They looked at each other; a silence that made evident both the purpose and the failure of their conversation. Then they shook hands again and the reverend made his way towards the stile that led from the garden back to the meadow. He had meant to say a few words about how even the worst situations had something salvageable in them, that the picture was never entirely black. The important thing, however, was that the elder boy was on his way. Things would improve then, somehow.

He looked up. The clouds now were slashed with a blue as clean as starlight, and he smiled, feeling the grateful inhalation of his soul. It was hard to believe there could be any atheists in Somerset, and by the time he was halfway across the meadow, his coat flapping over his arm, he had quite forgotten his dreams.

2

The moment László set out for his meeting with Emil Bexheti he felt a constriction of the chest, as if on the previous evening he had smoked an entire tin of Havanitos rather than his customary two. The Paris air seemed thin and innutritious. It was like breathing through a straw and it began to worry him. He wondered whether it was the beginning of something.

In the science room of his old school, dissected organs, human and animal, had been preserved in sealed bottles for the instruction of the pupils. He was sure there had been a lung there, floating in its syrup, an object that looked to have grown on the side of a tree or on a submerged rock, and which even as a young boy he had found improbable as the organ that funded human speech and laughter. And from that same schoolroom, he could recall certain mysterious and exotic terms – alveoli, pleura, gaseous exchange – that meant almost nothing to him now. It was shameful that he had so little idea of what took place in the world beneath his skin, though it seemed inevitable that in the next ten or fifteen years he would undergo some manner of enforced education. He knew, for example, that the heart was chambered like a weapon, but were there two or three chambers? Four? Was the body entirely dark inside? Was there colour?

He paused outside the Air France offices on rue de Rennes, leaning forward a little in a posture that seemed to ease the intake of air. Don’t let me be old today, he thought. Today he needed clarity and vigour, a will unsapped by any thoughts of mortality, and he turned his mind once more to the meeting, and to the note he carried, which yesterday morning, or the night before, had been slipped in among his papers at the university. A single sheet of A4 in a brown envelope. Unaddressed, unsigned.

‘The café terrace at the Monde Arabe. Wednesday 1600.’