After that, Verity brought her sketchbook as he suggested. She told her brother that she was sketching al fresco and he snorted as if he thought she was mad. She sat on a kitchen chair and drew what she saw out of the window: the rushes, the clumps of seablite, the geese and the waders, the spikes of grass and the line of the sea. Jack sat watching her, smoking. Slowly, he began to talk. He told her about the stars he’d seen from the desert, the cacti and the brutal heat. And cities with tall, shining buildings that reflected the sun. She allowed the words to cast their spell, watching his lips move while he talked, the flash of his teeth and the pale hairs on his arms, golden where the light caught them. He began to bring a camera to the cabin. It was a black rectangular shape with a plate that stuck out the bottom. Scratched on the side was a number and she assumed he’d somehow got it from the army surplus. Sometimes, he would get out the camera and take photographs from the window, sometimes turning it towards her. She found it embarrassing and flinched at first but then she began sketching him – the lines of his nose and jaw and cheekbones, filling page after page with bold, dark line drawings of his face and neck as he took photographs of her. It was a mutual gaze of recreation. She had never been looked at so much before in her life and it would have been unbearable except that she was also the looker. The way he focused on her as if every part of her was worth recording, was reciprocated in the way she drew every line and every crease and curve of his face. Sometimes her gaze snagged on his and she couldn’t look away. It was like he was photographing inside her, as if he already knew what was in there.

Once she was making coffee in the kitchen and saw a newspaper, folded on the floor. It must have fallen from his pocket. She picked it up. It was the New York Times dated 17th November, eighteen days old. On the front there was a picture of an officer of some kind and then, on the left, the headline said:

Experiments for Hydrogen Bomb Held Successfully at Eniwetok.

Where was Eniwetok?

‘Jack,’ she said, holding the paper when he came in from the bedroom, where he’d set up his camera. His hair looked askew from where he’d been distractedly putting his hand through it. When she saw him, she almost didn’t say anything. But it came out.

‘Do you know anything about this? I haven’t heard anything.’