"Who me?" Mish teased. She turned to Gunther. "Isn't she adorable?"

Gunther turned his well-made features to face Meredith and slid his eyes over the whole of her in a way that made her cheeks burn. "Indeed." He paused, took a deep breath and broke out of his trance only at the sound of his own voice. "Listen, I was wondering if you two would like to join my friends and me for dinner. We have a private room in the back and there is more than enough food and drink to go round. I expect you will find it a...unique experience, if nothing else."

Meredith winced apologetically and began to explain about the problem of their catching the last tube home and tomorrow morning's seven a.m. call to set. But it was funny, because none of her words seemed to come out, or if they did, they were drowned beneath the sound of Mish's cries of acquiescence.

In a blink, they were squeezed together on a love seat in a back room, making slurry small talk with a group of four tall blond men in black business suits. Gunther introduced the men as his "patrons." More trays of drinks appeared, and one of the men-a tall, hawk-faced banker named Benedict-stood up and raised his gla.s.s.

"To our good friend Gunther, on the cusp of his great success. Cheers to a true artist among all the other contemporary rubbish. Hah!"

The men banged gla.s.ses and shouted things in German. Gunther went around the room slapping shoulders, heads and b.u.t.tocks like an American football coach.

Meredith glanced at Mish, hoping to share a quizzical look, but her friend was already deep in conversation with a pair of black lapels to her left.

"In Canada, we don't have castles," Mish was saying, popping the tip of a Silk Cut into the corner of her mouth. "We have cottages instead."

"And where exactly are these cottages located?" The man produced a gold lighter and offered her the flame.

"On lakes, or sometimes islands. In Georgian Bay, for instance, you can buy an entire island for like less than fifty grand."

"A whole island you can purchase? With trees on it as well? For the price of a used car?"

"Oh, yes, plenty of trees. And bushes. And rocks. And everything."

Meredith felt a nudge. Gunther appeared on the love seat beside her. He inclined his head and smiled like a bashful boy.

"I apologize for my friends. Men in money are inexcusably boorish. But they are mandatory, don't you think?"

"What do you mean?"

"That they are a necessary evil."

"I understand, but for what?"

"For art."

Meredith thought this over. "I guess in another era you'd be having an affair with some d.u.c.h.ess or other."

"Stealing in the servant's entrance and ravishing her on the drawing room sofa when the duke is away. This I would prefer."

"She would expect you to compose works in her honour."

"Which I would, most dutifully. Pay homage to her everlasting beauty, despite the fact that she is fat and old."

"And bald."

"Yes, that too."

There was a loud collective whoop from the bankers that made Meredith and Gunther look up. A j.a.panese girl in a blue kimono, who looked to be only slightly older than a child, had entered the room. She did not smile, but bowed and took her place beside a potted bamboo tree in the corner. Soon a waitress followed, bearing a large platter of sushi, and another after her, who cleared the gla.s.ses and ashtrays from the low gla.s.s table in the center. The kimonoed girl bowed again and in one practiced and elaborate motion untied her sash and let her garment drop to the floor. She was naked and in perfect minuscule proportion, pubic hair trimmed into a tidy little Valentine's heart. The song on the sound system was that big hit by Coldplay. An odd choice for a stripper, Meredith thought, waiting rigidly for the girl to begin grinding her hips in the familiar pot-stirring peeler fashion. But instead of dancing, the naked girl took two steps forward, arched her back and draped herself backward over the gla.s.s table, stomach to the ceiling, feet and head dangling over the side, her throat exposed and quivering slightly. She lay there like a flank steak on a butcher's block. The room was silent as the waitresses began to arrange fish in fans and swirls over the girl's flesh. Hamachi sashimi around the left nipple, unagimaki around the right, raw lobster in between the collarbones, a k.n.o.b of green wasabi in the belly b.u.t.ton, pickled ginger palate-cleanser in each smooth armpit.

"The super deluxe," Gunther whispered into the nape of Meredith's neck. "A popular delicacy in j.a.pan. I hope you will forgive my friends' political incorrectness. I understand you Americans can be a bit...unamused by such spectacle."

Meredith and Mish exchanged uncertain, bug-eyed smiles. One of the waitresses began pa.s.sing around ivory chopsticks. The men laughed and elbowed one another, making cracks in German. They spread their napkins on their laps. The naked girl giggled, and goose b.u.mps rose up under their food.

