“Do not rush to push me forward,” said Hazzley. She recited:

Because the birthday of my life

Is come, my love is come to me.

She blew out the candles with one breath, and the company applauded. Thick slices of cake were served. Wine was poured, a toast given, and then Cass returned to the front of the café to help Rice.

“Was that Rossetti you were quoting?” Tom wanted to know. He’d finished his slice and come back to Hazzley for seconds.

“Christina, yes. I don’t know why those lines came to mind. Strange, really, the remnants of other times, other periods in our lives, the way they’re linked in our brains after half a century.”

Allam had picked up his wineglass and was moving toward the round table where they usually sat. The others remained standing, and he seemed surprised by this. He balanced his wine in one hand, cake plate and fork in the other, and returned to the group.

“Does everyone eat standing up?” he said to Gwen.

“People who live alone, maybe. I do, some of the time,” she added. This came out awkwardly because she wasn’t used to being part of the main conversation. She wouldn’t have dared explain the complex emotions that smouldered when she sat down to eat in her kitchen and stared at the empty chair across from her. She had never wanted to look Brigg in the eye.

She could look this man in the eye, though. This man who had set down his drink and now stood beside her, eating Hazzley’s birthday cake. She could look him in the eye because he seemed to receive whatever was in the room. This was difficult to explain, or even to understand. He didn’t send out from himself; he took in. When the company met, he sat next to her at the round table. Everyone took the same place on Tuesdays, because of habit or routine, or for comfort, or whatever the human explanation.

“In Syria,” Allam told her, “we sit for a long time at small tables in our favourite coffee house. Drink tea or coffee, smoke from the water pipe—argeelah. Sometimes we play cards or chess or backgammon. Sometimes we discuss books or history, whatever is going on in the world. For all this, we do not stand—we sit. I miss that. The coffee house was a place where I met my friends. Also, there are famous cafés, especially one in the old city of Damascus, where a hakawati in traditional dress sits on a platform and reads through a microphone the stories of ancient times. The way the story is read and told is a special art, a way of telling that makes people want to listen to tales of sultans and warriors, of the Baibars, of the Mongol invasions. Now”—Allam shrugged—“with war, it is not easy to say if storytelling carries on in public places.”

Gwen was thinking of the many hours she’d spent at a table right here at Cassie’s, reading the tales of King Arthur. Never looking up. A lone activity. An activity of aloneness.