Zahra had only gone a few paces when she heard Layla calling her back, holding up her phone. While they’d been walking, a tabloid had posted new footage on its home page. Azam smashing the spindly man’s face, his expression ugly. Alongside the looping footage, a still image: the spindly man, leaning forward, his face smeared with blood, each wrist held by a dark-skinned man. Something had been done to the image to make his blond hair shine so brightly, Ray and the Bangladeshi cook’s skin darkened to the color of coal. The blond man’s arms were spread slightly apart as he tilted forward, just enough to make explicable the replication of the image all across social media with the hashtag #Crucifixion.

  You ok?

  Fine, other than having to throw away my favorite shoes

  Because?

  It’ll kill all erotic charge if I tell you

  I’ll never ask again. Hope that Afghan is getting a medal

  He was stupid to do that. What is it with men and violence?

  Can be satisfying. You never wanted to punch me in the face?

  That was a surprise. They’d both avoided—carefully, she thought—any mention of that night that led to his expulsion from school.

  Oh, you’re going there

  Should I backtrack?

  Did you ever punch Jimmy in the face?

  For what?

  You were terrorized on that car ride too

  She hoped he would know she meant it as taunt, not forgiveness. With Hammad she could be unkind.

  No one was “terrorized”

  What word would you use?

  Bonjour

  ?

  I have to be in Paris for work this summer

  Changing the topic?

  Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m asking

  She went to stand at her bedroom window, watching the life on the street. Two men conversed under the awning of a cafe across the road, cigarettes in their gesturing hands. For the first time in years she wished she still smoked, as she had from university through her twenties. She imagined herself from a distance, a woman who had stepped away from her rumpled bed wearing only a dressing gown, smoking a cigarette, contemplating whether to allow herself what she wanted. Unchaining the animal places of her heart. She exhaled, and instead of smoke rings there was a little misting of the window. She traced a YES in it.

  Maryam thought the word home with pleasure, as she so often did, returning from the night walk with Woolf, the chill of outdoors closed out as she shut the door behind her. The dog edged past her as they entered the house and made her way on her stiff legs down the stairs. Upstairs, Zola’s bedroom light was off.

  Down in the kitchen, the dinner plates still hadn’t been cleared away as she’d promised Layla. Instead, she’d fallen down the rabbit hole of work emails—no time of day when investors or CEOs weren’t awake somewhere in the world. She put the kettle on to boil, cracked open four cardamon pods between her teeth, and dropped them into two mugs. Back, she texted, looking out toward the studio in the garden into which Layla had disappeared right after dinner.

  While waiting for the water to boil, she glanced at her email again, fired off a couple of responses, and then walked around to the floating display cabinet with its trio of sculptures—the goddess Hariti from Gandhara in gray schist and Oshun the Yoruba deity in bronze, flanked a clay woman whom Maryam lifted off the cabinet, looking closely at her for the first time in years. She was a small-scale model of a much larger sculpture in white marble that had been Layla’s contribution to a group show at Whitechapel Gallery, in the early days of their life together. Layla had called the piece After Phidias—it was a response to the absence of women’s genitals in Greek art, and had attracted considerable attention at the time. The clay figure reclined, nude, thighs indolently parted, revealing everything. A huge fight had ensued when Maryam had recognized—belatedly, because it wasn’t something she’d ever looked at for very long—the sculpture’s replication of parts of her own anatomy. It’s an homage, Layla had said. And no one but the two of us knows it’s you. I mean, none of your ex-boyfriends are the sort to wander into art exhibitions in the East End, are they?

  She’d been in the early days of a relationship with one of the ex-boyfriends when she’d first met Layla. An autumn day in 1993 that placed the word russet at the forefront of your thoughts. Maryam had walked into the Cambridge home that Zahra was house-sitting to find a woman balancing a mug of tea on a denimed knee that was drawn up against her chest, demonstrating a striking foldability of limbs. She’d been prepared to dislike this Layla-pronounced-the-English-way of whom Zahra spoke so adoringly, but Layla made that quickly impossible. Layla hadn’t stayed long, but before leaving, she embraced Maryam. The muscles of her arms, the thinness of the fabric of her T-shirt. On the train back to London that evening, Maryam became aware of a shift within her. A truth, already known, fully acknowledged. But it seemed only to be a partial truth at the time—she liked her boyfriend well enough—so she decided to ignore the inconvenience of it. It was several years before she encountered Layla again, in a pub garden on Zahra’s twenty-fifth birthday, and everything that followed was inevitable.

  Maryam noticed, with some amusement, the dust gathering between the clay figure’s legs. Nadya, their cleaner, was usually zealous about keeping everything spotless, but there were clearly places she didn’t want to go. Maryam carried the sculpture over to the kitchen counter and rubbed her down with a damp cloth. How much time they used to spend on art and war. Endless hours in galleries, from warehouses in Bethnal Green to the Tate Modern, which they first visited the day it opened its vast doors to the public—when the century was new and still filled with optimism. They’d largely agree about the art, furiously disagree about capitalism’s relationship to art, and often end up stalking away from each other or kissing in a corner, overlooked by a giant spider or a glittering woman made of elephant dung. A far more perilous activity then than now, but not kissing hadn’t really seemed an option.

