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down again to rummage in the back of the fridge.
    ‘Yes, I do,’ I said quietly, but he heard me, turned, and looked up at me with an expression on his face I hadn’t seen before.
    ‘You do what, Rebecca?’
    ‘Believe you know me well enough,’ I said.
    A few months earlier Joe had showed a colleague a draft of the chapter which described the midnight conversation between Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva. It was chaotic, his colleague said. It leapt about and had no objectivity. It read like a novel, not the work of a historian.
    Joe wasn’t too bothered. He was building his ballroom of the past, where there’d been empty air before. Thefloor of his ballroom was waxen and silken. Joe’s mind hummed. Of course the dancers would come. How could they bear not to?

6
    A Jump Five Floors Up
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.
    I’ve never liked to think too much about breathing. It’s safer not to imagine the labour of it, life-long. If you know too much detail, you might not be able to go on. At school they taught us the wonders of what our bodies were doing as if they were especially rich and powerful engines which we had been given by our parents. We sat and observed them from the bright-lit chamber of our brain. We were never truly implicated in what our kidneys did, or our hearts. At the same time, in another lesson, Byron told us that the heart must pause to breathe. I believe that he was right.
So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright…
    It was Mr Damiano who got me to learn that poem. He told me that I should learn poems by heart and then I would always carry them with me. There would be many, many times when I would think I had nothing, and then discover that I still had the poems.
    Byron was right about the heart. Whether he was right about the soul I don’t know, but I like the way he puts it. The soul grows strong and fierce and it needs to be let out. The body effaces itself, as the cervix effaces itself at birth.
    Adam came bounding up the narrow stairs to our flat. I turned and saw the close, fierce pelt of his red curls. I looked away quickly and flipped the chicken pieces over in the seasoned flour.
    ‘You must be Rebecca,’ said Adam.
    ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I must.’
    He had red hair but dark brown eyes. It seemed to me that his face was deeply lined, but then he was thirty-eight and I was twenty-six. His face was scored and I wanted to read what was written there.
    ‘What are you cooking?’ he asked, drawing up a chair and sitting down at the table opposite me.
    ‘Chicken stew. It’s for later.’
    ‘It looks good.’
    I stared at the naked chicken pieces. Their flour coating hadn’t done much for them yet. I knew they would soon turn gold in the hissing oil, but it was better for guests not to see the pallid, uncooked meat. The pieces which I hadn’t yet rolled in flour lay in their bowl. They looked blue and babyish in their translucency.
    ‘It’ll be ready at eight,’ I said. ‘But maybe you don’t want to wait that long.’
    ‘I’m happy to wait,’ said Adam.
    Joe poured wine for us, and I peeled shallots while the two of them sank into talk. It was getting dark outside the windows, and there was the city far below, the slope of it falling away from the tall thin terrace where we perched five floors up. I looked out and saw car headlights moving over the dual carriageway. An ambulance went by with its blue light flashing. The siren reached us and I wondered if Adam would turn to it, but he didn’t. The sky had turned lilac, from the mixture of orange street light and rain-sodden dusk. It was a beautiful colour and I thought about how natural things are not always the most beautiful.
    Adam got up and went to stand by the window, with his back to us. I could watch the shape of his body without him