Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

24 April 1930

When Qayyum stretched out on his mattress for the tiniest of rests he tumbled straight into dreams in which he wore the uniform of the 40th Pathans to try and reach his brother but at every gate of the Walled City a green-eyed woman held a pistol to his heart and asked why he had killed her sister. Finally at the last gate he felt the weight of a hand on his shoulder and turned round with a cry:

– Najeeb!

– Qayyum, no, it’s me. Wake up now, wake up.

Qayyum raised himself onto his elbow. Through the open window, the morning light was feeble. One of the most trusted of Ghaffar Khan’s men was there, his face discoloured with weariness – darkness below the eyes, pallor everywhere else.

– What is it? What happened?

– We don’t have time to talk of what happened. There’s work to be done.

The British still hadn’t opened any of the gates, he said, but some of the party leaders from Congress and the Khilafat Committee had been in talks with them to make allowances for the burials of those who couldn’t be interred within the Walled City – the Hindus who needed to take their bodies to the crematorium, and those Muslims who wished to bury their dead beside family members at the graveyard in Shahji-ki-Dheri. The funeral processions would take place in shifts, no more than one set of mourners at a graveyard at one time, and no more than ten people were allowed to accompany each body.

– How many have died?

– Who can say? But only a few are being taken for burial.

– What do you mean?

– Qayyum Gul, we don’t have time to talk of all the injustices of the night. Get ready, we need men to go round and explain the situation to the bereaved.

– Explain what? First the British kill our men, then they decide how we can bury them?

– This is exactly what you won’t say. We must be allowed to channel all the rage of the Walled City into resolve, not allow an explosion that we’ll be unable to control. Can I rely on you, General?

– Yes, sir. But. .

– Can I rely on you, General?

– Yes, sir.

The dead man was young, childhood’s mark still on his features. Qayyum lowered his head in shame as he stood in front of the body explaining to the boy’s father and brothers the terms of the funeral. If only Ghaffar Khan were in Peshawar, surely this wouldn’t happen. But the men accepted what he said without question. They’d worried they wouldn’t be allowed to the graveyard at all; any burial was better than none.

Only one of the men appeared not to listen to anything Qayyum said. He sat on the ground, holding the hand of the dead man whose face was his face. Twins, one of the men of the family whispered to Qayyum. He carried the corpse home all the way from the Street of Storytellers; he said it was like carrying his own death. Qayyum knelt in front of the unpaired twin.

– I’m sorry. To lose a brother must be the greatest of all griefs.

The man looked up at Qayyum.

– Do you have brothers?

– Yes, one.

– Was he on the Street of Storytellers yesterday?

– No. He’s in the Cantonment. He must be worrying about me but I don’t know when he and I can reach each other again.

– Come with us then.

– What?

– Come with us when we leave the Walled City for the graveyard.

Qayyum waited outside the house, smoking a cigarette, while the women of the family said their farewells, their voices rising through the windows as a battalion marched past. Through the smoke of his breath he watched the English soldiers’ expressionless faces. It was as though they were ghosts from some other time unaware of the cries that would pierce any living heart. He ground the cigarette beneath his heel, wished he were in an orchard away from these narrow alleys. Even at this hour, so soon after sunrise, the air was heavy. The body indoors had been surrounded by cut lemons to keep a scent of freshness about it – the family had been unable to go in search of ice during the curfew.

A donkey-cart arrived, the body was brought out, stiff as wood. Qayyum walked beside the cart as it progressed through emptied streets toward Gunj Gate, watching the driver’s bare foot as it rested on the donkey’s rump, the toes tapping out code for ‘slow down’ and ‘veer right’. The animal’s fur was discoloured and thinned where the man’s foot rested on it, but the foot itself was smooth. Only that foot, not its pair. Love wasn’t composed of grand gestures; it was found in the dead cells sloughed from a man’s skin for the thousandth morning in a row without expectation of even being noticed, it was a man rubbing his brother’s dead hand because he didn’t know how to stand aside and do nothing while his twin’s skin was ice-cold, it was a boy who learned without being told to always walk on the left-hand side of a man who had lost his right eye.

