1.

She hated leaving the city, knowing she was also leaving Jerichau behind somewhere, but whatever she felt for him - and that was a difficulty in itself - she knew better than to linger. She had to go, and go quickly.

But alone? How long would she, could she, survive like this? A car, a carpet and woman who sometimes was not even certain she was human ...

She had friends around the country, and relatives too, but none she knew well enough to really trust. Besides, they'd ask questions, inevitably, and there was no part of this story she'd dare begin to explain. She thought about going back to London; to the flat in Battersea, where her old life - Finnegan and his out of season Valentines, the pots, the damp in the bathroom - would be waiting for her. But again there would be questions, and more questions. She needed the company of someone who would simply accept her, silence and all. It had to be Cal.

Thinking of him, her spirits lightened. His eager grin came to mind, his soft eyes, his softer words. There was probably more danger in seeking him out than in returning to London, but she was tired of calculating risks.

She would do what her instincts told her to do; and her instincts said:

2.

'Cal?'

There was a long silence at the other end of the telephone line, when she thought contact had been broken.

'Cal, are you there?'

Then he said: 'Suzanna?'

'Yes. It's me.'

'Suzanna.'

She felt tears close, hearing him speak her name.

'I have to see you, Cal.'

'Where are you?'

'In the middle of the city. Near some monument of Queen Victoria.'

'The end of Castle Street.'

'If you say so. Can I see you? It's very urgent.'

'Yes, of course. I'm not far from there. I'll slip away now. Meet you on the steps in ten minutes.'

He was there in seven, dressed in a charcoal-grey work suit, collar turned up against the drizzle, one of a hundred similar young men - accountant's clerks and junior managers -she'd seen pass by as she waited under Victoria's imperious gaze.

He did not embrace her, nor even touch her. He simply came to a halt two yards from where she stood, and looked at her with a mixture of pleasure and puzzlement, and said: 'Hello.'

'Hello.'

The rain was coming on more heavily by the moment.

'Shall we talk in the car?' she said. 'I don't like to leave the carpet on its own.'

At the mention of the carpet, the puzzled look on his face intensified, but he said nothing.

In his head Cal had a vague image of himself rummaging through a dirty warehouse for a carpet, this carpet presumably - but his grasp on the whole story was slippery.

The car was parked in Water Street, a stone's throw from the monument. The rain beat a tattoo on the roof of the vehicle as they sat side by side.

Her precious cargo, which she'd been so loath to leave, was stored in the back of the car, doubled up and roughly covered with a sheet. Try as he might, he still couldn't get a fix on why the carpet was so important to her; or indeed why this woman - with whom he could only remember spending a few hours - was so important to him. Why had the sound of her voice on the telephone brought him running? Why had his stomach begun churning at the sight of her? It was absurd and frustrating, to feel so much and know so little.

Things would become clear, he reassured himself, once they began to talk.

But he was wrong in that assumption. The more they talked, the more bewildered he became.

'I need your help,' she said to him. 'I can't explain everything - we haven't got time now - but apparently there's some kind of Prophet appeared, promising a returning to the Fugue. Jerichau went to one of the meetings, and he didn't come back -'

'Wait,' said Cal, hands up to stem the rush of information. 'Hold on a moment. I'm not following this. Jerichau?'

'You remember Jerichau,' she said.

It was an unusual name, not easily forgotten. But he could put no face to it.

'Should I know him?' he said.

'Good God, Cal -'

To be honest... a lot of things .. . are blurred.'

'You remember me well enough.'

'Yes. Of course. Of course I do.'

'And Nimrod. And Apolline. The night in the Fugue.'

She could see even before he murmured 'No' that he remembered nothing. Perhaps there was a natural process at work here; a means by which the mind dealt with experiences that contradicted a lifetime's prejudices about the nature of reality. People simply forgot.

'I have strange dreams,' Cal said, his face full of confusion.

'What sort of dreams?'

He shook his head. He knew his vocabulary would prove woefully inadequate.

'It's hard to describe,' he said. 'Like I'm a child, you know? Except that I'm not. Walking somewhere I've never been. Not lost, though. Oh shit -' He gave up, angered by his fumblings. 'I can't describe it.'

'We were there once,' she told him calmly. 'You and I. We were there. What you're dreaming about exists, Cal.'

He stared at her for long moments. The confusion didn't leave his face, but it was mellowed now by the smallest of smiles.

'Exists?' he said.