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other direction, over the Med. He could have walked right up and stood there waiting for me to come out, and I’d never have known it.”
    “Even so — ,” she began impatiently.
    “I know, I know. It’s pretty unlikely.”
    “It’s damn unlikely.”
    The waitress came and collected their plates. “What’ll it be for pud?” she asked. “Choice of jam roly-poly, apple crumble, or gateau.”
    “Jam roly-poly for me,” Pru said with enthusiasm. “And coffee.”
    “What’ll it be for
what
?” asked Julie.
    “Pud,” Gideon said. “Pudding. Dessert. We’re in the UK now.”
    “Oh. I’ll pass. Just coffee, please. I’m still too keyed up for dessert.”
    Not Gideon. He had wolfed down the chicken and chips, but he was still ravenous. “I’ll have the apple crumble. And coffee for me too.”
    “Okay, here’s another possibility,” Pru said as the waitress moved off. “Couldn’t it have been the wind?”
    “I doubt it.”
    “What about something blown
by
the wind?” suggested Julie. She was trying to give him a graceful, reasonable out, a way of having fallen off the Rock of Gibraltar that wasn’t his own dumb fault. “I don’t know, a piece of cardboard, an empty carton? You said you didn’t have your feet planted very firmly. Something like a cardboard carton might have been enough to—”
    “Uh-uh. I thought about that for a minute too, but it was blowing the other way.” He tipped his head in the direction of Adrian Vanderwater. “A
levanter
, remember? Not a
poniente
.”
    “All right, then, isn’t it possible that when a gust hit you, you kind of leaned against it — you know, overcompensated — and then when it suddenly stopped, over you went in the other direction?”
    “Yes,” he said slowly, “I guess that is possible. I just think . . .” He shook his head, not sure what he had just thought. Who knows, maybe it had been the wind.
    Their coffee and desserts were brought and placed before them. Julie grimaced at the pale, glistening mass on Pru’s plate. “What is that, exactly?”
    “Something you don’t see in the States anymore.” Pru said, scrutinizing it with obvious relish. “A roly-poly. It’s a suet pudding. They flatten it and roll it up around a jam filling. Have you ever had suet pudding? Want a bite?”
    “Um . . . no, I don’t think so.”
    “Weenie,” Pru said, getting ready to attack her dessert with the soup spoon that had been provided.
    “You know what they called jam roly-polys in the eighteen hundreds? ” Gideon asked. “Dead man’s arm. Because they used to steam it — and serve it — in an old shirt sleeve.”
    “If that’s meant to affect my appetite, dream on,” Pru said, digging in.
    Gideon was feeling pretty mellow by now. Not ordinarily a lunchtime drinker, he’d thirstily consumed two glasses of the cold Montilla, and the pungent, strong wine, more like a rough sherry than a dinner wine, had given him a pleasant glow. With alcohol coursing through a nervous system that had already been given a roller-coaster of an adrenaline ride only an hour earlier, he was seeing the world in a different light now. They were probably right. He’d lost his balance, that was all. And if they were willing to believe that the wind had a part in it, so was he.
    It was perfectly credible. Why dream up some complex theory of who and why and how? What had happened to his adherence to Occam’s razor, the principle of parsimony that he was always prating about to his classes, the idea that if you have a simple theory that satisfactorily explains the facts, you don’t go around “unnecessarily multiplying uncertainties,” that is, dreaming up more complex ones? He’d taken a heck of a tumble, he’d very naturally panicked, and the result had been a bout of rather absurd paranoia.
    “You’re both right,” he said, methodically working away at his apple crumble, a palatable British version of apple crisp. “I overreacted. ”
    “Well, it’s no