She smiled to see Margaret sitting on a patio chair bare-armed, little evidence in her toned biceps of the seventieth birthday that she’d celebrated last year at the British Museum, where she was a trustee. She had a cigarette in hand, and plumes of smoke drifted from her mouth.

  “Still a cold-blooded dragon lady,” Maryam said in greeting. Earlier in the afternoon it had been summer, but now clouds had moved in and brought back the sharp chill of spring.

  Margaret received this as the compliment it was intended to be, raising her cheek for a kiss, her smile showing teeth discolored with wine and nicotine. Her careful attention to appearance had never made its way inside her mouth.

  “I see the Minister for Children and Families has backed the Home Secretary’s comments about Imij this evening,” Margaret said, as Maryam sat down. “Who even knew there was a minister for such a thing?”

  “I imagine he said it just so we do know there’s a minister for such a thing,” Maryam said.

  “Terrible moment for all this noise, given acquisition talks, isn’t it?” Margaret took another drag on her cigarette, her mouth curved into a smile of secret knowledge.

  “You already know about that?” She’d come here prepared to reveal this highly privileged information to Margaret only if doing so proved necessary in order to enlist her aid. Even now, she continued to underestimate the club members.

  “I might have had a hand in getting that ball rolling.”

  Margaret’s housekeeper reappeared with a bottle and two crystal glasses. The bottle had gold lettering and a gold icon of a winged horse on it. Since turning teetotaler, Margaret had become a connoisseur of fine water.

  “Eight thousand years old,” Margaret said, holding up a glass. “Puts all those vintage wines to shame. According to legend, Pegasus struck his hoof on the ground and this spring issued forth. It’s wonderful with oysters.”

  “Now you’re just pulling my leg,” Maryam said. She took a sip and wished you could come to visit Margaret and ask for a cup of tea. “About all the noise around Imij. Could you do something to quiet it down?”

  “I’m pulling my weight in other directions at the moment. But I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the High Table.”

  “The what?”

  Margaret explained. She had always said political donors’ clubs didn’t provide a significant enough return on the investment, but the High Table was different, offering monthly meetings with the Chancellor to discuss the country’s economic affairs in addition to the usual dinners and receptions with the Prime Minister and other members of the Cabinet. Join the High Table and your phone calls to Number 10 will never go unanswered, Margaret said.

  “You know I don’t even vote for them.” Maryam wasn’t impressed with any political party, but had voted Green in the last couple of elections because Zola asked it of her. Her constituency was one of the safest of safe seats; her vote couldn’t change outcomes in the world, so it might as well influence relations at home.

  “No one’s asking you to vote for them. That is a matter for your conscience; this is a matter for the firm.”

  When she’d first met Margaret and heard things like this it had been hard to believe that someone who sounded so like her own grandfather could appear in the guise of an Englishwoman.

  There was no need to ask if Margaret was a member of the High Table. She didn’t have to buy influence. Maryam felt the lightest touch of the term nouveau riche attach itself to her, but she shrugged it off the same way she shrugged off words such as migrant, with its whiff of misfortune. England taught you the subtleties of language—When did you arrive here? was something you never wanted to hear; When did you move here? was fine. The movers had options, the arrivers simply followed a trajectory out of a hellhole and washed up on some better shore. She was a mover and therefore not a migrant but an expat or even an émigré. Sometimes she liked to think, Conquerer.

  “Play this right, and there’s no limit to what you can get out of it,” Margaret said. “Between Brexit and the last round of bloodletting in the party, they’ve lost a great many donors—there’s an enticing desperation to their fundraising efforts.”

  There was a new feeling of warmth. The sun had lowered, breaking free of the clouds. Maryam tilted her face toward it and closed her eyes. The patio’s scent of dwarf lilac entwined around the cigarette smell to evoke long-ago parties in her grandfather’s garden—night-blooming jasmine and women’s floral perfumes, everyone smoking, and always the air of intrigue: marriage alliances brokered, favors called in, introductions made, information traded. She touched her fingertip to her tongue, tasting the familiarity of it all.

  The first two sentences were in bold, a larger font than the rest of the letter. Your application for leave to remain has been refused. You must now leave the United Kingdom.

  Zahra read with her eyes but the sentences registered, as ever, deep in her gut. She’d been rejected for a student visa when she’d first applied for one in Karachi as an eighteen-year-old. An administrative error, quickly corrected, but when she’d read the rejection letter there was a feeling of being upended, the phrase “rug pulled out from under your feet” revealed for the first time not as a cliché but as a true description of the feeling of flailing, falling. And the life she’d felt herself severed from when she’d read that letter hadn’t even been her life—it was just an expectation of a life to come. Thereafter, she’d felt an echo of the upended feeling each time she’d had to apply for a visa extension, a new visa category, indefinite leave to remain, and finally citizenship itself.

  Her own experience didn’t begin to compare, of course, to what someone like Azam must feel, but that was precisely the point. It had felt like an extinguishing, and yet it didn’t even begin to compare.