  Maryam followed the damp cloth with a dry one, then placed a fond kiss on the wide-openness of her desire when she was done.

  When was the last time Layla had talked to her in more than the most cursory fashion about any exhibition she’d been to see? When, for that matter, had Maryam last been to see an exhibit with her? Their conversations were almost all domestic now—about Zola, mostly; but also grocery shopping, home improvements, summer holiday plans, whether it was time to invite some or other combination of their families over for lunch. They didn’t fight much anymore—Layla’s attitude toward their differences had moved to “acceptance,” aided by a great deal of yoga and meditation. Occasionally, it felt like diminishment. Occasionally, also, Layla herself seemed diminished from the woman Maryam had fallen in love with. Not in any startling way, just the ordinary way in which young people filled with energy and promise settled into middle-age contentment, at peace with a position as an art and English teacher in a state school when once she was one of the most promising sparks in a cohort whose other members now had solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy and commissions from Artangel. “You turned her into a wife,” Layla’s ex had once said to Maryam. Maryam had been unusually wounded by that, though Layla had laughed when she repeated the line, and said, “Growing up, solo exhibitions seemed within reach, but I never dreamed this life was possible.” And she’d gestured around to the bedroom she shared with Maryam, the toddler clambering about her legs. Later, Maryam had heard her yelling down the phone to her ex about “heterosexual paradigms.”

  The studio light went off, and a few moments later Layla walked through the sliding door and laughed to see Maryam with the clay woman.

  “Darling, you haven’t changed a bit,” she said, dropping a kiss onto Maryam’s neck before taking her hand and pulling her onto the sofa. “Did you make us some tea?”

  Maryam gestured toward the kitchen counter, where the mugs sat next to the kettle. “I could bring it over, but that would mean getting up.”

  Layla shifted, wrapped her legs around Maryam’s waist, and held her in place. Maryam rested her head on Layla’s chest, felt the comforting rhythm of her heart, fifty-eight beats per minute at rest. Some of Maryam’s favorite moments in life occurred at the end of a busy day, when everything that had come before fell away and there was only Woolf’s rumbling breath, the particular quality in the air that arose from knowing Zola was safely at home but not likely to need anything further until tomorrow, Layla silent with her in the way they’d always been able to be with one another.

  “I spoke to my aunt today,” Layla said after a few minutes. “She seems to have started redecorating the whole house in anticipation of our arrival.”

  Maryam took Layla’s hand and pressed it to her lips. Soon after Zola was born, Layla had sat Maryam down and talked to her about the two years she and her brother had spent with their parents in Lagos when they were nine and eleven. It had been transformative to not see your Blackness as contrast, Layla had said. She’d like Zola to have that experience one day, and also the experience of living within a large family. Maryam had agreed, as was the civilized response to any demand from the lactating and sleep-deprived love of your life. In the years since, she’d shaved the two years down to six months, Nigeria’s homophobic laws coming to her aid. Layla could take a term’s leave from work, Zola could go to the same school as her cousins in Lagos, Maryam would fly in to visit as often as she could. They were to leave after Christmas.

  “Life will be very rubbish without the two of you here.” She tried to say it lightly, but Layla squeezed her hand in apology.

  “I’ve told Zahra to clear her social calendar for next spring. She promises she’ll be here at least once during the week as well as your usual Sundays.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter,” Maryam said, but she was pleased.

  A little later, Layla slid a tablet off the coffee table. Maryam took it from her hands and propped it against her knees so they could both watch Zahra on Question Time.

  “Oh, hello,” Layla said, as the camera focused on Zahra, sitting on one side of the moderator around the crescent-shaped desk. She always wore a jacket in muted tones with a black shirt beneath for her TV appearances, but today the shirt was red and the neckline a V rather than a scoop. The four men and one other woman around the desk were all in different shades of black and white, their hair white or blond. You would look at Zahra and think, One of these things is not like the other things, even without the red shirt. But the bright color added an air of flaunting, a deliberate setting-apart, which she should by now know better than to attempt if she was also going to say the kinds of things she always said.

  “Do you think she’s doing that for her mystery man?” Layla said.

  “Has she said anything more to you about him?”

  “He’s in a different time zone, she knew him slightly years ago, he might come to London sometime this summer. Also, she hasn’t had an orgasm that hasn’t been self-induced for much too long.”

  “That is the kind of sentence I can’t imagine Zahra saying.”

  “It’s because you grew up with Upright Zahra. I first met Horizontal-with-the-Tutor Zahra.”

  “I suppose he’s where it started.”

  “It” was Zahra’s taste in men, which ran to the clandestine. Zahra liked to call it a proclivity, but really it was a guardrail. You don’t expect to go very far when you walk down a dead-end street, and one failed marriage was all the emotional upheaval Zahra was willing to risk in a lifetime. Layla said she was starting with the patriarchal assumption that coupledom had to be the emotional center of every woman’s life, and there was no evidence that Zahra wanted anything more than she received from her entanglements. But inside Maryam there still remained an adolescent, fierce about her best friend, who wanted to yell, You aren’t good enough for her, at all the unworthy men who stopped short of loving Zahra Ali, even if love wasn’t what Zahra wanted from them.

