“A bagful of the best. They must have been off, I haven’t been so ill in thirty years. I’ve got a stomach like an old boot. Like the inside of an old boot. What have you done with my trousers?”

“They’re going round and round in the washer. Listen, can you hear them?”

And both sat silently for a moment or two, in the dark middle of the night, listening to the comforting distant rattle and swish from the kitchen, as modern life went on its pure mechanical way, trousers turning and buttons and zip rattling against the thick glass eyeball of the machine. An absurd thin purposeless light-headed lighthearted gaiety possessed Kate, as she sat there on the floor in the early hours of the morning with a not very clean old man. The worst is already over, thought Kate; and it wasn’t so bad, was it? It won’t be so bad, after all.

Her good mood lasted through the next morning, accompanying her as she collected the drink from the Off Licence, as she chopped beef and tomatoes and onions, as she listened to Simone’s descriptions of Damascus, as she answered the phone to people who wanted to bring extra friends to her party, as she dusted borrowed glasses. She finished all her own cooking in good time, leaving the kitchen table and surfaces to Mujid and Simone and the girls, and to Hunt, who, recovering with his usual rapidity, insisted on contributing a mushroom salad. Hunt, when in the mood, was an inspired cook. Kate hovered around, watching them. Mujid was off the next day, back to Paris with Simone. He had become so familiar to her, one of the family. Would she miss him? No, of course not, one must not exaggerate. But was glad to have known him, had learned from him. The difference between Sunni and Shi’ite, the location of Kurdistan (which was more than she’d ever learned from Hugo). A few phrases of French. (Gone were the days when she would confuse the Croix Rouge with the Khmer Rouge.) Her progress had been less impressive than his, but then, she had had less time. She had grown used to his ways: particularly she liked the way he made tea. Instead of spooning tea into the pot, he would pick up pinches in his fingers from the caddy, in his pale brown fingers. An Oriental timeless gesture, graceful, intimate, personal. He made a good pot of tea, and had learned to like it English-style, with milk. He had even devised a new labour-saving and hot-water-saving way of warming the pot, by propping it over the spout of the electric kettle; a permanent contribution to Armstrong domestic life. And such nice things he said, from time to time, like on the morning on which she had reprimanded him for taking out of the airing cupboard and putting on, at breakfast, a sweat shirt that was visibly damp, and he had replied in French, “Qa va secher sur la bete,” which he had promptly though not very idiomatically translated for her. “It will dry on the animal.” He, in turn, had learned that from Simone, he said. An attitude that augured well for domestic harmony. What a nice man he is, thought Kate fondly, as she watched him and Simone stirring up their couscous, and how unlike what would have been her idea of an Iraqi, had she ever had one. Walking up Tottenham Court Road the other day, she had paused outside the window of the Iraqi Cultural Centre and peered within: the little gallery, usually almost empty, was crowded with men—a party, an opening?—with men in white and beige suits, drinking cans of Coca-Cola, turning to stare at Kate as she stared at them in a way that Mujid would never have stared at a woman: but perhaps each of those men, separated from their group, might prove as amiable? Unlikely, thought Kate: you could tell they were different from the cut of their cloth. All the more credit to Mujid, who had never made a sexist remark, except about vegetables, during the whole of his stay. The world is changing, thought Kate, and all the nice friendly people will inherit it. What a hope, what a hope. But what else can one do but hope? Her own kitchen seemed hopeful enough, charged with an atmosphere of excitement, of end-of-term abandon: even the serious Simone was laughing as she stirred, and Mujid and Hunt were now on the best of terms as they quarrelled over possession of the sharpest kitchen knife.