  She glanced up at Azam. There was that hunted look already in his eyes, she’d seen it in so many of her clients when she was a barrister. Ray had texted her in the morning and said he knew it was the weekend but Azam was falling apart, could she speak to him? And so they’d met near the Finchley Road Tube station at a new cafe that in its stylish wood interior and attractive young baristas tried to defeat the grim thoroughfare quality of the street outside but could realistically aspire only to being the least awful place to have coffee on Finchley Road.

  She returned to the letter. Azam’s application had been refused because his “assault” on the man outside CCL’s office made it undesirable for him to remain in the UK based on his character and conduct.

  “You said—” Azam said, and stopped himself.

  But she had said. She’d said it would be okay. She hadn’t counted on the CCTV footage going viral or on the Home Office using that footage as grounds for refusing a man settlement based on phrasing in their guidelines that was so vague it allowed them to reject any applications they wanted to reject.

  Azam tapped his finger alongside a paragraph halfway down the page. Little weight should be given to a private life established by a person who is in the UK with precarious immigration status. Any private life in or ties to the UK have been developed with your full knowledge that you did not have permission to remain here permanently.

  “How can they write this? I’ve come here on a spouse visa.”

  It was the standard phrasing to deny a claim to residency based on family ties, but it felt grotesque to use the words standard phrasing.

  “And this,” he said, jabbing at another sentence. There is no reason your wife can’t join you in Afghanistan, particularly given her ties to that country.

  “My wife’s family came here as refugees. They recognized her rights as a refugee. Now they’re saying there’s no reason she can’t live in Afghanistan?”

  A barista had approached with their coffees and stood hovering awkwardly. Azam looked up and apologized, standing to take the cups from her, then sitting back down.

  “But I can appeal. It says I can appeal,” he said a little while later. “Will I win?”

  “There’s a good chance,” she said, choosing her words carefully. She touched her finger to the miniature potted cactus on the table, felt its tiny thorns as pinpricks. “There are so many people who will write letters of support about your good character. Your excellent character.”

  “How long will this take?” He pressed his temples to indicate the chaos the letter had already caused in his brain.

  She had to tell him the truth, or at least some of it. It could take between six and twelve months to get a court date. She didn’t say, Even when you get a court date you might be put on the waiting list, which means your case might not get heard and you’ll have to wait another six to twelve months. She didn’t say, If the decision goes in your favor the Home Office could contest it and that could be another six to twelve months. Years might go by in a limbo, everything in your life contingent. Your mood will suffer, your marriage will be placed under immense strain, your ability to plan for or even imagine tomorrow will disappear. You might decide to get on a plane and return to Afghanistan, which is probably the whole point of—or at least a welcome corollary to—this drawn-out torture, but if you do that you’ll be barred from returning to the UK, even for a visit, for at least ten years.

  “Six to twelve months?” He looked at her as though unsure she really knew how the law worked in England. “And in the meantime, what? I’m supposed to go to work, come home to my wife, meet my mates, and live my life as if everything’s normal?”

  “You can’t work, Azam. You’re not allowed to work anymore.”

  He leaned back in his chair, his hands over his face. His wife couldn’t afford the mortgage payments without his contribution; his brother would have to drop out of medical school in Kabul.

  She looked away. Two near-empty 13 buses trundled past outside. The day was warm already, and much warmer on this shadeless street than it would be on the adjacent Fitzjohns Avenue, tree-lined and red-bricked. London and all its diverging lines.

  He had applied only a few weeks ago. The average waiting time for an ILR application was six months. The number of times she’d heard of someone with a faultless record being refused residency because of a single punch following on from a racist attack was zero. Someone in the Home Office had been very keen to deliver this blow. She wondered if Azam or she were the intended recipient.

  Zahra took off her reading glasses, set them to one side. She’d get him the best lawyer for his appeal, of course. Beyond that, she’d speak to Azam’s MP, one of the good ones, who would raise the matter with the Home Office. Perhaps a rally outside Parliament on his behalf. Everyone knew him as the man who tackled the racist. Tens of thousands, maybe more, would turn up at the rally. They’d hold up placards, they’d chant their chants. They’d cheer her when she stepped up to speak on a makeshift stage at Parliament Square, watched over by the statues of Disraeli and Churchill and, since the previous year, Millicent Fawcett, her presence there usually an uplifting reminder of all that could be fought for and achieved. But—Zahra considered her cup of coffee, didn’t have the will to lift it to her lips—she wasn’t sure she knew how to win anymore. The tens of thousands, maybe more, who showed up at rallies had less and less the air of people determined to bend the arc of history toward justice these days, and more and more that of those in need of a support group. History’s losers, for the foreseeable future.

  She looked at the letter again. The words blurred on the page, all except the first two sentences. Your application for leave to remain has been refused. You must now leave the United Kingdom.