The donkey-cart took a zigzagging route past the homes of those who had known the dead boy but weren’t allowed to add their voices to the prayers at his grave. Windows opened all along the donkey-cart’s route and the fists of mourners released rose petals onto the corpse. Qayyum had expected to find himself an impostor in this funeral procession but instead, as the Walled City rained rose petals, he was reminded that grief never leaves, It merely sinks into you. A deep sorrow. It wasn’t his parents he thought of as the soldiers at the gate waved him through but the man whose features he could no longer sharply recall – Kalam Khan, hardly older than the dead boy whose body rolled with the motion of the donkey-cart until his father placed a hand on its chest to hold it still, releasing the scent of crushed roses.

Qayyum would have walked all the way to the graveyard beside the donkey-cart – to treat this funeral procession as a cover for escape was an insult – but at a certain point, as they walked past the wheat fields of Shahji-ki-Dheri the dead boy’s father said to him, Go to your brother, and Allah be with you. And all the men said the words which they knew were the last the boy had heard: Inqilaab Zindabad.

He didn’t slow his pace until he reached the Museum grounds, where the gardener took a single look at him and held the garden pipe in his direction. Qayyum cupped his hands, splashed the cool water onto his face and neck, smoothed down his hair. No need to embarrass his brother by running in looking like a crazed Pashtun. He stood up, listened a moment to the birds and touched the bark of a tamarind tree. Every morning he went to the orchards thinking it would be his last day there, but the rent-collector’s sympathies clearly didn’t lie with his King-toasting, polo-playing employer. Or perhaps the men who socialised with Deputy Commissioners and paraded their loyalty by the portraits of kings on the wall were only disguising their deeper sympathies. Peshawar is filled with Scylaxes, he would say to Najeeb, who lived in as close proximity to delight as an adult as he had done as a child.

He thanked the gardener, strode towards the door, and pushed it open. Through the archway leading into the Main Hall he saw two figures; one with her back to him advancing upon the other – an Englishwoman in trousers, her hair short as a boy’s. The Englishwoman turned towards him as he entered and said, Najeeb! her voice containing too much emotion.

– I am his brother, he said, more harshly than he’d intended, and barely had time to be disturbed by her acute look of disappointment before a thought came bearing down on him, trampling all other concerns.

– You haven’t seen him? Yesterday, he didn’t meet you at the train station?

– The train had to turn back. I only arrived in the evening. Someone has gone to fetch him now. No, please don’t go.

The last words were spoken in Pashto to the other woman who, head down, walked past Qayyum – he stepped aside to make room for her – and, ignoring the Englishwoman’s comments, proceeded out of the door.

So now it was the two of them. Qayyum Gul and the famed Miss Spencer.

– I ask for your forgiveness.

She looked over her shoulder and then pointed to herself, a question in the gesture. Qayyum nodded and stepped a few steps closer to her, recalling that Najeeb had once mentioned this high-ceilinged, wooden-floored space used to be a hall where the English came to dance. He hoped her Pashto was fluent so he could say what he needed, quickly, in a language which didn’t make him feel inadequate, and be done with it.

– I came to your house with my brother and stood with my back turned towards you when I should have thanked you for taking the time to teach him.

– So that was you. But it was fifteen years ago.

– That’s fifteen years in which I’ve failed to ask for your forgiveness.

– In all the wide world there is no one like the Pathans!

He had come to hear that idea, from other Indians and from the English, as one indicating the hot-bloodedness of the Pashtuns; but here stood an Englishwoman reflecting his people back at him with warmth and admiration. He saw too keenly what there was in her that Najeeb had found so appealing as a boy, and wheeled away, a lumbering creature who didn’t belong in this place where both women and statues were composed of precise gestures of forgiveness and blessing. But the woman seemed to think he had started a conversation, not concluded one, and came to stand beside him in front of the starving Buddha.

– Are you a letter-writer, like your father?

He looked sideways at her, shook his head, wondering what he was supposed to do now. In Brighton he had grown accustomed to Englishwomen – had come to enjoy their company, if he was honest. But they had all been older, and the relationship of patient and nurse clearly demarcated. What was her name – he tried to remember – that nurse in whose handkerchief he still wrapped his eye at night? How shameful to have forgotten.

