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  They sat quietly side by side as they drove in, watching that gentle miracle of the dawn: steadfast old London emerging from a quiet rain, gray and wet, street by street—prewar terraces of solid brick, modern low-rise offices, the high white stucco of West London's prosperity, newsagents on corners just opening up, the Victorian railway lines, the Georgian canals, the early-shifters already afoot, making for the nearest tube with umbrellas, headphones, privately preoccupied. The drizzle zigzagged down their windows. The car's heater hummed intermittently, as though a tiny piece of paper had been caught somewhere. She sat with her shoulder-length dark hair tied to one side at the back in a mini-ponytail that wisped sideways, long legs twisted around each other in her heavy black tights, buried otherwise in her coat; he sat, also looking out but thinking thoughts that mingled the history of his city with a tingling awareness that he was slipping under the encounter's gathering spell. That somehow there was a fragile affinity between them that may or may not come to anything, something intimately shared beyond the immediate ride—something, he thought, to do with that mysterious old alchemy that happens when a man and a woman find that their journeys coincide for a while.

  When they turned from their windows, they met each other's eyes. And he eased the moment's silence by asking for her number, saying it would be fun to meet up again and discuss customs regulations. And she gave it to him. And the next day he called her.

  In the weeks and months that followed, he probably fell in love. Lina was twenty-six, two years younger than he at that time. She was half Sami, half Swedish. Her limbs were all long and thin, so she had the occasional gawkiness of a slightly taller woman. She had ice-blue eyes, snow-sunned skin, sleek, dark, silky black-brown hair, which she was forever tying up this way or that. Her lips were almost colorless, though shaped and full, as though designed by some high seraphim of kissing. And the soft light of the midnight sun was in her smile.

  Indeed, hers was a sorcery of the genes that no other combination on earth could hope to conjure. When he sat down to think about it, which, in those early days, he did more often than sanity might require, he calculated that there could be fewer than a thousand like combinations alive—how many pure Sami people were left in the north of Sweden, and of those, how many had married the southerners, and of those, how many had produced female children who turned out like Lina? She was one in six billion. And yet it was impossible to place her without knowing where she was from, for her eyes had only the faintest rise of the far north, her dark hair and skin suggested the south, while her smile was as wide and white-toothed as the west itself, and her manner was almost oriental.

  Her mother—now married to her stepfather (her "plastic dad") and living in London for the past two decades—looked as though she had just stepped out of a 1970s holiday brochure advertising happiness and free love in Sweden: the cheekbones, the head-to-one-side smile, the true blond hair, the ever-honest self-reliant Scandinavian eyes of steady azure. And it was from her mother that Lina had received the gift of living in her body with ease and openness—not so much the tawdry modern "confidence," more a deep and unconscious surety in the authority of womanhood—and the gift of competence, a steady practicality and equilibrium that found life for the most part exactly as it should be.

  Her father had abandoned an existence of fur trapping with his father to go the long way south to Gothenburg at nineteen. Lina's grandfather, meanwhile, had lived his entire life bound in ice and liquor. She had a picture of the old man, grinning broken-toothed from inside the layers of his furs, standing on the edge of a white forest, white mountains behind, white sky, surrounded by dead animals neatly fanned out in the red-stained snow before him. And so it was from her father's side that Lina had received the gift of tranquility—or, more accurately, the gift of silence. For Gabriel knew that she was without doubt the most silent human being he would ever meet—not silent as in "a bit quiet" or "sometimes shy" but silent, when the mood took her (twice, three times a year), as in utterly wordless for days at a time. He had known her to say nothing for entire weekends, wrinkling her nose, smiling, and blinking after they made love and then wandering off, towel loosely held like an afterthought, to find a drink, her bath, her music. And it wasn't erotic primarily, or even sexy (though both these things), but it was somehow ancient and intense.

