I thought of that glib remark of mine that Marco had latched on to back in the spring: the onus of belief is on the believer. It wasn’t actually something I believed at all. If anything, the opposite. I was, in my heart of hearts, an absolutist. Reality, for me, wasn’t a “construct” arrived at by some Darwinian battle of competing human interests and ideas. It wasn’t a prize awarded to whoever fought hardest, or dirtiest. It was something that existed outside the human mind, and independently of it. Whatever happened between the couples in those rooms—Marco and Julia in Belfast; Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the maid; Naffissatou Diallo, at the Sofitel in New York; Assange and the Swedish women—was an actual occurrence, fixed in time and unchangeable, not some quantum state of infinite potentiality. I couldn’t accept those stories as variations on Schröedinger’s cat, alive and dead simultaneously until its box was opened—their protagonists at once guilty and innocent, victim and false accuser. Nor could I accept them as fables on the limits of the knowable. The truth might be hard to bring to light, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist, because it did exist: fixed in its moment, unalterable, and certainly not a matter of “belief.”

I was still ruminating on these thoughts a couple of days later, when the phone rang in my mother’s living room and to my surprise I found myself talking to Julia Gault.

6

6

IN THE SHOCK of hearing Marco’s accuser in my own ear, I barely took in anything she said at first, beyond the fact that she’d read my mother’s funeral announcement in the paper, and seemed to think she owed us an explanation for why she hadn’t come. A concert seemed to have been involved, or the organizing of a concert. Southwark Cathedral. Syrian refugees. I was aware of condolences being offered, and of offering the conventional responses in return.

“I haven’t seen your mother for years,” she said, “but I’ve always felt close to her. She was one of the few people on this planet who understood me.”

Her voice, somewhat high-pitched, as it had been on Marco’s answering machine (though without the fury), had a singsong intonation that I didn’t remember from the past. Otherwise it was much the same, with its distinct mixture of flattened Midlands vowels and crisp, Oxbridge emphases—a rare blend of the regional and the imperial that, along with her intelligence and good looks, had made her a natural candidate for a career in TV.

“Now remind me,” she said, “are you the one who went off to America?”

“I am.”

“I remember you! You were shy.”

“Very shy.”

“I think I used to make you blush.”

“You did. You probably still could.”