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own misery, Sam had not wanted anyone to come too close. So he respected those who stayed aloof. He glanced at them quickly, when he handed them the food, and then looked away.
    There were those who engaged him in conversation. Some of them spoke quickly and eagerly, like children, while others spoke softly and slowly. Yet it seemed to Sam, strangely enough, that they spoke with one voice; or, rather, that one voice spoke through all of them—the way that a hundred birds seem to sing the same song. That, at least, was how he put it to himself.
    “Do you think you’ll be joining us?” one middle-aged man asked him. He had a bald spot on the top of his head, with long black hair cascading from its rim.
    “Joining?”
    “Coming along with us. When this place goes.”
    “It won’t go.”
    “Oh yes it will. I see it all the time. I’m used to it.”
    “I don’t know whether I’ll go with you or not.”
    “I think you will.”
    Nothing disturbed the even tenor of the days. Sam still lived at home, but he rarely saw his father. He had not told him that he worked in the convent; it was a secret thing, belonging to a secluded part of himself. He kept the rosary on a little wooden table in his bedroom; it reminded him of his life with the nuns; it reassured him, in its plainness and simplicity. He knew now that each bead was a prayer, a prayer perfectly formed, a sphere of grace. So he would hold the rosary, grip it tightly, and close his eyes—then he saw images, images of flame and ruined walls, of sunlit fields and hills, of innumerable faces gazing upwards. He did not know what these images meant, but he was touched by them. He still sometimes visited the Lady Chapel, too, where he sat in front of the statue of the lady. “Thank you,” he said one day, “for letting me stay. I feel safe here.”
    Yet, on a day after one of these visits, everything changed. He set off from his house early that morning, making his familiar way to the convent. But he could not find it. The gate and the walls were not there. The convent had disappeared. He ran through the streets, returning by different routes to the same place. The convent was gone. He looked for signs of the tramps and beggars who had wandered through the neighbourhood; they, too, had vanished. He asked several people if they had seen the nuns, but they looked at him curiously and shook their heads. Nuns? What nuns? He was distraught. He cried out—to what, or to whom, he did not know. Weeping, he beat his fists against a stone wall. Eventually he went back to the church. There was no chapel. There was no lady. The nave was dark. He sat down in a pew and began to beat his head against the wooden rail in front of him. That was the day when the young tramp in the park also disappeared.

V
    A marmoset
    H ARRY H ANWAY was bent over his typewriter, smoking as he read the page still in the machine. He was writing a story—he used the word casually and naturally now—concerning the resignation of a middle-ranking minister from the Wilson government. It was not the stuff of headlines, but with careful nurturing it could grow. Harry knew that the minister had been hastened from office as a result of his affair with his secretary, already a married woman. So Harry chose his words carefully, hinting rather than stating impropriety, lending an air of ambiguity to all his phrases, making it clear that the minister was a married man with three small children. He enjoyed this process. It gave him power.
    His career at the Morning Chronicle had so far been a success. He had begun work as one of the reporters filing copy for the gossip column, purportedly written by “Peregrine Porcupine.” Harry found himself at parties and at first nights, at society weddings and at political conferences, on the chance that he would see and talk to a “famous name” or would pick up some gossip that could be repeated to the newspaper’s readership. His ready charm, his affability, and his