Colin the clairvoyant had arrived in Zeno’s life in much the same way as he had arrived in Fleur’s. On his fortieth birthday, a chum younger than himself—a carpet expert and lover of things oriental with whom he had exchanged exotic birthday presents—had hired Colin to announce himself at Zeno’s front door. The two men had taken to each other, and the sensitive had encouraged Zeno to cast his own chart, which he assured Zeno was as essential to a seeker as a self-administered haircut was to a narcissist.

Zeno, who knew the date and time of Fleur’s birth before she became edgy about revealing it, had consulted his ephemeris and seen that the condition of her Venus was similar to his own and, borrowing an example of his chum’s charm, paid the clairvoyant to repeat the novelty.

It was not particularly strange that Colin did not report back to Zeno on his visit to Stanley Crescent, for genuine sensitives are as aware of the in-built responsibilities of their gifts as priests are of their stations. Perhaps more so: priests do not necessarily lose their holy orders if they abuse them, while sensitives inevitably lose the gift that gives them theirs.

What was curious was that Colin did not have any inkling of the identity of the two souls he had advised Fleur to be hospitable to.

Zeno took a seat on the near-empty Northern Line. He had opted for one of the vacant doubles facing his destination. In front of him, to his right, was a couple. He assumed they were a couple, until he scrutinised them closely. The lady—an impoverished aristocrat, he guessed—was reading The Times, held delicately between gloved hands to prevent the printer’s ink from soiling her genteel fingertips. The man was wearing shell-shocked dungarees over a battered tee-shirt. He was looking at something that passed for a comic, which was also clutched between a pair of gloves. Rubber industrials, orange in colour.

Zeno smiled to himself and wondered whether they had knowingly sat alongside each other, or if they had been grouped by the law of like kinds that attracts things of a similar nature. Since Zeno had read about it in the Marylebone Library, he saw it everywhere—from types of flowers that grew together to buses of the same number that travelled in twos and threes. Perhaps it was the couple’s gloves that had drawn them together—or was a deeper attraction at play? If they stopped reading the papers and looked at each other, would she fulfil his dream of perfumed gentility, or he her fantasy of hot working-class steel?

He found himself thinking of another incident that had happened on the same line. He had been wearing a leather suit and was on his way to Camden Lock Market. At Euston, a seat became vacant and he took it. He found himself sitting next to Jim Morrison, also in leathers, chocolate-brown. The definitive voice of rock and roll looked like a cherub who had slipped through the pearly gates for a night on the town. They compared leathers, spent the day together, dropped some Purple Haze, and became friends.