Everyone, even Najeeb, assumed Qayyum’s stand against Empire stemmed from Vipers, the suffering he’d been led into for a fight that wasn’t his to fight. But he had never felt closer to the English than on that day. Even now, he knew hatred could never truly take root in his breast so long as he remembered Captain Dalmohy shot again and again, getting back to his feet each time as though his body were an irrelevance; and Captain Christopher, dying with Urdu words of gratitude on his lips for the sepoys who had rushed to help him. It was later, at Brighton, that the questions began. It was because of the nurses. His glass eye felt gritty in its socket. Tell them a widow gave a present to a Pathan boy – let the Empire tremble at that! It was something like that she’d said, and he’d been astonished by her audacity, the dismissal of Empire. Everything had started there.

But the only young Englishwoman he’d ever spoken to was that one – how vividly the memory came back – on the train to Peshawar. He was thinking this as the Englishwoman beside him held out a cigarette case to him and offered him its contents, her hand freckled.

– Turkish. The cigarettes are Turkish.

She smiled as if this observation of his, in English, were something wonderful, showing uneven teeth, pink gums. Now he started to think he had recognised her immediately. The large blue eyes, the angular features. But no, he hadn’t. When he thought of her – and sometimes he did – what he recalled was not eyes or jawline but the impatience of her gestures, the hunger of a woman trying to be a man and failing as a result to be either man or woman. But now everything about her was more measured.

– How did you first meet my brother?

– He was my welcome committee in Peshawar the first time I arrived here. Well, not really. But when I stepped off the train, there he was.

– You were right.

– I’m sorry?

– That day, when I told you I was twenty-one years old, you said this is just the beginning. You were right.

Her look of confusion disappeared the moment he pointed to his glass eye, and then her hand covered her mouth and the two of them stood and looked at each other, directly now in a way that hadn’t been possible until this moment, excavating their memories for what remained there of the train journey, one speaking in Pashto, one in English.

– You sketched all the way from the Indus to Peshawar.

– I barged into your compartment!

– You offered me half your bread roll.

– You refused that, but you took the cigarette later.

And then they both said, Turkish! and laughed, as if something miraculous had happened. Qayyum thought, wait until I tell Najeeb.

– Where is he, that brother of mine? In the house with his broken statues?

– He has broken statues at home?

– At home. No. What do you mean, at home?

– Someone went to get him from his house. They say, because of all this trouble, he probably decided to stay in the Walled City. Oh, there’s the fellow who went to get him.

Qayyum turned round, trying to fight the rising, ridiculous panic. The peon at the Museum was shaking his head at the Englishwoman, saying, The soldiers won’t allow me into the Walled City.

– But he’s here, Qayyum said, walking across to the peon, catching hold of his arm. He was here yesterday. He stayed in the Cantonment overnight.

The peon shook his head.

– No, he said, he didn’t come in yesterday at all.

Qayyum pushed the peon aside and strode out of the door. He was here yesterday, Najeeb Gul, my brother, he was here. And the gardener: no, not yesterday. He never came. Qayyum put a hand out, felt rough bark beneath his skin. The Englishwoman had followed him out. Mr Gul? she said, and her voice was shrill, awful. He gritted his teeth against the sound, and ran out of the grounds towards the Walled City.

Kabuli Gate was closed, but as he approached it opened to allow a car driven by an Englishman to drive in. Running, he was through, and within the Walled City again.

– Stop. Stop right there.

Strange, how a command delivered in an English accent still made him want to salute. He turned towards the voice, and there was an English officer with two sepoys on either side of him, their rifles pointed at Qayyum.

– Lance-Naik Qayyum Gul, 40th Pathans. Sir!

The sepoys looked uncertainly at the officer, who signalled to Qayyum to approach him, his expression entirely disbelieving.

– On leave, are you?

– Discharged due to injuries sustained in battle, sir.

– Which battle?

– Vipers, sir. Ypres.

Of all the words known to the English, only Somme had greater power. Not King, not Country, not Christ could stand against Ypres. Even so, he didn’t expect the Englishman to step forward and hold out his hand.

– My father died there. Royal Fusiliers.

Qayyum took the Englishman’s hand, unable to discern if he was feeling anything at all beyond anxiety that a green-eyed woman might be watching him from a balcony down the street, aiming a pistol at his head.

24 April 1930

Viv picked her way among the severed hands, the headless torsos, her shoes leaving faint prints in the dust of the chequered tiled floor. The groupings were by body parts: arms and feet and heads and torsos and legs of all sizes together, like placed with like so that variety might emerge.