  Maryam walked up the graveled path of a Chelsea mansion in a floor-length, scoop-necked black dress and black fitted bolero jacket with beaded collar. A door opened on her approach, and a maid in a pinafore offered a tray of champagne flutes. She took one and followed the sweep of the butler’s hand into the next room, where another butler was waiting to show her the doorway leading out into the garden. On her way out she glimpsed a Matisse, a Miró, and a sketch that might be a Van Gogh.

  She stepped into the garden, into the noise of men taking pleasure in being alpha dogs among alpha dogs. White men in black tie on a London evening, their shadows long. It could be a movie scene from any era—except this one, you’d think, but you’d be wrong.

  There were two other women present. One was the lady of the house, whose husband was chief executive of an oil and gas company; she was the only plus-one allowed into this gathering. The other woman was married to a Russian oligarch with close enough ties to the Kremlin that his name wouldn’t look good on a list of the party’s top donors, though his last name was so distinctive that the wife who shared it was hardly much of a camouflage. People bothered less and less with veneers these days.

  Oh, and there was a third woman. The Valkyrie. She smiled at Maryam with one of those hello-the-sisterhood smiles. Maryam responded with a vague look that said she believed the smile was for someone else. There were schoolyard rules about the enemies of your friends. She walked toward the newly minted Chancellor, whom she knew a little from a lunch with Margaret at the Athenaeum two governments ago, when he was Business Secretary and there were rumblings about an anti-monopoly bill aimed at Venture. He’d assured them he was on their side, but both she and Margaret noticed that he insisted on ordering wine by the glass and then drank enough to fill a bottle and a half—that said everything they needed to know about his reliability. Layla had later said, I could have told you all you needed to know about him, in that way she had of claiming authority about everyone of Nigerian heritage. On spotting Maryam now, he cried out, “Olé,” and it took her a moment to make the connection to her bolero jacket.

  “We were all delighted to see you on the guest list,” he said. “We’re trying to beef up our community outreach. Thought you might want to get involved.”

  “Only so far as to tell you that it might be best to avoid the phrase ‘beef up’ if dealing with Hindus and Buddhists.”

  “That’s very funny,” he said. She remembered previously noticing that he told you something was funny rather than laughing. He looked past her at someone else, his face making exaggerated expressions of delight. A moment later, he started to speak to whoever the person was, quite literally over her head. She moved away with as much grace as was possible in the direction of a man she didn’t recognize who was waving hello to her.

  He’d been at Wharton with Babar. She’d met him with Babar in New York at the 21 Club—he’d recommended she order the burger. She remembered the burger, not the man, but was quickly stuck in a conversation about girls’ schools in London. He was moving to London with his family over the summer—taking over the European division of his family’s construction empire—and had flown out from New York for this party; he’d joined the High Table before finding himself either a place to live or a school for his children.

  She finished her champagne quickly so she could look around for a top-up and complain about the poor service, leaving him no option but to offer to find her another glass. Once he was gone, she was able to survey the garden. There was a particularly large cluster of men near the tulips; that would be the Prime Minister. She didn’t know him at all, but her impression of him was confirmed when she moved closer and saw that he was appearing to listen intently to what was being said to him, arms crossed over his body, head bent down—but the bent head was only so that the men around him couldn’t see his eyes scanning the garden for new entrants. The eyes arrived at her breasts, stopped, looked up.

  “Fuck off,” she muttered to herself, then raised her empty champagne flute in his direction.

  He was by her side in a matter of seconds. “Maryam Khan,” he said, unexpectedly. “I’ve been waiting for you.” There was the flirtatious smile, the hand on her arm. Don’t tell me dressing so straight isn’t a deliberate choice, Layla had said when she’d complained about this sort of thing one time too often.

  “Are we about to have a conversation about community outreach?” she said, leaning sideways to place her empty champagne flute on a table, which allowed her to move away without seeming to want to move away.

  No, they were not. The Prime Minister had grander ideas for how a woman with the last name Khan could be used to repair the party’s image internationally, frayed around the edges as it was. He was launching a “Britain’s Open for Business” campaign to send a message to the world that the UK was a wonderful place to bring investments and ideas, the doors were wide open no matter where you came from. There’d been too much scare-mongering about a future unshackled from Europe, he said; it was time to showcase the diverse potential of the nation. Someone like Maryam would be perfect as one of the faces of the campaign.

  “Brown outside, made of banknotes inside?”

  “I didn’t think we said that sort of thing.”

  “We prefer saying that sort of thing to hearing the code word diverse.”

  He laughed, a real laugh. She often ended up warming to the awful ones at work gatherings dressed up as social affairs. And they liked her. If they were all like you, was a phrase she was as familiar with as, And which lucky man brought you along tonight? You could hold that against them, or you could find the jester, the charmer, the family man, the lost boy inside. It helped. You had to do whatever helped to get through these evenings.

  “So you’ll do it?” he said.

  “I can’t possibly,” she said. “I’m the chair of Imij, and apparently your government is intent on taking measures against it. How would it look if I’m representing your government and being slapped down by it at the same time?”