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Annie sailed triumphantly through Oxford, launching a radical and scurrilous magazine and sickening her friends by getting a brilliant First in English without ever appearing to do a stroke of work. Because it was the thing she least didn’t want to do, she became a journalist, working on an evening newspaper in the far north-east of England. Her mother came to visit her just once and was so depressed by the landscape and the sooty hovel her daughter was living in that she cried all the way back to London. She had a point. Annie stuck it for a year then packed her bags, flew to New York and amazed even herself by bluffing her way into a job on
Rolling Stone
.
    She specialized in hip, brutal profiles of celebrities more accustomed to adulation. Her detractors—and there were many—said she would soon run out of victims. But it didn’t work out that way. They kept on coming. It became a kind of masochistic status symbol to be “done” or “buried” (that quip had started even at Oxford) by Annie Graves.
    Robert phoned her one day at the office and for a moment the name meant nothing to her. “The
tubab
who gave you a bed one night in the jungle?” he prompted.
    They met for a drink and he was much better looking than Annie remembered. He said he’d been following her byline and seemed to know every piece she’d written better than she did herself. He was an assistant district attorney and working, as much as his job allowed, for the Carter campaign. He was idealistic, bursting with enthusiasm and, most important of all, he made her laugh. He was also straighter and had shorter hair than any man she’d dated in seven years.
    While Annie’s wardrobe was full of black leather and safety pins, his was all button-down collars and corduroy. When they went out, it was L.L. Bean meets the Sex Pistols. And the unconventionality of this pairing was an unspoken thrill to them both.
    In bed, the zone of their relationship so long postponed and which, if she was honest with herself, she had secretly dreaded, Robert proved surprisingly free of the inhibitions she had expected. Indeed he was far more inventive than most of the drug-slackened coolsters she had lain with since coming to New York. When, weeks later, she remarked on this, Robert ruminated a moment, as she recalled him doing before declaiming details from the Dakar flight directory, and replied in perfect seriousness that he’d always believed sex, like the law, was best practiced with all due diligence.
    They were married the following spring and Grace, their only child, was born three years later.
       Annie had brought work with her on the train not through habit but in the hope that it might distract her. She had it stacked in front of her, the proofs of whatshe hoped was a seminal State of the Nation piece, commissioned at huge expense from a great and grizzled pain-in-the-ass novelist* One of her big-shot writers, as Grace would say. Annie had read the first paragraph three times and hadn’t taken in a word.
    Then Robert called on her cellular phone. He was at the hospital. There was no change. Grace was still unconscious.
    “In a coma, you mean,” Annie said, her tone challenging him to talk straight with her.
    “That’s not what they’re calling it, but yes, I guess that’s what it is.”
    “What else?” There was a pause. “Come on Robert, for Godsake.”
    “Her leg’s pretty bad too. It seems the truck went over it.” Annie took a wincing little breath.
    “They’re looking at it now. Listen Annie, I better get back there. I’ll meet you at the train.”
    “No, don’t. Stay with her. I’ll get a cab.”
    “Okay. I’ll call you again if there’s news.” He paused. “She’s going to be alright.” “Yes, I know.” She pressed a button on the phone and put it down. Outside, sunlit fields of perfect white altered their geometry as the train sped by. Annie rummaged in her bag for her sunglasses, put them on and laid her head back