“If it’s true,” she repeated to herself, “if anything he told me was true. Me mum warned me against marrying above myself.” Tears came to her eyes. Then she remembered that Zen was with her, and she tried to blink them away.

“Mum, I’m sorry. Don’t be sad—let’s talk about something else.”

She thinks it’s her fault, thought Prudence; isn’t it strange that whenever a marriage goes wrong, the kids blame themselves?

The whistle blew and the train was about to pull out when the door opened and a young woman struggled in. Nick, slouched in his corner seat, perked up. He wasn’t one of those people who felt his privacy invaded when someone entered his carriage—he welcomed a travelling companion. He regarded the newcomer as acutely as an anthropologist presented with a new species. In her flurry, she was unaware of his presence. He appreciated this, as it gave him an edge. Her face was away from him as she placed her basket—a Third World affair with a stripe and leather straps—alongside a pair of plastic bags in the overhead rack. He noted that, viewed from the rear—not the most flattering angle to view a woman’s legs—hers showed unusual promise. He was even more intrigued when she turned and proved to be attractive. Not that it would have made a great deal of difference to Nick—he wasn’t that sort of guy. In fact, in a bygone era, he could easily have been one of those warrior chieftains who bedded all the women of his clan, not just the pretty ones.

She was wearing a great deal of jewellery—so much so that virtually all her movements were accompanied by jangling and tinkling. He was not especially put off by this, as it was his custom not to divide sounds into harmonious or inharmonious, but rather to extend the field of his listening until he arrived at a comprehensive conclusion.

He had always felt that you could tell a lot about a person from their jewellery and how they wore it. Thus, he first noticed the most obvious items—the wedding and engagement rings. He glanced down at the ring on his own forefinger, painstakingly copied from the portrait of a pope in a Venetian palazzo. If his carriage companion had been interested—which at present she was not—she might have been intrigued by the oblong of black amber held in place by the plain gold hoop. Intrigued by the theory that, worn on this finger, it denoted a desire for power over others.

His attention returned to the girl, who was rummaging through her handbag, probably for her ticket; he wondered if she realised that she was in a first-class carriage. She held her legs together, providing a stable place for the bag, and he casually glanced at the fine shafts of hair above her knees, noting that the colour corresponded with her strawberry-blonde hair, which was cut into a fashionable page-boy.

Nick also believed that humans retained traces of the lower kingdoms in their physiognomy, and this signified a similarity with the nature of that creature. It was one of the insights that had given him unexpected success in his chosen pastime.