Ailinn agreed with him. 'Christ!'

iii They took a late breakfast a mixed mushed aubergines again a in a room that must once have suggested a pasha's pavilion (mosaic tiled floor, mirrors on the ceiling, carpets on the walls), but now looked bored with itself a a street-corner bric-a-brac shop going out of business. Sensing that the permanent residents of the hotel weren't looking for conversation, Kevern and Ailinn kept their eyes lowered. They were served mint tea which Kevern failed to pour from the requisite height. 'It tastes better if you aerate it like this,' the only other person in the breakfast room not in a keffiyeh called across from a nearby table. He was holding his own glass teapot aloft as though he meant to take a shower from it. 'And you get more foam.'

Kevern, feeling like a country boy, thanked him.

'Where are you two from?' the man asked.

Kevern sneaked a look at Ailinn. How did she feel about talking to a stranger? She nodded imperceptibly. 'Port Reuben,' Kevern said.

The man, as broad as a door and dressed like a widely travelled photographer in khaki chinos and a cotton jacket with a thousand pockets, shook his head. 'Never heard of it. Sorry.'

'That's all right,' Kevern said. 'We aren't on the line about it. And you?'

'I'm not on the line about it either.'

If the man was a comedian, Ailinn wondered, how would her thin-skinned lover deal with him.

Kevern worried for her on the same grounds.

He tried a laugh. 'No, I meant where are you from.'

'Me? Oh, everywhere and nowhere. Wherever I'm needed.'

'Then you're needed here,' said Kevern, with a worldly flourish of his arm. 'Should we take sugar with this?'

The man asked if he could join them and joined them without waiting for an answer. The width of him was a comfort to Kevern. You needed a wide man to advise you in a strange place. Ailinn thought the same. He would have made a good father.

It turned out that he was a doctor employed exclusively by this and a number of other nearby hotels to attend to the mental welfare of their long-term guests. 'It keeps me busier than you would imagine,' he said, smiling at Ailinn, as though she, having to deal with the mental welfare of Kevern, would be able to imagine only too easily what kept him busy.

There were questions Kevern wanted to ask but he wasn't sure about the propriety of asking them while there were guests still eating. Reading Kevern's compunction, the doctor, who had introduced himself as Ferdinand Moskowitz, but call him Ferdie, leaned across the table as though to gather his new friends into his wide embrace. 'No one hears or cares what we're talking about,' he said. 'They're miles away. Depression can do that. It can make you indifferent to your surroundings, uninterested in yourself let alone other people.'

'And those who are not depressed?' Kevern asked.

Ferdie Moskowitz showed him a mouthful of white teeth. Kevern imagined him dazzling the Tuareg with them. 'No such animal here. The only distinction to be drawn is between neurotic depression and psychotic depression, and even then those who start out with the milder form very quickly develop the more serious. Dispossession does that.'

'We're all dispossessed in our way,' Ailinn said quickly. She wanted to say it before Kevern did. She could deal with her own pessimism better than she could deal with his. His slighted her. Slighted them a the love they felt for each other.

'Yes, and we're all depressed,' the doctor said. 'But in fact few of us are dispossessed as these poor souls are. You must remember that theirs is a culture that had already fallen into melancholy, long before' a he made an imaginary loop with his hand, from which he made as if to hang himself a 'long before you know what.'

'Not what they told us at school,' Kevern said. 'Fierce warrior people,' he quoted from memory, 'who dispensed largesse and loved the good things in life . . .'

'Ah, yes a Omar Khayyam via Lawrence of Arabia. Come fill the cup . . .'

Kevern closed his eyes, as though savouring something delectable, and tried to remember a line. 'Enjoy wine and women and don't be afraid a isn't that how it went?'

'We read that at school as well,' Ailinn said, 'only our version was Enjoy but do be afraid.'

The doctor made a sound halfway between a cough and a snort. 'As though that was all they ever did,' he said. 'As though, between lying languorously on scented pillows and occasionally riding out to inconsequential battle in a sandstorm, they had nothing to do but wait for us to come and impose our values on them.'

Kevern shrugged. For himself, he wanted to impose his values on no one. He wasn't even sure he knew what his values were.

'Either way,' the doctor continued, 'that's not the real Omar Khayyam. He was a philosopher and a mystic not a hedonist, which of course you can't expect schoolboys a or schoolgirls a to understand. And as for the large-souled warrior of our romantic imagination a he vanished a long time ago, after believing too many lies and too many promises and losing too many wars. Read their later literature and the dominant note is that of elegy.'

'Our dominant note is elegy, too,' Kevern said. 'We've all lost something.'

Ferdinand Moskowitz raised an eyebrow. 'That's an easy thing to say, but you have not lost as the poor souls I treat have lost. At least you can elegise like a good liberal in your own country.'

'I don't think of myself as a good liberal,' Kevern said.

