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rain and wet shoes and road blockages.
    But by now the schools were emptying, and the roads filled up with yellow school buses, American style, another innovation since Lily had been away. On the Fulham Road they merged into a growing crowd of parents and children, noisy, laughing, hurrying along the pavement between gushing gutters and lines of sandbags. Lily wondered how many of the world’s nations were represented in the exhilarating rainbow of faces around her. This was an old village long overwhelmed by the growth of London, a place you just drove through, but people still lived here just as they had when Lily was a kid, still worked and went shopping and took their kids to school, still were born and grew old and died in this place.
    And then the rain lightened, and a shaft of sunlight broke through the scattering clouds and glimmered from the water that stood on the roads and in the gutters, on lawns and playgrounds. Unaccountably, on this day she had learned her mother had died, Lily felt optimistic. She was free, and here was the sun trying to shine. On impulse she grabbed Gary’s hand, and he squeezed back.

7

    T he next day George Camden phoned Lily early at her hotel. Camden was the smooth ex-military oppo who had retrieved them from Barcelona. Camden said that the summons to lunch with Nathan Lammockson that day was confirmed. Lammockson’s “hydrometropole,” as Camden put it, was in Southend, some fifty kilometers east of central London at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. A chopper would pick up Lily and Gary from London City Airport at eleven that morning.
    Gary met Lily outside the hotel, in the rain. He was gazing into his handheld.“You followed the news? Remember that North Sea storm on the car radio? Well, it’s on its way south.”
    The rain was already lashing down, and now a storm was on the way. “Great.”
    “Overnight flooding all down the east coast . . .”
    He showed her the handheld. The BBC news was all about the weather, with images of the Tyne breaking its banks and forcing its way into the fancy restaurants along Newcastle’s Quayside. The island of Lindisfarne, only ever connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway, was cut off, stranding pissed-off holidaymakers. Beaches in Lincolnshire had been damaged. There were flood alerts out for East Anglia, for Boston and King’s Lynn, where the sea was challenging new flood barriers around the Wash. And so on. The weather girl’s animated map showed the storm as a milky swirl of cloud that was still heading south.
    Lily asked,“Is this unusually bad? If it keeps coming south, is London threatened?”
    “They haven’t said so. I don’t think this is even a particularly powerful storm. If it combines with all the fluvial runoff or a high tide it could become a difficult event. But I don’t know. Things seem to have changed.”
    “Kristie, my niece, you know, said sea levels have risen by a meter.”
    His eyebrows rose. “A meter ? Where the hell did that come from? A meter rise wasn’t in the old climate-change forecast models until the end of the century, even in the worst case.”
    “I wouldn’t believe everything Kristie says. She’s quite liable to have mixed up her meters with her centimeters.”
    “Well, if she’s right it would make a mess of everything . . . I just don’t know, Lily. I’m three years out of the loop, and Britain’s not my area anyhow.” He glanced at her. “Kind of stressy, your sis.”
    “Always was. She’s not dumb, though. She took a law degree. But she ended up in events, handling people rather than dealing with cases. She has that kind of personality, I guess. Bright, bubbly, engaging. A bit fragile. But on the other hand, neither you or I are raising two kids.”
    “That’s true enough,” he conceded.
    After their years together he knew the rest: that Lily had never married, and it was many years since she had had a relationship that lasted much beyond six months. At one point she