“And then he conquered his Smoke. Conquered it completely, for more than two years. We were all in awe of him: the servants, Mother, and I above all. He was like a holy man. Only he grew very thin. And then he started talking to himself. Little things, not always in English. When I returned home after the next school term, he was chained to his bed.

“I’ll tell you another secret: for the past year and more, I’ve wanted to be like him. Like he was, before he went mad. Holy.” She surprises herself by being able to laugh. “But Charlie thinks I have no talent for it.”

“Tell me about Charlie.”

“Charlie is the one we are waiting for. Thomas’s friend.” She feels herself blushing. “My friend, too.”

Soon thereafter, they each retire to bed.

ф

Thomas is up early the next day. His sickness has left him at last. Now he stands, itching for action. He is that hateful word found in cheap novels. Virility. It’s in his every stride and glower. No other word will do.

And yet he cannot meet her eye.

“I’m off,” he announces after breakfast and does not wait to see whether she will follow. His impatience only increases once — five steps apart, him rushing, her chasing — they reach the foot of the church. Dawn is breaking; a smear of colours in the fog.

There is no Charlie.

“Something has happened to him.”

“You don’t know that,” Livia replies, though she, too, is bowed by the same thought. Charlie is alone: detained in Oxford, or lost on the road to London; in a train compartment, on the back of a wagon, lying wounded in a ditch. They were shot upon before. When Livia closes her eyes she can hear the screaming of the horses dragging her mother’s coach over the precipice.

Charlie does not arrive at noon. She does not need to wait for Thomas to tell her what he is thinking. He wants to go find Charlie; trace him all the way to Oxford if need be. She can feel it in her pores, on the hairs of her arms. And yet, Thomas is not smoking. There must exist, then, another type of Smoke: invisible, clinging to them as surely as their shadows. The breath of their needs and worries; the truths each must assert and impose upon all others. The potentiality of sin. If so, they are all in each other’s mouths every time they speak. How dangerous then proximity, those hours and days spent shoulder to shoulder until the other’s being begins to grow into one’s own and sows its hunger in one’s furrows. How blissful, conversely, solitude, and how miraculous Grendel’s isolation. Of all the men and women in London, he alone is an island, unadulterated, himself.