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were they to let go, the world would return to the void. When, eventually, they fell asleep, they were still together, his contented penis still inside her contented complexities, both cool and quiet.
    When they woke, the sun had faded from the bedroom window and the slate roofs across the back garden shone silver in the thin grey light. Their bodies were shadowed in the dim light; they looked long and smooth and cool and vulnerable. Always, caressing human flesh, stroking the beautiful lines of sides and thighs, she thought about that vulnerability. It was peculiarly human: animals had things—fur, or feathers, scales, or carapaces—to disguise their nakedness. Humans had only clothes, which were removable, and when they were removed, you were forced to remember what nakedness meant, how a tiny bullet, a cloth the size of a grain of cereal, a sliver of flying glass could destroy all of it in an instant A single swipe of a blade under a chin, and all the warmth and motion and color would drain away, the shapely flesh converted in an instant to stiffness, and all its expressiveness into rigidity, into stone that wasn’t stone, petrifaction that rotted and stank.
    He stirred, pulled up his torso, and leaned over the side of the bed towards his clothes.
    Her heart bounded. Was he one of those? He couldn’t be that bad, to get up now and dress! He couldn’t be!
    He came back up with a packet of cigarettes and a gold lighter. He offered her one and she broke her rule and took it They sprawled comfortably against propped-up pillows, smoking.
    He looked at her, glinting. “You know we don’t even know each other’s last names.”
    She smiled back. “That’s kind of fun, isn’t it. I mean, dramatic and mysterious and romantic and all that.”
    “It’s fun until you have to look somebody up in the phone book.”
    “I’m not in the phone book.”
    “That’s even more serious.”
    She looked intensely into his face: wonderful face, sculpted with expression. She put her hand on his cheek, gently, and held it She did want to know, yes she did, what had made that face, what had lined it in that precise way, what had created such expression. He was looking love at her, and she lifted her head and kissed him lightly.
    Even more serious. Did he mean that? He acted serious, he was looking at her with the same intensity now as before. All the silence between them on the train, all the intensity, hadn’t it been designed to make this feel cataclysmic, a tremendous romantic ecstasy? And it had worked, their sex was extraordinary. But surely that was all, wasn’t it? It had served its purpose, was finished now.
    Then why did the thought of him getting up and out of bed, dressing, leaving, the flat vacant of him, vacant, make her heart ache?
    “Okay, then,” she said. “Tell me your last name. And everything else too.”
    His name was Victor Morrissey. He was a vice-president in charge of development for IMO, a company that made a whole range of things, but mainly electronic equipment for airplanes and experimental trains and buses and cars. He was in England to open a branch office, small to begin with, forty or fifty people. The present plan was that it would expand tremendously in the future. They were being given great help by the government, in its belief that IMO would help bolster the British economy.
    “We’re based in London, but I come to Oxford every few weeks because we work with the automobile companies here, in Cowley.”
    Aha: Wife in London, mistress in Oxford. I see what he’s aiming for. R and R no matter where he is.
    “Your turn.”
    My turn.
    “My name is Dolores Durer. I’m a professor of English at Emmings College in Boston. I specialize in the Renaissance.”
    Actually I specialize in grief. I was apprenticed to it early by my mother, who was apprenticed to it by hers. You might call it the family business.
    “I got an NEH—a federal grant—to come to England and do research on a book I’m