‘You always have something to say. You certainly had enough to say when we were looking down on Parliament.’

‘That is true.’ He sounded subdued.

‘Didn’t you think at least that it was a weird coincidence?’

‘I truly have no idea of what you mean.’

‘One day you talk about Parliament exploding, the next day three thousand people are killed in the Twin Towers.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘If you are trying to find some sort of connection, Sara, I suggest that you analyse such events more rationally.’

She sensed the rage within him but still did not understand what was driving it. Whatever it was, she was going to confront it. ‘It made me feel I don’t know you. Don’t understand you.’

‘I do not take it back,’ he said. ‘What was done on Tuesday was justified.’

‘What?’

‘I told you. Our people are entitled to payback.’

‘Killing all those innocent victims.’

‘Those towers were not innocent. They were symbols of domination. Imperialism. Exploitation. Like the Pentagon. Like the White House if the fourth plane had got through.’

‘Do you truly believe that, Kareem?’ She no longer felt eighteen; in the past two days she had grown up and was now an adult trying to drum sense into a wayward fool. ‘Because I hope you’re just in some muddled way theorising. Philosophising. Whatever you want to call it. And you’ll grow out of it.’

He softened. ‘I hope one day you might grow into it.’

She fought back tears – she refused to release them – welling up from an indefinable sense of betrayal. That, somehow, he had cheated her, not just sexually but by not presenting his full self from the outset; and that she had betrayed herself by not having the intelligence or insight, before he engulfed her, to probe beyond the outer sheath of the civilised and romantic gentleman.

‘An action like this,’ he continued, ‘will have a counter-reaction, then a counter-counter-reaction which will show up the West for what it is.’

‘What do you want, Kareem? War? Chaos? You’re someone who can do so much good if you choose to.’

‘This will be good. If you had spent as much time as I have among the West’s upper classes, you would agree with me.’

‘Is that where this is all coming from?’

‘No, they are only a symptom. We have suffered centuries of rapacity and aggression. Now we can begin to redress the balance of history.’

She looked away. He spoke with a cold aloofness – as if he were an automaton repeating a drilled-in slogan. Had there always been something of that about him? The way, as she now reinterpreted it, that he gave his opinions – as if he’d always rehearsed? There was the same handsomeness but a dullness in the eyes. No joy. A dead stare.