They spoke like this for five minutes or so, while Emily stared out the window at a man walking up and down, perhaps looking for an address, until she’d had enough of the conversation and ended the call.

There had been many times, years ago, when Emily tried to counsel heartbroken friends who had separated from a lover or spouse. The most crucial condition of that friend’s former relationship or marriage, she said, was the reciprocal nature of the love. Once that reciprocation ended, the friend was in love with a lie, with a person who existed in the past and was now a product of invention. It was impossible, she’d maintained, to remain in love for long with an object you knew to be false. In Sydney, Emily reminded herself of this advice, but it gave no comfort at all. She sat at her hotel room desk with a newspaper and a glass of cold water, barely reading the paper, and sipping from the glass as if it were liquor. She went to bed and pulled the sheets to her chin, before getting up again and mooching around her room. She thought of Michael and Therese in the flat in London; she thought of them naked on the carpet between the couch and the television, and she could hardly bear to imagine this scene, yet there it was, pronounced in her mind like a memory, and Emily could not picture herself entering the flat in London and sitting on that couch again, knowing what they might have done, how they must have felt.

After sending Liam a three-sentence email—I’m here. And you were right about Michael having an affair. He’s in love with someone named Therese—she emerged from her hotel room, blue-skirted, white-bloused. She ate Balkan food on Crown Street. She drank wine in a bar. When Emily looked at the faces of strangers in Sydney—and the same thing often happened in other foreign cities—she was reminded of people back in London, seizing on some resemblance: everywhere she saw the Australian doubles of ex-colleagues and old friends, her mind mitigating the distance from home. In Emily’s stomach a wheel of anxiety turned whenever she saw somebody who looked like Michael.

On the way home from the bar she stopped on a footpath, transfixed, alone in the spectacle, as dozens of enormous bats circled a tower in what looked like delirium.

Chapter 6: 1945

1945

1.