Faced with this picture, he thought only, How beautiful. And relived, at once, the frustration that had edged his youthful efforts, shadowing the pleasure he took in looking at art. Pictures belong to the world of things. They cannot be contained in language. Tom was still susceptible to their immanent hostility. It had persuaded him, as a student, to concentrate on literature. There he was at home in the medium. For all their shifting play, narratives did not exceed his grasp. He paid them the tribute of lucid investigation and they unfolded before him.

An English voice said, ‘Isn’t it completely wonderful?’

A milky woman with crimson pigtails was smiling down at him. ‘I was sure it was you.’ She went up on her toes; she was wearing beaded mesh slippers. Up and down she went again, holding out her hand.

The rocking was a boon. It identified a party in the summer; a long woman rising and falling. ‘We met at Esther’s, didn’t we?’ Tom took her cool, boneless fingers. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember…?’

‘Imogen Halliday. But everyone just says Mogs.’

Mogs was wearing a kimono fashioned from what might have been hessian, slashed here and there to show a silky green undergarment. She said, ‘How is Esther? I’ve been simply swamped.’

‘I’ve been out of touch myself.’

Two years earlier, Tom Loxley and Esther Kade had been deputed by their respective university departments, Textual Studies and Art History, to attend a weekend conference on Multimedia and Interactive Teaching Strategies. Under the circum stances, alcohol and sex had seemed no more than survival mechanisms. Later both regretted the affair, which out lived the conference by only an awkward encounter or two. But Esther now felt obliged to invite Tom to her parties to show there were no hard feelings; for the same reason, he felt obliged to go.

Interactive strategies, he thought.

‘Isn’t life mad? But I adore working here.’ Mogs swayed above him, waving a hand on which a green jewel shone.

Christ, thought Tom. It’s real.

Mogs was, in her own way, catching.

‘I was looking at you: you were transfi xed. Isn’t she a marvel?’ The slippers rose and fell. ‘Nelly Zhang,’ said Mogs’s soft English voice.

Tom nodded. He had read the name, which meant nothing to him, on the list he had picked up at the door. And noted that the picture was not for sale.

‘ Carson ’s known her forever. Since before… you know, everything. She’s over there with him, actually. In the black… tunic, I think you’d say.’

Tom turned his head and saw a woman in a loose, dark dress that fell to mid-calf. Red beads about her neck, her twisted hair secured with a scarlet crayon.

‘Really exciting. A painting. An early work, of course-she was barely out of art school. From Carson ’s own collection. Such a privilege just to see it now that Nelly only shows photographs of her work.’

Mogs was all right. But Tom wished she would go away. He wanted to be left alone with the picture.

Outside the gallery, a spotlight fell across a strip of grass where Nelly Zhang squatted, scratching the dog’s chest.

‘Hail dog,’ she said. ‘You speckled beast.’ She peered at his name tag. Her sooty fringe made an almost shocking line against her powdered skin.

The dog wagged his tail. His good looks habitually elicited caresses, titbits. Experience had taught him confidence in his ability to charm.

Nelly stood up. Tom was not a tall man, but her head was scarcely higher than his shoulder.

She said, ‘Lovely dog.’

He remembered that his wife used to refer to the dog as a chick magnet.

Nelly was lighting a thin cigarette. The pungency of cloves and behind it-Tom’s sense of smell was acute-a bodily aroma.

The dog tilted his spotted muzzle and sniffed. Tom bent to untie his leash.

‘That looks professional.’

‘Just a quick-release tie.’

‘A man who knows his knots. So much rarer than one who knows the ropes.’

He didn’t say, I was lonely growing up.

He didn’t say, String is cheap.

But it might have begun long, long before that evening in Carson Posner’s gallery. It might have been historical.

War took an Englishman called Arthur Loxley to the East and in time returned him with two medals and a shattered knee to ruined Coventry. His mother had been killed in the fi rst raid; to his father he had never had much to say. A trio of sisters inspected him as if their free trial period might expire and leave them stuck with him forever. At some point each took him aside to ask what he had brought her from the Orient. Their blue eyes glittered with the understanding that the world had been made safe for the business of acquisition.

He was twenty-six, and his knee ached all through the winter. But the map was still stained pink. Pink people could move about it as they pleased; could rule a line on it and bring nations into being. Arthur returned to India, where that kind of thing was causing a commotion. He paid no attention to it, having had his fill of history. What he was after, then and for the rest of his life, was a bolt-hole, with drink thrown in. There was also the memory of a twenty-four-hour leave he had spent in the whorehouses of Bombay. A Javanese half-caste with spongy golden thighs was instructing him in the art of cunnilingus when boots thundered past in the street and a Glaswegian voice bellowed that Rangoon had fallen. Thereafter, news of defeat would always induce in him a mild erotic stir.

Having drifted down the Malabar Coast he fetched up in Mangalore, where he was taken on as an inventory clerk by Mr Ashok Lal, an exporter of cashew nuts with a godown in the port. When Arthur looked up from his ledger, boats rocked on green water.

He rediscovered, with gratitude, the room India granted to casual human theatre. It was there, on every street: in garlanded Ganesh affixed to a radiator grille, in a scabby, naked toddler with liquid jewels at his nostrils, in the man who, possessing no legs, propelled himself on a wheeled plank, advancing on Arthur with a terrible smile. It was not that Arthur idealised the place, for he was a kind man and the daily spectacle was often cruel. But he relished the friendly attention paid here to comedy and tragedy alike; a willingness to be entertained, amused, horrified that he recognised as a form of thanksgiving for the faceted world.

And so, from modest pleasures, Arthur fashioned a happy life. The locally distilled whisky was cheap, the beer cheaper. He ate devilled prawns every Sunday. Once a month he visited a former maharani who had a house with turquoise shutters in the shadow of the cathedral, and five exquisitely skilled girls.

An Indian who had been with the firm for eighteen months was promoted over Arthur, whose congratulations were sincere. He was as indifferent to distinctions of race as to his own advancement. He drank steadily, sometimes fabulously, but always arrived at his desk sober.

Contentment, being rare, never fails to attract attention. Arthur Loxley, with his veined cheeks and drunkard’s careful gait, was increasingly in the thoughts of a beautiful woman. Iris de Souza’s father had informed her at the age of six that she was to marry an Englishman, and neither of them had ever lost sight of that goal. Iris’s skin was fair, her face ravishing; many a pretty Eurasian was let down by toothpick legs, but Iris’s calves were shapely. Her mother, a handsome crow, had had the good sense to die young. Her father-but it would take a separate volume to explore the intricate self-loathing of this man, who despised in others the inadequacies that crawled in his own murk. He was an umbrella, tightly furled. Springing open, he might gouge flesh from your fingers. His rages were unpredictable and inconsistent. Iris acquired early the important female attribute of fear.