There was a pause. And it became clear that, for all of their noisy jostling, none of the men was willing to be first.

"I'm hungry," Meredith announced. Clicking a pair of chopsticks, she reached down, plucked a sea scallop from the point of the girl's left hip bone, popped it in her mouth and swallowed it whole.

8.

Waking up with a hangover was one thing, but waking up hung over two hours from the time you'd gone to bed by a grinning woman in a half-slip was quite another. Meredith pushed her face deeper into the satin throw cushion that was doubling as her pillow.

"Good morrow, Moo," Irma said. "Thought you might like a persimmon before work. I found it at the back of the fridge. How 'bout it, my little corker?"

Meredith raised herself on one elbow and fell back again. Her brain rustled in her skull like a bloated pigeon.

"Time?"

Irma consulted her locket. She rarely slept. "Five-thirty-eight on the dot-you'd better hustle if you want to make it out there by seven."

Meredith scowled but managed to retain the b.i.t.c.hy remark that pressed itself against the inside of her teeth. She waved her mother away and staggered toward the bathroom.

Half an hour later Meredith scrambled downstairs, late for work. "Don't forget!" Irma called from the door.

"What?"

"Tonight."

"What's tonight?"

Irma poked her head over the landing, and her blue kerchief floated from her head and landed on the stairs.

"Blast. Dinner at the club at nine-thirty, darling. I've arranged some specimens for you to examine. Bring your little Canadian friend along. Unless, of course, you'd rather not have the compet.i.tion."

Meredith stumped down the four flights of stairs two at a time, hurrying to make it before the light timer went out and left her stranded in the lightless stairwell. This country! Timers on lights, cold-water flats, coin-operated heaters, pay-as-you-go public washrooms, the absence of paper towels, napkins or paper products of virtually any kind. Somewhere along the line this great empire had taught its people to live without Kleenex, and its children to bathe in two inches of tepid water. Why? The English must enjoy physical discomfort on some level that North Americans do not. Meredith wondered if the grottiness-the chilly, unheated, unpampered misery among the privileged people was the English way of keeping a connection to history alive. For North Americans it was different. If it was good enough for our ancestors, it couldn't be good enough for us.

Meredith made her way through the urban dawn toward Notting Hill Gate. The pastel-painted town houses seemed dull and two-dimensional. It was the tail end of spring and the sidewalks were covered in fetid brown blossoms, glued to the pavement by rain and fixed there by feet.

She felt surprisingly okay, despite her lack of sleep, and realized it was possible she was still drunk.

The tube rumbled toward Piccadilly, roiling Meredith's stomach inside her. The previous night returned to her in strobe-lit glimpses. Mish slurping a sliver of barbequed eel directly off the thigh of the nude girl. Both of them dancing on top of a single chair until it cracked and gave way. Some commotion involving a car. An overlit flat somewhere in South Kensington with polished concrete floors and hardly any furniture. Dancing again, but this time to something terrible-UB40? The smell of kebab sauce. Talking intensely with Gunther on the couch about his photography while Mish locked herself in the bathroom (to throw up?). A blurry bit. Then home.

She couldn't remember if she had kissed Gunther goodbye, whether they had exchanged phone numbers or even affectionate words. She did recall him begging her to stay, pinning her to the sofa in a half-playful way. She had resisted-though now she was not sure why. What was it with the Pollyanna routine? If she wanted a baby, she was going to have to get tactical.

As she traveled east into the city, the car filled up. Across from Meredith a hot-dog-shaped man in a three-piece suit was reading the Times folded meticulously into eighths. Watching him, Meredith suddenly wondered how her own father had read the newspaper. Was he a spreader or a folder?

The train surged above ground into the daylight and suddenly the car was loud with the sound of cell phones ringing, beeping messages from loved ones and colleagues who'd been momentarily out of contact. All around Meredith, people dove for their bags and coat pockets. Just then her own phone, which she kept in the special compartment on the outside of her knapsack, began to play the Ode to Joy at an intense volume. (One of the Germans must have switched it from the usual ring last night for a joke.) A message she hadn't noticed earlier. Meredith plucked the handset out of her bag, flipped it open. The voice mail had been left from the night before, a Toronto number. She pressed one and entered her pa.s.sword: SCRIPT.