'Well, however you think of yourself, you have the luxury of thinking it in your own home.'

Kevern exchanged glances with Ailinn. Later on they would wonder why they had done that. Other than asking them to call him Ferdie a a name that upset Kevern to an unaccountable degree a what had Moskowitz said to irritate and unite them? Weren't they indeed, as he had described them, people who enjoyed the luxury of home? All right, Ailinn had spent her earliest years in an orphanage and had left the home made for her by her rescuers, but had she not found a new one with Kevern, hugger-mugger on a clifftop at the furthest extreme of the country? 'I cling on for dear life,' Kevern had told her once, making crampons of his fingers, but that was just his exaggerated way of talking. They had found a home in each other. So what nerve had the doctor touched?

'Wherever we live,' Kevern said at last a and his words sounded enigmatic to himself, as though enigma could be catching a 'we await alike the judgement of history.'

Ferdinand Moskowitz rattled his pockets and moved his lips like a man shaping a secret. 'We do indeed,' he said. 'But there are some things we don't have to wait for history to judge.'

'Such as?'

'Such as our using the people you see here a our grandparents using their grandparents a as proxy martyrs. We said we were acting in their interests when all along we were acting in our own. The truth is we didn't give a fig about their misery or dispossession. It was we who felt dispossessed. They were a handy peg to hang our fuming inferiority on, that was all. And once they'd given us our opportunity we left them to rot.'

'This isn't exactly rotting,' Kevern said.

'You haven't seen inside their heads . . .' He paused, then went on, 'Look, I know what you're thinking. These are the lucky ones, the rich and the powdered, born here to parents who were born here. The bombs didn't fall on them, because they financed the bombs. The banks didn't crash on them, because they owned the banks. They were spared the humiliations to which for years their poorer brothers were subjected. But that doesn't mean they don't feel those humiliations. Observe them at your leisure a their lives are sterile and they don't even have the consolation of being able to hate their enemies.'

This was all getting a bit too close to the bone for Kevern. He wasn't sure what to say. People didn't discuss war or WHAT HAPPENED, or the aftermath of either, in Port Reuben. It was not the thing. Not banned, just not done. Like history. WHAT HAPPENED a if WHAT HAPPENED was indeed what they were talking about a was passe. Was this why his father cautioned him against the Necropolis, because in the Necropolis they were still discussing a war that was long over? Was Ferdie Moskowitz the disappointment his father wanted to save him from?

'How so?' was the best response Kevern could come up with. This was like arguing through cotton wool. It wasn't that Kevern didn't have a view on the subject, he didn't know what the subject was.

'How so? You can't hate in retrospect, that's how so. You can't avenge yourself in retrospect. You can only smoke your pipes and count your beads and dream. And do you know what they fear most? That our history will make a mockery of events, extenuate, argue that black was white, make them the villains, ennoble by time and suffering those who made a profession out of their eternal victimhood, stealing and marauding on the back of a fiction that they'd been stolen from themselves.'

The wool descended further over Kevern's eyes. Soon he would not be able to breathe for it.

'They being . . .?' he just managed to ask.

But the doctor had lost patience. No longer a father figure to either of them, he rose, bowed in an exaggerated manner to Ailinn, and left the breakfast room.

A moment later, though, he popped his head around the door and pulled a clownish face. 'The gone but not forgotten,' he said.

The phrase seemed to amuse him greatly for he repeated it. 'The gone but not forgotten.'

'I don't think Ferdie likes me,' Kevern said, after he disappeared a second time.

It was to become a refrain between them whenever Kevern sniffed a predator a 'I don't think Ferdie likes me.'

And Ailinn would laugh.

iv That afternoon, with a light rain pattering against the scratched Perspex, they decided they would get Ailinn's phone fixed. The best places, the concierge told them, were in the north of the city and he didn't advise driving.

'Is it dangerous?' Kevern asked.

The concierge laughed. 'Not dangerous, just tricky.'

'Tricky to find?'

'Tricky to everything.'

He offered to call them a taxi but Ailinn needed a walk. They wandered aimlessly for an hour or more a Kevern preferred wandering to asking directions, because asking meant listening, and the minute someone said go straight ahead for a hundred metres then take a left and then a hundred metres after that take a right, he was lost. Occasionally a tout, dressed like a busker or a master of ceremonials at some pagan festival, stepped out of a doorway and offered them whatever their hearts desired. 'Do you have anything black?' Kevern asked one of them.

The tout looked offended. He was neither pimp nor racist. 'Black?'

'Like a black tee-shirt or jacket?'

The tout missed Kevern's joke. 'I could get you,' he replied. 'Where are you staying?'

Kevern gave him the wrong hotel. He wasn't taking any chances.

