"I saw this film once, with a terrible audience. They must presumably have known when it was made, and that there would be touches of melodrama or naivete no longer usual. They must have known too it was a landmark, the matrix for very much else. And they laughed uncontrollably. High-pitched, silly laughter, to show they knew, had grown up, progressed. Worst of all, an actress from the film had come to introduce it. She was lovely, tiny, and charming. They laughed, as she sat among them. I would have turned a machine gun on them all."

"Yes," said Rachaela. "Well, I won't laugh."

"Obviously. You have no need."

When they left, Althene paid.

The owner saw them to the door. The other diners were too discreet to stare.

Outside, another cab was waiting, which took them to the cinema.

As predicted, not all the film concerned Rachaela.

She found the biblical sequences interesting, or delightful, or remotely sad. The Babylonian scenes astonished her, the reeling walls and spinning sunwheels, the elephants and eagles of stone (which was not), the staircase of lions, where beautiful women embraced, lip to lip.

The audience did not laugh. It observed a reverential silence.

All dreamers then, those with memories.

Rachaela found the film had played upon her incoherent nostalgia, as if Althene knew, and had chosen purposely.

Rachaela felt a little stunned. It was a long film, of course. It was midnight when they emerged from the cinema.

To her surprise, no car was waiting.

"Shall we walk in the fog?" said Althene. "I know a little club, only a few streets away. We can have something to drink."

Rachaela was not sorry. She did not want the intimacy of a car. She pulled her coat closed against the thick dankness of the air. The fog had grown woollier, and the city… was unspecified heights and shapes of dark, with here and there a streaming diluted light that might be made of anything… a candle, a shallow lamp of oil—

The women on the stairs. Flowers that kissed. How had the censor passed it? Had they missed those mouths in the alabaster deluge of shoulders, arms, lily faces ringed by black curls?

They had turned into an alley. The fog pressed gray about them.

Anywhere. They might be—

Shadows massed. What was it?

Rachaela heard, after all, a laugh. Male.

Five men came out of the fog in front of them.

After the siege of Babylon, the violence of reality.

They were young, between eighteen and twenty-five. The fog dimmed them, giving them vegetable faces with paint hair and big white trainered feet. Between were quilted jackets, baggy cords, tracksuits like adult rompers.

" 'Ere," said one, "two fucking dykes."

"Never had a porking," said another.

"Like it," said another.

They hovered in the fog, stupid as the carcasses of butchered meat, but solid, alive.

Althene too had halted.

Rachaela thought, Never before—