nature into a few syllables.
    ‘That’s what I like the most,’ he gushed, caught up in his own excitement, in her apparent interest. ‘The subtle awareness. The attention to detail. Just look at
shodo
, the calligraphy. All that intense energy. Concentrated on a single brushstroke.’
    She ran a finger through a small pool of beer, tracing her own private design on the tabletop. ‘I like to see passion in a man,’ she said, looking down at her handiwork.
    He reddened to the comment, hastily gulped down the rest of his beer, not sure if she was referring specifically to him or just to any male of the human race.
    ‘My father spent a few years in Tokyo,’ she continued. ‘He expects great things from the Japanese. He says they are absorbing all things American, refining them with their own aesthetic, then selling them back to the West. They’ve already