"h.e.l.lo, this is a message for Meredith. It's Joe Veil calling-the doctor. I got this number from your file. I hope you don't mind my checking up on you. I just, well, I just wanted to call in person to see that everything is okay. I'm not sure if you've rescheduled your appointment, but if you haven't, call the office anytime, or even if you just want to come in and talk. Or talk on the phone. I'd be glad to answer any...anything. Okay, so I hope you're well."

Without pausing to consider, Meredith pressed the call-back key. Within four seconds a phone was ringing somewhere in Toronto.

"Hel-lo?" A man's groggy voice.

"Is that Dr. Veil? It's Meredith Moore. Calling from London. I guess I kind of forgot about the time change-G.o.d, sorry. What time is it there, anyway?"

m.u.f.fled pillow noises, followed by a phlegmy grunt. "Uh, 1:37."

"I'm sorry to wake you. I should let you sleep. This is so rude of me-I completely forgot. I'll let you go back to sleep."

"Don't be sorry. I'm used to it. I actually feel neglected if the phone doesn't ring at least once in the night." Another cough. "How's London?"

"It's okay. Super busy." The train pulled into an outdoor station. Beyond the outdoor platform Meredith could see a woman on the balcony of her high-rise building hanging a flowered bedsheet out to dry. "To be honest? Not so great. I'm pretty mixed up."

"Mixed up how?"

"I've decided I want to have a baby."

"Congratulations."

"No, wait-which is crazy because I'm not even in love or in l.u.s.t or anything. I mean, isn't that wrong? Shouldn't a baby like-I don't know-grow out of love?"

"Meredith, babies grow out of stem cells. The love part comes later." She could hear his head shift against a pillow.

"Do you think I could do it on my own?"

"I don't know you well enough to say one way or the other, but let me ask you this. Of all the other things in your life you've set out to do on your own, which ones have you failed at?"

The train rocked her from side to side. "None, I guess," she whispered. "But sometimes I wonder-"

"Daddy?" A girl's voice in the background. m.u.f.fled noises, then Joe's voice saying gently, Go back to sleep. "Hi. Sorry, you were saying?"

Meredith lowered the phone and stared at the digital mini-screen on her handset. She watched a timer ticking off the seconds of contact.

"h.e.l.lo?" came his voice from somewhere on the other side of the ocean. "Meredith? Meredith, I think I'm losing-"

The windows went black as the train was sucked underground again.

h.e.l.lo? h.e.l.lo? said the pa.s.sengers on the train, as Meredith stared at her screen. A new message flashed on it: SEARCHING FOR SIGNAL.

9.

Barnaby Shakespeare stood at the bar drinking his second pint of lager and vowing to pace himself. Tomorrow morning he was driving back to the Cotswolds and he didn't want a hangover. On the last trip back from London his hands had been so shaky on the wheel he had nearly swerved into oncoming traffic while changing gears on the motorway.

Overall, he was a much better driver the night before than the morning after. Although he tried not to make a habit of driving p.i.s.sed in the city (he'd been done twice for operating a motor vehicle under the influence already-the next time they would take away his licence and throw him in the hole), in the countryside it seemed unavoidable. Everybody simply did.

Barnaby was not one of those lushes whom no amount of liquor seems to slow or sicken. He invariably woke up shattered the morning after. The trick was predicting when the devil was coming to visit so he could clear off the calendar for the following day. Not that he generally had anything much to do-living, as he did, in the country, without an occupation or a wife. Unfortunately there never seemed to be any rhyme or reason to his benders. Unlike other people, he did not drink to celebrate his triumphs or kill his woes. He simply drank. And, for reasons that remained a complete mystery to himself, on some days Barnaby drank significantly more than on others. The problem of predicting his own behavior was getting worse as he got older (he turned thirty-three last December).

He vowed to begin keeping a diary of his daily movements starting tomorrow. His father, Nigel Shakespeare, a nonpracticing barrister, had kept a diary religiously his entire adult life. After brushing his teeth and before turning off the light in the evenings, Dad would jot down exactly what had happened that day in point form. The outcome, Barnaby discovered when he unlocked his father's nightstand the day after his funeral and flipped through the small leather-bound books (there were stacks and stacks of them), was impressive. Mundane details of daily ch.o.r.es or digestive complications were given equal weight with events of ma.s.sive personal significance. The result, Barnaby thought, was a terrible, inadvertent joke. One entry in particular stayed with him: "June 15th, 1975. Kippers for breakfast. Popped in at the motor shop. Rosa in labour upon my return. Girl-stillborn. Cook's half day-scrambled egg for dinner."

