He could see the old buildings — churches, houses, pubs, even railway stations — which stood like geological markers, constructed of their area’s native rock. Britain was a small island, crammed with ten thousand years of history, a billion years of geology.

The sheer size of London surprised Henry. He’d come to think of everything in Britain as being miniature scale. Even a place like Edinburgh was — had been — pretty small by the standards of many American cities.

London, though, was different. He flew over mile after mile of grey suburbs, knots and twists of terraced houses and semis, spread like blankets over the gentle topography of the chalk landscape. His RAF pilot pointed out some of the logic, if you could call it that, that underlay the sprawl of outer London. It was really a collection of old villages — like Brentford and Harrow and Ealing and Richmond — that had been overwhelmed by the flood of building that had come after the war, but their identities were preserved in their names and the topology of the roads, which curled around the old village centres.

The Thames coursed through the heart of the sprawl, a silver-blue thread, and as they flew over central London it was easy to use the river as a guide to pick out tourist highlights: the big ugly glass developments at Canary Wharf, where the old docks used to be, and ships from Britain’s global empire had once called; the tiny, jewel-like sandstone perfection of the Palace of Westminster, the seat of Parliament; the surprisingly elegant bridges that laced across the water; the spectacular cowl shapes of the Thames flood barrier.

Traffic crowded the streets and highways, the metallic carapaces of cars and buses and lorries glimmering like so many beetles in the sun. Life was, obviously, going on here. It was as if the bad shit that had come down in Edinburgh, a bare four hundred miles away, had never happened.

They landed at a floating heliport on the bank of the Thames, near a bridge the pilot said was called Blackfriars.

Incredibly, he was taken to a hotel for the night; even more incredibly, he was going to have to wait until the next day — in fact, for twenty-four hours — before meeting members of the Government.

So he arrived in an anonymous BMW in Soho, an area of tight, crowded roads, the cars cruising inches from the elbows of cappuccino-sipping customers of pavement cafes. Most of the population here looked young, sleek, dressed well if sometimes bizarrely; Venus protection had been subsumed into fashion, and the girls in their ponchos looked like butterflies.

The car pulled into Frith Street, just off Soho Square. Henry got out with the holdall full of spare clothes and bathroom stuff that he’d requested on the way down from Edinburgh. His hotel was a neat little converted eighteenth-century house, another corner of Britain that was, no doubt, older than his entire country.