Thurayya had ruined Mr. N’s taste in women. Despite the detachment and aversion he felt for her at the time, he couldn’t help being influenced by her tastes. What he wanted in a woman was someone who could look as clean and orderly as Thurayya on the outside, yet contained all the abundance, plenty, and warmth that Mary had offered Mr. N. Miss Zahra did have some of Thurayya’s coldness, it was true, balanced by some of Mary’s kindness, but Mr. N would hardly have called her his ideal. Still, when she came back, he would point out the matter of her damaged stocking. It wasn’t right for a woman like her to go around looking sloppy. And when he brought it up, he would also insist that she stay a while.

Not that Miss Zahra hadn’t been right to hurry out. There really wasn’t space for two people in Mr. N’s room. Not that it was small, exactly, but neither was it especially inviting, particularly since it was longer than it was wide. Longitudinal spaces do not inspire a sense of harmony. Instead, they make you feel remote, as though they’ve decided to keep their distance out of some sense of aversion. Mr. N’s wooden table was nothing more than a long slab of wood, and as one of the few items of furniture, it was put to many uses besides eating. The television, almost never turned on, was set into the wall like a dark window behind which who knew what sorts of phantoms lurked. As for the bed, it was neither small nor large. A “twin-plus,” as Miss Zahra put it, meaning it was big enough for one and a half people. The half person being the whole person’s shadow, perhaps. An absent lover, or the ghost of some other loss.