  The relationship deepened. Lina was kind, unbelievably generous, and supportive. She gave him all the freedom he wanted. She was as honest as Archean rock, and almost weirdly straight—quite without artifice or any sort of emotional deviousness. For a while Gabriel wasn't sure if this was a side effect of her being forever in her second language, but her English was perfect, better than her Swedish, she said, and the only errors that she made—"tempting faith," "a leap of fate"—were too few and far between to bear any wider significance. So next he wondered if it might be that in fact she was entirely normal and it was just his own background that caused him to consider everything short of fabled espionage, intrafamilial hostility, and deceit as "straight." But eventually he came to see that she was indeed wholly guileless. She was clever, but logically so, clever in straight lines, clever at recognizing the trail; she was quick-witted, but not witty; she was insightful, wise, socially observant, but somehow tone-blind, or rather blind to the effect she was having on the people around her. Then again, she didn't actually care, which he found more and more attractive.

  Except, perhaps, when this blindness translated itself into the Lina who would notice (and comment upon) the shabbiness of a pianist's shoes after he'd just finished playing the last three Beethoven sonatas from memory. Or the Lina who would be talking about the lack of good customer service at the petrol station they had just left as they drove north for their holiday into the purple-peaked Pyrenees with Elvis playing on the radio and the sun sinking in the west like Cleopatra's barge burning for the beauty of its love-struck queen.

  True, the correlative of this was that she was the most capable woman he had ever met—a facilitator. There was nothing she could not sort out. (After college, she'd joined the same advertising agency that had previously made her the face of Swedish Lapland and sorted that campaign out too.) Indeed, so much of his life did she ease and improve (as the first three years disappeared) that he sometimes felt as though he were being corralled, trained, domesticated according to some grand plan that he could never know. And now and then he did resent being managed as if he were an awkward account. He suspected that if he were to allow her to do so, she would get up an hour early every morning to wash, dress, groom, and perfume him. Her man-doll. But then, not one of her requests was in the slightest bit unreasonable: dry his feet before he left the bathroom, stop eating everything at three hundred miles an hour, be on time when he said he was going to meet her, replace the garbage bags when he carried out the trash. And so on. She was never, ever unreasonable.

  They walked together now, beneath November skies of pond-sodden bread. The rain had stopped since he had been out for the permit, and London seemed to be prepared to make a go of it again. It was not yet eight-fifteen. Already Frank was assiduously under way with the plumbing and Gabriel was feeling a little better. He knew Lina well enough not to try anything when he was covered in mud and bleeding. So instead he had merely told her how pretty she looked, then dutifully taken a shower, dressed in his favorite shirt, and asked her about her trip as they moved around the bedroom, before telling her that he had transferred all her music to her new MP3 player, which won him a kiss.

  Lina took his arm and he crooked it for her, as he always did. They crossed Tufnell Park Road, solid at this hour with precious mothers off-roading precious children to precious schools, and began to make their way toward the main junction. Traffic wardens were swarming on the corner. In the middle distance, the sirens sounded like eight-year-old girls making fun of their friends' boy stories. Gabriel could scarcely believe that he was the same person who only an hour ago had been cycling, bleeding, having a breakdown. And it wasn't anything Lina h
ad said—it never was; they seldom talked about feelings, his or hers—but now, for the first time, he smiled rather than flinched as a memory of his mother entered his head: a policeman parking illegally to nip in and get a pizza in Highgate village, his mother remonstrating, he embarrassedly waiting so that they could hurry up and buy the promised tennis racket, policeman catching schoolboy's eye, mutual sympathy. Yes, though light on his arm, Lina felt steadfast and certain. He was glad to be with her this morning. Glad the world contained her. Glad that she was here with him. Maybe it was because she had been away for a couple of days, but he was struck again by how calm and together and resourceful he felt in her presence. There was nothing he could not do with this woman at his side. Oh God.

