This December was a month of anniversaries. Jackson and Mam Agnes would have been married for forty-two years, Silas was turning fifty, and on the fifteenth it would be ten years since Silas had first learnt that the liberation movement was negotiating with the government. ‘Freedom is on the way,’ someone had told them, ‘the only thing that needs to be determined is when – and how – the baby will be born.’ A briefing in London, senior officials speaking with the smug voices of schoolboys in the know’. A smell of damp warmth inside the conference room, the Imperial Hotel, dull hues of gold and brown and colonial purple.

Comrade X on the podium, lecturing the delegates on the ‘new responsibilities’ that awaited them at home. Silas tried to ease his boredom, and his agitation (Betty was waiting for him at a bed-and-breakfast place, ‘Find your way to Oxford Circus, then take the Central Line to Shepherd's Bush station, walk along Uxbridge Road, away from the city, you'll find St Stephen's Avenue …’), by playing a game with his eyes. Observing the Comrade from different vantage points, dressing him in a young man's clothes, lending music to his inchoate exploration of the ‘new possibilities for the future’ (Eleanor Rigby, picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been).

Finally, Silas made a desperate swoop along the faded carpet, between the two rows of patient listeners, like a fighter-plane locked onto its target, and, when he could see the man's face, the ageing skin, the tired eyes, fired off a burst of mental gunfire. Old-fashioned machine-gun fire, loving the brat-atat-tat noise in his head. He watched in horror as the elderly man shut his eyes, clutched his throat and fell to the floor.

Afterwards, hurrying through London's bitter December cold, and hanging onto the strap in the swaying underground train, he tried to still his trembling hands. He lay next to Betty after they had made love, wanted to tell her what had happened, to explain that the moment he pulled the trigger in his mind, he knew the Comrade was going to die. But how could he capture the utter, terrifying beauty of that moment? He looked out through the brocade curtains at the cold, tyrannical sky, and, leaning into the warm rhythm of her body, he too fell asleep.

‘Hey, bra, you're very far away,’ Alec said.

‘Ja, well, just remembering something,’ Silas answered.

He was making good his long-standing invitation to take Alec out for a drink. This was an appropriate day, the afternoon of the Oliphants’ prayer-and-drinks party. A solemn affair, Silas thought it would be. Imagine that for a feat, forty-two years with the same person, more if you counted the courting and stuff like that. Did they fuck before they got married?

‘Why does Jackson always do this, pray and sin at the same time?’ Silas mused, more to himself than to Alec.