The stout man in the Museum had told her that it had been Najeeb’s idea to undertake the cataloguing of detritus: all the excavated pieces too fragmented, too poorly crafted to ever have a hope of being displayed. Such work was a labour of labour, he said, and no one else showed much enthusiasm for it, but Najeeb had obtained permission to turn the elongated reception room of a departed official’s house into a field of broken stone. A notebook lay on the window ledge, and Viv picked it up. Item 1. Takht-e-Bahi 1911–12. Torso with drapery, stump of left arm ending above elbow. 18.7 L. Crude. Late Kushan? She walked over to the cluster of torsos, located the one with the number 1 chalked onto it, walked to the next one, read the accompanying entry. Continued on, feeling the world steadying around her for the first time in the day.

Item 184. SKD 1908–9. Left hand. 5.5 L x 2.8 W. Lower-right palm missing. Three fingers curled into fist. Index finger bent at first and second joint. Effective foot scratcher. Sliding her foot out of its shoe she rested it against the extended index finger of the upturned Gandhara hand and moved it forward and back. There were pleasures large and small here from the foot-scratching hand to the jigsawing together of a fish-tail with a human torso to reconstitute an ichthyocentaur from Takht-i-Bahi. But her favourite thing of all was Najeeb’s pairing of two abraded heads of almost identical size, one Greek in features, one Indian, separated by three centuries or more. He had laid them down in profile so they looked each other in the eye, their mouths inches apart each other. Was this an expression of his own proclivities or an acknowledgement of the passionate intimacy of Pathan men, sexual and otherwise? Who had the boy she’d adored grown into, and how long would it be before movement in and out of the Walled City would become possible again so she could find out?

But how extraordinary that his brother should turn out to be the one-eyed Herakles. She smiled at the memory of their mutual wonder, and wished he hadn’t run out so abruptly. She had asked the peon what he and Mr Gul had said to each other in Hindko, and his answer was an unhelpful Nothing, memsahib, though he was more obliging when the stout man asked him to accompany Miss Spencer to the house of fragments.

A cool breeze, accompanied by the heavy clatter of water. The peon had turned the garden pipe onto the bamboo blinds of the verandah which ran along one side of the house. Viv walked over to the window and leaned out, calling out her thanks to the dark shape on the other side of the blinds. Easing herself onto the window frame, she swung her legs out and stepped down so she was in the shadowed verandah. She fanned the front of her blouse to bring some relief to her clammy skin and moved forward to look through the chink between blinds, wet bamboo against her cheek; the colours in the garden were bleached by sunlight, tree limbs sagging. Viv had a brief, glorious, image of a jugful of ice cubes which she could pour down the front of her dress, but felt too stupefied by the heat to go in search of a kitchen. Foolishly she sat down on a wicker chair, and then it was doubtful she would be able to get up again. She watched a bead-eyed lizard dart up the wall and stop, stilling entirely, as though, having sped towards this spot, it couldn’t remember why it wanted to be here or think of what next to do.

She must have fallen asleep in the shaded verandah because the light was muted when she opened her eyes and saw the peon bending over, his hands resting on his knees, looking at her in concern. He jumped back, apologising, and she shook her head which seemed to be the only part of her awake – everything else gripped by sleep.

– Water, she said, and he held out a glass filled with liquid. She drank more than half its contents before tossing the rest of it at her face and neck. The water was warm, but even so, it did the trick of rousing her, though she hadn’t anticipated the transparent rivulets that would snake down her blouse.

– Thank you, she said.

– Memsahib, the peon responded in a tone which did no more than acknowledge she had spoken.

Memsahib. Such a peculiar word. In this country filled with titles and honorifics nothing pre-existing had suited Englishwomen; while the ubiquitous ‘sahib’ came to rest comfortably on the shoulders of Englishmen, something other than ‘begum-sahib’ had to be devised for their female counterparts. As if to say that Englishmen and Indian men, for all their differences, could still be described in the same language but the women of the two races were so far apart that they had to be categorised separately, kept separate.

– What is your name?

– Dil-daraz.

– Dil-daraz, there was a woman in the museum with me. She would have been leaving as you arrived. Have you seen her before?

The boy slid a bare foot back and forth in the dust, and moved his head in that way which was halfway beneath a yes and a no.

– Memsahib, no, but she said to say something to you. I didn’t want to bother you with it.

– What did she say?

