“Huh,” was all I could think of to say. The story sounded absurd. I felt a sort of cringing awkwardness on her behalf, and a strong urge to get out.

“It was the mother who told me. I’d tell you her name, but she asked me not to, out of consideration for her daughter. There’s a lot of stigma for women who admit to being victims of sexual abuse, as I’m sure you know. It’s true though. Perhaps I ought to have put it in the memoir after all. I could have used pseudonyms. What do you think? I still can, of course . . .”

“That’s your call,” I said, probably rather coldly. “If you think it’ll help you, then you should certainly put it in.”

She flinched. She must have caught the skepticism in my tone. The brightness fell from her face like a mask. She looked dazed.

“It was good seeing you, Julia,” I said. “I’m sorry if . . .”

“Must you really go?”

“I should, yes.”

We managed a pro forma kiss on the cheek. It was still raining outside. I was cold, hungry, exhausted. Even before I crossed the river the whole encounter was acquiring a spectral quality, as if I’d dreamed or imagined it. I made a deliberate attempt to fix its key features in memory: I had a feeling I was going to need to recall them at some point. Some effort of concentration was required. It was never a neutral matter to be back in London, and I found it hard to focus on other things as I inched home across the city. I liked to think of it as a changeless place, stalled forever in the same drizzle and gloom I’d left it in decades earlier. But of course there was always some new development: flashy new buildings like the ones coming in and out of view from the Docklands train—Gherkin, Cheese­grater, Walkie-Talkie; new ticketing rigmaroles to figure out on the tube, new announcements on the platforms in new kinds of voices, the trains themselves smashing out of the tunnel mouths at newly aggressive speeds as if charged with the task of obliterating all memory of the newly interminable wait preceding their arrival. Contrary to what I’d always maintained, the city I’d abandoned seemed suddenly more anarchic, vivid, tumultuous than the one I’d moved to. And by some odd alchemy of transference, that wildness seemed to spread back into the images of Julia and Marco I’d formed when I lived there—Londoners to their fingertips at that critical juncture in their lives—and I had a vertiginous feeling of being caught up in a more turbulent drama than I’d fully grasped, with larger protagonists, gripped by stronger forces.