Finding themselves in a part of town where there was actually construction going on, they went into a cafe to escape the dust. A beefy, furiously orange-faced builder in brightly coloured overalls, covered in plaster, raised his head from his sandwich and looked Ailinn up and down. 'Tasty,' Kevern thought he heard him say. But he could have been clearing his throat or referring to his sandwich. The gesture he made to a second builder who entered the cafe, however, slowly twirling a probing finger in Ailinn's direction, was unambiguous. The new arrival took a look at Ailinn and fingered her impressionistically in return.

'What's that meant to signify?' Kevern asked them, looking from one to the other.

The builder with the inflamed, enraged face made a creaking motion with his jaw, as though resetting the position of his teeth, and laughed.

'Take no notice,' Ailinn said. 'It's not worth it.'

'You tell him, gorgeous,' the second builder said, opening his mouth and showing her his tongue.

The first builder did the same.

These are the gargoyles I missed in Ashbrittle, Kevern thought.

'Come on. Let's leave them to dream about it,' Ailinn said. She took Kevern by the elbow and led him out.

They were both strangers to the city, but Ailinn felt she could cope better in it than Kevern ever would.

Back on the street the rain was falling more heavily. 'Let's just jump in a taxi, get it sorted and then go home,' she said. 'I think we've been away long enough. I have a migraine coming on.'

It was a vicarious migraine, a migraine for him, a man who didn't have migraines.

Kevern felt guilty. His idea to come away, his idea to mooch about looking into the windows of ill-lit shops and see where they ended up, his idea to go into the coffee shop a his idea, come to that, to ask Ailinn out in the first place, his idea to kiss Lowenna Morgenstern, everything that was making life difficult for Ailinn a his idea.

There were few taxis and those that passed were uninterested in stopping. Kevern wasn't sure if their For Hire lights were on or off, but he thought some drivers slowed down, took a look at them, and then sped off. Could they see from their austere clothes, or their hesitant demeanour, that he and Ailinn weren't from round here and did they therefore fear they couldn't pay or wouldn't tip? Or was it simply something about their faces?

Ailinn had turned white. Seeing a taxi, Kevern made a determined effort to hail it, running into the street and waving his arms. The driver slowed, peered out of his window, drove a little way past them, and then stopped. Kevern took Ailinn's hand. 'Come on,' he said. But someone else had decided the taxi was for him and was racing on ahead of them. 'Hey!' Kevern shouted. 'Hey, that's ours.'

'What makes it yours?' the man shouted back.

He was wearing a striped grey and blue cardigan, Kevern noted with relief, as though that made him someone he felt confident he could reason with. And wore rimless spectacles. A respectable, soberly dressed person in his early thirties. With a woman at his side.

'Come on,' Kevern said, 'be fair. You know I flagged it down before you did. Didn't I, driver?'

The driver shrugged. The man in the cardigan was blazing with fury. 'You don't have to yell and scream,' he said.

'Who's yelling and screaming? I flagged the taxi down before you, and I expect you to accept that, that's all. This lady has a migraine. I need to get her back to our hotel.'

'And I have a wife and tired children to get home.'

'Then you can get the next taxi,' Kevern said, seeing no children.

'If it means so much to you that you have to behave in this insane manner, then take the taxi,' the man said, raising an arm.

Kevern wondered if the arm was raised to call another taxi or aim a blow. He felt a hand on his back. Was it a punch? In his anger, Kevern wouldn't have known if it was a knife going between his shoulder blades. 'Take your hands off me,' he said.

'Calm down, you clown, you've got what you want. Just get yourself into the taxi and pootle off wherever you belong.'

'Get your fucking hands off me,' Kevern said.

'Hey,' the man said. 'Don't swear in front of my children.'

'Then don't you fucking lay your hands on me,' Kevern said, still seeing no children.

What happened next he didn't remember. Not because he was knocked unconscious but because a great sheet of rage had come down before his eyes, and behind it a deep sense of dishonour. Why was he fighting? Why was he swearing? He was not a fighting or a swearing man. And he couldn't bear that Ailinn had seen him in the guise of either.

It was she who had pushed him into the taxi and got them back to the hotel. 'Your hands are ice cold,' she told him when they were back in their room. Otherwise she said nothing. She looked, Kevern thought, as though made of ice herself.

He didn't know what time it was, but he fell into bed.

'I don't think Ferdie likes me,' he said before he fell asleep.

Ailinn did not laugh.

It was her suggestion, when they woke in the early hours of the morning, that they drive home without even waiting for breakfast. It was clear she didn't want a conversation about what had happened.

'Do you hate me?' he asked.

'I don't hate you. I'm just bewildered. And frightened for you.'

'Frightened?'

'Frightened of what might have happened to you. You didn't know who that man was. He might have been anybody.'

'He was a family man who didn't want his children to hear foul language, that's if there were any children. Though he didn't mind them seeing him pushing a stranger. There was nothing to be frightened of.'

'You don't know that. I was also frightened about you. I didn't like to see you like that.'

'Do you want me to explain?'

'No.' She meant no, not now, but it came out more final than that.