  Breakfast was already well under way in Martha's Café. His hangover was hungry. They were greeted by the welcoming aroma of fresh-ground coffee as they opened the door, which gave way to a delicious smell of bacon toward the kitchen at the back. They sat at one of the miniature tables under the blackboard on which the menu was scrawled. They had been coming here most days since the work on the kitchen had started.

  She ordered some inscrutable confection of muesli and he went for the half English, which, after all, was what he was. Conversations of football crises, of such and such a figure in the news getting exactly what he deserved, of so and so needing to get her act together, of problems, rumors, plans, and hopes reached his ears. To Gabriel, the whole experience already felt as though it would be something that they would look back on and remember ... Someday, twenty or so years from now, when visiting one of their children at university perhaps: breakfast at the local college café, newly independent child assuming parents had never dreamed of eating such a thing, mute parental complicity as child talked through the menu as though it were the most recent thing on earth.

  Lina reached up to remove a stray eyelash from his cheek and took the opportunity to hastily rearrange his hair more to her liking, a habit that he vehemently disliked.

  "Lina. Pack it in."

  "What have you been up to, then—apart from throwing yourself at the local pavements?"

  He grimaced. They had only talked about her trip so far—her real dad's birthday.

  "Larry came up last night," he said. "It was terrible. He's an alcoholic. He's definitely an alcoholic."

  She smiled. "What did you do?"

  "We went to the pub for a quiet one and then into Camden ... Ended up drinking in some pig-packed shit hole until Christ knows when."

  "Fun?"

  "At the time."

  "Sounds it."

  "Actually, it wasn't."

  "When did you get in?"

  "Two."

  "Larry meet anyone?"

  "No, he just got a cab home."

  "At least none of your friends can stay over when they're drunk at the moment, so you don't have to go through all the rigmarole with the futon."

  What she really meant was not all the rigmarole of turning the futon into a bed but the secondary rigmarole of putting a sheet down —one of her pet insistences. She was the most hygienic woman in the world. She would physically cringe at the thought of a man falling asleep on their furniture without the prophylactic of a clean sheet, duvet, pillowcase. And yet there was never a word of censure about what he was doing until two in the morning. He could have turned up three days later without his trousers and said that he had been in Rio judging the Miss Porniverse Pussy-Pumping Pageant and she would have been just as calm. And he loved her for that.

  Her coffee (decaffeinated) appeared, his tea hot on its trail with a jug of milk. There was a sudden sizzle of sausages arriving for the workmen on the next table. She spoke over the top of her raised mug. "You should get him a girlfriend. Then you could both go out and do something you actually enjoy."

  "What do we enjoy? I've lost track."

  "Swimming on the Heath."

  "Lins, it's absolutely freezing at this time of year."

  "Joke." She eyed his hand, gauging his minor thumb injury as he gingerly removed the teabag.

  "He wants you to get him a girlfriend."

  "Me?" She raised her eyebrows.

  "He thinks you know loads of beautiful Swedish women."

  "What? From ten years ago?" She affected consideration. "Well, there's Anya—she's thirty-one and about to have a cesarean any day. She's my oldest friend and happily married, but I could ask if she'd like to give it all up for an overweight TV producer."

  "No. Forget it. She goes out clubbing. Larry only goes out eating."

  Someone swore at a bottle of ketchup that could not be bullied into dispensing its chemical treasure.

  "I could have a look at the office. What type does he like?"

  He also loved it that Lina wasn't on some phony high horse about womankind; he loved it that she could talk about other girls—minds, bodies, behavior—without all the invidious ancillary crap that so many women had to shovel into such conversations all the time.

  "Medieval barmaid type."

  "Blond?"

  "Yes. Blond, big baby eyes, breasts..."

  She wrinkled her nose. "It's such an easy look."

  "...comely, honest but saucy, daughter of local miller, weaver, wainwright. You get the idea."

  "I'll do a round-robin e-mail."

  "You still want me to order your mum music for Christmas?"