– She said all she wants is to know where her sister is. If there is anything you hear, she lives in the carpet-seller’s house on the Street of Storytellers. Chand Carpets, anyone can tell you which it is.

– I know Chand Carpets. Thank you, Dil-daraz.

– Memsahib, I hope this doesn’t trouble you.

She shook her head, and stood up to leave accompanied by the boy, Dil-daraz – the most unlikely-looking character to have the name ‘Heart’s Drawer’. The space between dreams and reality was wider in India than anywhere else in the world.

The Forbeses still lived in the bungalow with a garden which was exceptional in its lushness even by the high standards of Peshawar. Viv followed the young man in white livery, who looked disorientatingly like the old man in white livery who had worked here in 1915, along the pathway shaded by trees so tall only the top of St John’s spire could be seen through them. When she entered the bungalow and closed the door behind her everything was plunged in darkness, the heavy curtains muffling light more successfully than it kept out the late-afternoon heat; but gradually, outlines became objects and Viv found herself surrounded by the familiar disorder of Forbes books and Forbes shoes. And then there was Mr Forbes walking in from the door which led to the garden – the spade in his arms and the grass stains on his trousers indicating that the same person who would draw his curtains against the day would then step out and toil in it.

– Heave-ho!

Mr Forbes hoisted the spade, scooped up a few books and knocked others onto the floor to make space for Viv on the sofa. The liveried man moved forward to lift up the books, and Mr Forbes waved him away, the spade in his hand making the gesture a dangerous one, for which he laughingly apologised before sending the young man to the kitchen with instructions for tea. He excused himself as well, holding up his soiled hands in explanation. While he was away Viv made a pile of all the books on the floor, and carefully brushed away the clinging mud which had transferred itself from the spade to a thick book with soft leather binding. There was a welcome peace in watching the mud fall to the speckled stone floor in a room heavy with the scent of jasmine buds, strings of which hung from the rotating ceiling fan.

– Mrs Forbes should be with us in a few minutes.

Mr Forbes, still in his grass-stained trousers but with hands that were well scrubbed, sat down on the armchair adjacent to Viv, nothing in his lined face with its ruffled eyebrows indicating that there was anything untoward about Viv dropping in during the middle of the afternoon when Mrs Forbes was undoubtedly taking an afternoon rest.

– I’m so sorry to disturb you. I just didn’t know where else to go, or who else to ask.

– What is it, my dear?

– What happened yesterday on the Street of Storytellers?

– I shouldn’t worry about it, Miss Spencer.

– Mr Forbes, if I can be very frank?

– Perhaps we should wait for Mrs Forbes?

– I worked as a VAD nurse in London for almost every day of the war that I wasn’t in Peshawar. You can guess what I saw, what I heard. Do you think I’m not equipped to cope with news of a skirmish in the Walled City?

Mr Forbes sighed, and sat back, his fingers bridged together, trembling against the tip of his nose. He had been one of the leading surgeons in Peshawar before his retirement and though Viv had never known him during his professional life his palsy struck her as an example of life’s cruelties.

– Things got out of hand.

– What does that mean?

– There was some inexperienced fool – allowed himself to get worked up by a baying mob and called in the armoured cars when it wasn’t necessary. And then – well, Pathans. In so many ways the finest men you’ll ever meet, but the first sign of a fight and the blood rushes to their brains.

– How many died?

The door opened and the liveried man entered with a tray on which there were biscuits and the usual sort of tea for Viv, and kahwa, scented with cardamom and almonds, for Mr Forbes. Fifteen years earlier she’d asked him when he planned to move back to England and he’d repeated the word ‘England’ back to her as if it were a strange vegetable that he had no intention of adding to his diet. They sat silently until the Native man left the room, closing the door behind him on Mr Forbes’ instructions.

– All things considered, it was something of a miracle. Several injuries. Broken bones, lacerations, that kind of thing. One fellow got his finger shot off, but if a man can’t hold on to his own gun he probably deserves it. Oh, and a horse was shot dead. Mrs Forbes is particularly upset about that. But the only chap who died was a dispatch rider – Bryant. Ignored orders, and rushed in where he wasn’t supposed to go. Right into the path of the armoured car. Terrible thing. And then, I regret to say. . well, never mind.

– VAD nurse, Mr Forbes.

– The savages set him on fire.

– While he was still alive?

– Probably not, but does that matter?

