In spite of her pragmatic willingness to enter the polluted waters of the real and swim in the general direction of the current, she never lost the sense that some awful disaster was lurking just around the corner – a legacy, this, of her father's and sister's sudden deaths. This hairs-on-neck prickliness had made her a cautious climber, a ‘real percentage man’, as the lads would have it, and as admired friends died on various mountains her caution increased. Away from mountaineering, it gave her, at times, an unrelaxed look, a jumpiness; she acquired the heavily defended air of a fortress preparing for an inevitable assault. This added to her reputation as a frosty berg of a woman; people kept their distance, and, to hear her tell it, she accepted loneliness as the price of solitude. – But there were more contradictions here, for she had, after all, only recently thrown caution overboard when she chose to make the final assault on Everest without oxygen. ‘Aside from all the other implications,’ the agency assured her in its formal letter of congratulations, ‘this humanizes you, it shows you've got that what-the-hell streak, and that's a positive new dimension.’ They were working on it. In the meantime, Allie thought, smiling at Gibreel in tired encouragement as he slipped down towards her lower depths, There's now you. Almost a total stranger and here you've gone and moved right in. God, I even carried you across the threshold, near as makes no difference. Can't blame you for accepting the lift.

He wasn't housetrained. Used to servants, he left clothes, crumbs, used tea-bags where they fell. Worse: he dropped them, actually let them fall where they would need picking up; perfectly, richly unconscious of what he was doing, he went on proving to himself that he, the poor boy from the streets, no longer needed to tidy up after himself. It wasn't the only thing about him that drove her crazy. She'd pour glasses of wine; he'd drink his fast and then, when she wasn't looking, grab hers, placating her with an angelic-faced, ultra-innocent ‘Plenty more, isn't it?’ His bad behaviour around the house. He liked to fart. He complained – actually complained, after she'd literally scooped him out of the snow! – about the smallness of the accommodations. ‘Every time I take two steps my face hits a wall.’ He was rude to telephone callers, really rude, without bothering to find out who they were: automatically, the way film stars were in Bombay when, by some chance, there wasn't a flunkey available to protect them from such intrusions. After Alicja had weathered one such volley of obscene abuse, she said (when her daughter finally got on the end of the phone): ‘Excuse me for mentioning, darling, but your boyfriend is in my opinion a case.’

‘A case, mother?’ This drew out Alicja's grandest voice. She was still capable of grandeur, had a gift for it, in spite of her post-Otto decision to disguise herself as a bag-lady. ‘A case,’ she announced, taking into consideration the fact that Gibreel was an Indian import, ‘of cashew and monkey nuts.’

Allie didn't argue with her mother, being by no means certain that she could continue to live with Gibreel, even if he had crossed the earth, even if he had fallen from the sky. The long term was hard to predict; even the medium term looked cloudy. For the moment, she concentrated on trying to get to know this man who had just assumed, right off, that he was the great love of her life, with a lack of doubt that meant he was either right or off his head. There were plenty of difficult moments. She didn't know what he knew, what she could take for granted: she tried, once, referring to Nabokov's doomed chess-player Luzhin, who came to feel that in life as in chess there were certain combinations that would inevitably arise to defeat him, as a way of explaining by analogy her own (in fact somewhat different) sense of impending catastrophe (which had to do not with recurring patterns but with the inescapability of the unforeseeable), but he fixed her with a hurt stare that told her he'd never heard of the writer, let alone The Defence. Conversely, he surprised her by asking, out of the blue, ‘Why Picabia?’ Adding that it was peculiar, was it not, for Otto Cohen, a veteran of the terror camps, to go in for all that neo-Fascistic love of machinery, brute power, dehu-manization glorified. ‘Anybody who's spent any time with machines at all,’ he added, ‘and baby, that's us all, knows first and foremost there's only one thing certain about them, computer or bicycle. They go wrong.’ Where did you find out about, she began, and faltered because she didn't like the patronizing note she was striking, but he answered without vanity. The first time he'd heard about Marinetti, he said, he'd got the wrong end of the stick and thought Futurism was something to do with puppets. ‘Marionettes, kathputli, at that time I was keen to use advanced puppetry techniques in a picture, maybe to depict demons or other supernormal beings. So I got a book.’ I got a book: Gibreel the autodidact made it sound like an injection. To a girl from a house that revered books – her father had made them all kiss any volume that fell by chance to the floor – and who had reacted by treating them badly, ripping out pages she wanted or didn't like, scribbling and scratching at them to show them who was boss, Gibreel's form of irreverence, non-abusive, taking books for what they offered without feeling the need to genuflect or destroy, was something new; and, she accepted, pleasing. She learned from him. He, however, seemed impervious to any wisdom she might wish to impart, about, for example, the correct place in which to dispose of dirty socks. When she attempted to suggest he ‘did his share’, he went into a profound, injured sulk, expecting to be cajoled back into a good humour. Which, to her disgust, she found herself willing, for the moment at any rate, to do.