  “Is this her first time facing the Valkyrie since she said that thing about criminals and terrorists?” Layla said.

  The only other woman at the desk was the Home Secretary, who had blonde hair like a helmet and the languid air of centuries-old privilege. Zahra blamed her for the attack on her office, though it was perfectly clear that it was Zahra’s own words, not anyone else’s, that made certain kinds of people hate her.

  The questions from the audience started. Zahra did what she always did, with her perfectly formed sentences and witty asides and very human anecdotes that made it clear she understood the human cost of policy and polling decisions: she made everyone else look insincere, ill-informed, and second-rate. Maryam’s interest wandered to Layla’s hands moving under her shirt and then lower, so she missed the next few questions and only focused again when a woman in a hijab with a Birmingham accent stood up to say she had been distressed for weeks about that schoolgirl Tahera, whose attempted suicide had been a result of school bullying, much of which took place on Imij.

  Layla’s hand stilled, aware of the shift in Maryam’s attention. Why had everyone stopped talking about it so quickly? the woman was saying. Shouldn’t the government have stepped in and taken action against the rampant Islamophobia and racism that was allowed to go unchecked?

  The moderator turned to Zahra first. Did she support government action? he asked.

  “Absolutely,” Zahra said. “I absolutely think the government should take action against rampant Islamophobia and racism. A good starting point would be an internal inquiry into their own party, looking first at the leadership’s use of language and extending out to government policies.”

  Layla hooted in appreciation, the audience applauded. Maryam watched the Valkyrie, saw the bright red marks on her cheeks.

  “This government is unequivocally opposed to all forms of discrimination,” she said. “So, yes, we will be taking measures against Imij. The Prime Minister has made it very clear there is no place in Britain for companies turning a blind eye to racism for the sake of profits.”

  That brought on the loudest round of applause of the evening.

  Maryam kissed Layla’s hand in apology while moving it off her and stood up even as her phone started to buzz and ring at the same time.

  “Load the dishwasher and bring me some tea,” Layla called out as Maryam crossed to the phone on the kitchen counter, reaching it before the second ring, winged sandals on her feet now that the battle she’d thought she’d averted was here.

  Sorry, was on a conference call when you were doing your tv thing

  Where in the world was he? Question Time had aired before six a.m. Singapore time.

  That’s OK. It was nothing to write home about

  I disagree

  Based on?

  Couldn’t listen but was watching on my phone. You in red. Stuff of fantasies

  Perhaps he was in some other city where he had an affair on the go. She never imagined she was the only one—there was something so recycled about many of his lines.

  Is having me on mute also the stuff of fantasies?

  No I want to hear every sound you make. What color was your bra?

  Recycled, and yet it sent a charge through her, made her feel the right kind of dirty.

  What bra?

  You’re killing me

  Maryam walked along the quiet Kensington street, hands in the pockets of her belted suede coat. A retro-stylish 1980s Khan Leather saddlebag was slung cross-body and bumped against her hip with every step. She glanced, by habit, toward every passing window to see what piece of life she might find on display in street-facing rooms on ground floors and in basements. Here was a room that was all television, here another that was museum-like with its red walls and expensively framed paintings, but that drew attention far less than the one that was in total shambles—dust thick on piles of books that were a nudge away from toppling, brown rings from teacups on carpet and furniture; it conjured up an image of occupants who shuffled about in stained clothes that were both moth-eaten and smelled of mothballs. As a child she’d once been taken to such a home by her parents and assumed the couple who lived there—her father’s guardians from his boarding school days—must be too poverty-stricken to afford new clothes or even a spray can of Mr Sheen; she had greeted with first disbelief and then scorn the information that quite the contrary was true, but if you’re English and posh you don’t ever want to be seen as trying. Years later, when she’d entered the heady world of dot-com with its promise of new ways of doing things, she had understood that Britain was a place that had invented nonsensical rules to wrong-foot outsiders at a time when being an insider placed you at the very heart of global power; by the close of the twentieth century the rules were tired and silly, the arcane rituals of a club no one took seriously when the clubhouse itself was up for sale.

  But she’d underestimated the club members, as evidenced by her need for assistance today from Baroness Margaret Wright, CBE, descendent of one of the lesser-known viceroys of India, power broker, philanthropist, and not only Maryam’s former boss but now, in retirement, valued investor in funds raised by Venture Further. The clubhouse might be almost entirely sold off, but club membership remained restricted to those who had grown up playing on its grounds. You don’t mind the exclusivity, you just mind that you aren’t part of it, Layla had said once, as if this were a Maryam-specific attitude rather than absolutely everyone’s objection to exclusivity.

  Climbing the steps to Margaret’s front door, she grasped the lizard-shaped knocker with her usual distaste—one of the few things she’d never missed about Karachi was its geckos. A few moments later she was being ushered by the housekeeper through the chandeliered house, Margaret’s brocaded ancestors watching from the walls, and down the stairs to the patio.