– Are you saying the only Englishman who died was killed by our armoured cars?

– There’s no need to sound disappointed by the ability of our troops to withstand attack.

– I’m struggling to understand, that’s all. And how many Peshawaris died?

He shook his head and picked a book off the side table, turning it round in his hands, examining its bindings as though it were the Gutenberg Bible rather than a tome on military campaigns of the North-West Frontier.

– Were there any women among the dead?

– Have you been listening to some Congress propaganda? They don’t waste a moment! Here comes Mrs Forbes. We mustn’t talk about this in front of her.

The rules of the Peshawar Club were clear: if you were an Englishman you could apply for membership; if you were an Englishwoman you could enter as the guest of a member. But there were other rules in place which governed the interaction of the Indian guards with the ruling race, and when Viv arrived after dinner at Dean’s, uninvited, unaccompanied, she merely showed the guards a profile of sufficient disdain to ensure they wouldn’t question her right to be there. How badly she’d behaved with Remmick, accepted his favours as if they were her due – no, as if she were doing him a favour by allowing him to claim her as his guest. No one should ever be beautiful and young at the same time; it deranged the mind. Not that it excused his behaviour, of course. She wondered where in the world he’d got to by now.

Viv stopped along the pathway leading to the familiar single-storeyed club house with its multi-arched verandah, bracing herself against a palm tree with one hand so she could remove the drawing pin which had lodged itself into the heel of her python pumps. The days of derangement had passed. Now, however fashionable her hemline and heels, she was a spinster nearing forty, one of the tragic-but-uncomplaining women in a generation which had lost its men to the Great War. This was the story assumed of her, and she supposed it was true in its own way. There had been other men since the war ended – before the war ended, in fact – but joining one’s life to any of them in perpetuity always seemed to entail more loss than gain.

Indoors, the Club was as crowded as she’d ever seen it except during a ball but there was nothing of a festive atmosphere in the rooms heavy with smoke and whispers. Viv stood in the doorway, trying to decide whether or not to enter, until a slightly hysterical high-pitched laugh, which came from a man, decided it. Backing out, she walked around the club building and through the trees to the swimming pool from which no sounds of splashes and merriment issued despite the warmth of the night.

Beyond the rectangle of liquid darkness, a group of men sat on deckchairs and loungers, the ends of their lit cigarettes tracking the movements of their arms as they jabbed at the air. Sounds swooped across to her, too tangled for words to emerge. All the men seemed to be speaking at the same time. She took off her shoes – the grass prickling her foot through silk – and, still unseen in the shadow of a palm tree, slipped off her rolled garters and stockings and stuffed them into her handbag. Beneath the high diving board the darkness was particularly concentrated, and it was here she sat, her legs stockinged in water beneath the knee.

Eventually she heard the muffled tread of a man’s shoes on grass and though she held herself very still he walked straight towards her, stopping a few feet away to climb onto the low diving board, fully clothed. He walked to its end and, disappointingly, sat down, legs dangling just above the water’s surface. He didn’t look at Viv at first, but she knew he was aware of her. She had seen him – red-faced as ever – as she stood in the doorway, and it was unsurprising that he’d either seen her too or else been informed she was there by someone who knew he was a man who liked to know everything that went on in this city. There seemed barely any change in him since he’d walked into Dean’s on her second day in Peshawar, which said more about how middle-aged he’d looked in his youth than how young he looked in middle age.

– I’m surprised to find you here tonight.

– I could say the same of you, Miss Spencer. How did you get here from Campbellpur?

– So you knew I was on the train.

– Of course. Why are you surprised to find me here?

– I’d thought you’d be behind locked doors, making important decisions about important things.

She couldn’t make out his expression in the darkness as he removed a cigarette from its case, and patted his pockets.

– Catch.

She threw her lighter at him; it flashed silver in the darkness, and disappeared into the water. Without a word, barely a sound, he slipped off the diving board, the sleeves of his jacket briefly ballooning before the water dragged him down. Viv stood up, wondered whether to call for help from the men in deckchairs who remained engrossed in their conversation, and settled instead for lying flat beside the pool, her sequinned garter looped around her wrist, and plunging her arm into the wavering darkness. Diamonds of light flared in the water; something pressed against her fingertips and she started to jerk away before she recognised the familiar shape of the lighter and closed her fist around it.