  "Yes. Thanks for doing that, Gabe. Choose things she would like, though. Nothing too weird. Maybe those cello pieces you listen to."

  "Nothing too weird."

  "I'll give you the money."

  Their breakfast danced into view. He was starving. Having poured her milk—she always swamped her cereal, causing Gabriel to think that what she really wanted was muesli-flavored shake—Lina did not start eating but instead began to watch him with mild disapproval (which she never could hide) at the sheer speed with which he was devouring his food.

  "Try not to eat so quickly, honey—it's really bad for you."

  "I know."

  Maybe that was it: the fact that she couldn't hide a single thought that came into her head ... This relentless compulsion for honesty, transparency, as if the epitome of human goodness was merely the willing ability to broadcast every last waking thought, no matter how trivial. Was it actually possible to resent someone for being so honest? What kind of a monster was he becoming? Anyway, why was he attacking her all of a sudden? Her request was perfectly reasonable. Slow down, Gabriel. Slow the fuck down.

  "I've got an easy couple of days," he said.

  She made a start on her muesli. "What's the next issue again?"

  "'Inner Voices.'" He forced himself to stop eating. "I should try to make this one better. I think ... I think I lost it a bit with the last one. I'm already struggling with the whole idea, though—I mean, how can anybody trust their inner voice when inner voices are universally famous for coming and going at random? And when they tell you all kinds of contra—"

  "What you should do is take a break from living and thinking on behalf of the rest of the world." There was concern as well as humor in her tone. "Leave it to someone else for a while—the pope or the president or someone."

  "People in power can't think on behalf of anyone else. They get cut off. That's the problem, Lina. Power may not corrupt every time, but it always isolates." He raised a fist to his chest in a gesture of mock heroism. "That's why everything is up to you and me."

  She smiled but shook her head. "We should go on holiday and you should not be allowed to think about anything except pizza toppings and ice cream flavors. Have you thought any more about doing the play?"

  "No. I need to call the man in Highgate again."

  "You should do it."

  Care, consideration, and total, unquestioning support.

  "I know."

  "I think May is perfect," she said. "And I was working it out on the plane this morning ... If you can start everything at the beginning of your working month, like now—just after an issue is out—then you can pr
obably get loads done from your office and sneak out for rehearsals. Then take your holiday for the next fortnight, while the issue is actually coming out—let your deputy do some work for once—and then put on the play the week after, when you are back at work but when it's easy again. That way you get a six-week run. Have you thought any more about which play you want to put on?"

  "Steven Berkoff." He picked up his fork.

  "You've gone off the Shakespeare idea?"

  "No. Just ... not the first one."

  "Shakespeare is not necessarily very commercial anyway." She nodded. "You want something that the audience can get to grips with easily."

  Maybe that was it. Something lurking behind that "not very commercial" or that "get to grips with"—that attitude. Which, again, was fair enough.

  "And if you have to take a month off unpaid, then you should do that. You know the money is not an issue. I'll support you."

  Or maybe that was it: maybe the money was an issue—though not in the way Lina thought. He had never borrowed; the house and the holidays were strictly fifty-fifty, his expenses were his own, but she paid more restaurant bills than he did, paid for more tickets, furniture, food. He finished his breakfast as slowly as he could manage.

  "You need a new coat," she said.

  "I know."

  "How come Frank managed to persuade you to go and fetch the permit?"

  "It just kind of happened. The buzzer went and he let on as if I was supposed to have organized it all ... and I ... I said I would go. I don't exactly know how it happened."

  She laughed lightly. "Well, don't bother becoming friends with him like you did with Bernie. It doesn't seem to help. You don't have to be friends with everyone in the world. Let's keep Frank at arm's length. I have given him pretty strict instructions, so we'll see ... He's doing the new sink, then he's going to sort out the dishwasher, and I've told him not to fit the new surfaces until he has properly sealed them."