The worst thing about him, she tentatively concluded, was his genius for thinking himself slighted, belittled, under attack. It became almost impossible to mention anything to him, no matter how reasonable, no matter how gently put. ‘Go, go, eat air,’ he'd shout, and retire into the tent of his wounded pride. – And the most seductive thing about him was the way he knew instinctively what she wanted, how when he chose he could become the agent of her secret heart. As a result, their sex was literally electric. That first tiny spark, on the occasion of their inaugural kiss, wasn't any one-off. It went on happening, and sometimes while they made love she was convinced she could hear the crackle of electricity all around them; she felt, at times, her hair standing on end. ‘It reminds me of the electric dildo in my father's study,’ she told Gibreel, and they laughed. ‘Am I the love of your life?’ she asked quickly, and he answered, just as quickly: ‘Of course.’

She admitted to him early on that the rumours about her unattainability, even frigidity, had some basis in fact. ‘After Yel died, I took on that side of her as well.’ She hadn't needed, any more, to hurl lovers into her sister's face. ‘Plus I really wasn't enjoying it any more. It was mostly revolutionary socialists at the time, making do with me while they dreamed about the heroic women they'd seen on their three-week trips to Cuba. Never touched them, of course; the combat fatigues and ideological purity scared them silly. They came home humming “Guantanamera” and rang me up.’ She opted out. ‘I thought, let the best minds of my generation soliloquize about power over some other poor woman's body, I'm off.’ She began climbing mountains, she used to say when she began, ‘because I knew they'd never follow me up there. But then I thought, bullshit, I didn't do it for them; I did it for me.’

For an hour every evening she would run barefoot up and down the stairs to the street, on her toes, for the sake of her fallen arches. Then she'd collapse into a heap of cushions, looking enraged, and he'd flap helplessly around, usually ending up pouring her a stiff drink: Irish whiskey, mostly. She had begun drinking a fair bit as the reality of her foot problem sank in. (‘For Christ's sake keep the feet quiet,’ a voice from the PR agency told her surreally on the phone. ‘If they get out it's finite, curtains, sayonara, go home, goodnight.’) On their twenty-first night together, when she had worked her way through five doubles of Jameson's, she said: ‘Why I really went up there. Don't laugh: to escape from good and evil.’ He didn't laugh. ‘Are mountains above morality, in your estimation?’ he asked seriously. ‘This's what I learned in the revolution,’ she went on. ‘This thing: information got abolished sometime in the twentieth century, can't say just when; stands to reason, that's part of the information that got abolsh, abolished. Since then we've been living in a fairy-story. Got me? Everything happens by magic. Us fairies haven't a fucking notion what's going on. So how do we know if it's right or wrong? We don't even know what it is. So what I thought was, you can either break your heart trying to work it all out, or you can go sit on a mountain, because that's where all the truth went, believe it or not, it just upped and ran away from these cities where even the stuff under our feet is all made up, a lie, and it hid up there in the thin thin air where the liars don't dare come after it in case their brains explode. It's up there all right. I've been there. Ask me.’ She fell asleep; he carried her to the bed.