Barnaby, however, planned to keep quite a different sort of diary, one with far more colorful anecdotes and jokes and even the odd s.e.xy bit. His diary would be read aloud at his funeral, and everyone would laugh and say what a bright, jolly fellow he had been. How he had lived life to its fullest despite his flaws. Possibly (and this was an especially private thought) someone would want to publish it.

While Barnaby knew he drank too much, he wasn't particularly worried about being an alcoholic. He had read somewhere that real alcoholics don't get hangovers. He knew this to be true, since his own father had consumed at least twenty ounces of Famous Grouse with soda every single day of his life and yet bounced out of bed each morning at five-thirty on the dot. Barnaby, however, was reduced to a quivering, retching muck. The more he drank, the more he found himself perversely rea.s.sured each morning when he woke up to find the old symptoms were still there (if anything, they were getting worse!): rolling thunderclaps of nausea, jitters, a crushing head and a mysterious acrid peppermint smell everywhere he went. What he secretly feared most was the morning he would wake up to find his hangover gone.

That morning, he conceded now while ordering his third pint, would probably not be tomorrow. It was not yet six, and he had the whole night ahead of him. Soon people would start arriving at the club for c.o.c.ktails, and then there would be dinner in the dining room with more wine, and who knows what sort of nonsense after that. Part of him wished he could stay on in London an extra day. And he would too. If only he didn't miss the birds so much.

It had been Mish's idea to take a taxi to dinner in the first place, so she couldn't reasonably complain. Meredith had tried to warn her about rush hour in London, but Mish hadn't listened. Even worse, Mish had insisted on paying for it. Now they were sitting in the back of a black cab stuck in a roundabout in central London wondering if they would have to camp for the night. In the past twenty minutes, the cab had moved a total of one car length. The driver, a thin, bald, mean-looking youth in a Manchester United jersey, alternately swore and leaned on the horn. Every few minutes he turned around and gave Meredith and Mish a look of irritated surprise, as though he'd never seen a traffic jam before in his life. Meanwhile the meter ticked away all the cash in Mish's handbag, plus her per diem, and half of tomorrow's pay as well. So far, the fare was roughly what it cost to fly to Paris, and they were only halfway across town.

"I rather fancy a drive," she'd said (pretentiously, Meredith thought) while they were still back on set packing up after a long day's shoot. "And besides," she added, applying extra body-glow to her throat in front of the full-length mirror of the wardrobe trailer, "there's no way I'd be caught dead on the tube in this outfit."

When it came to clothing, Mish had a penchant for the inappropriate. Her personal style was a blend of the most outrageous, unseasonable and (all too often) unsightly trends of the moment. Today, for her first day of work on set, she had shown up in an acid-wash denim miniskirt, suede stiletto boots and a large yellow sweater knitted out of feathers that looked as if they'd been plucked from some unfortunate cousin of Big Bird.

Now, in addition to being hungover and under-slept, Mish was sinking into a terrible sulk. This was just two steps away from a tantrum, Meredith knew, and it made her twitchy with apprehension. They sat in a grump, stomachs lurching as the car crept forward another few inches and came to a halt, nearly rear-ending a girl on a Vespa in front of them.

"w.a.n.ka!" the driver hollered at the girl in the helmet, and then wagged his tongue in the rearview mirror.

Mish hissed softly into her feathers, and Meredith was afraid her friend might be about to chuck. The only thing that ever made Meredith ill was the sight of other people throwing up.

"So what did you think of Kathleen?" Meredith hoped to distract Mish from any vomit-related thoughts.

Mish shrugged, still facing forward. "She's okay."

"Okay-b.i.t.c.hy or okay-nice?"

"Just okay."

"Yeah, but do you mean-"

"Meredith, sometimes an 'okay' is just an 'okay.' Okay?"

The driver, seeing an opportunity to move a few paces ahead, changed lanes, causing the rear end of the car to swing violently to the side. Mish gripped the armrest with one hand and felt for the window b.u.t.ton with the other. It was locked. Her face paled beneath its layer of makeup, and pearls of sweat appeared on her upper lip.

"Excuse me, sir? Could you please roll down the window?" Meredith used her most officious voice with the driver.