“Ah, a conundrum.”

  “Here’s a further conundrum. We’re having conversations at my firm. My partners both want to move out of Britain, given the economic uncertainty here. I’m the only one making a case for staying, but this saber-rattling against Imij isn’t helping me win the argument. Incidentally, we’ve just had a final close on our latest fund; we’ve raised six hundred million pounds for British start-ups. But I can’t be a face of a ‘Britain’s Open for Business’ campaign if I’m also moving my company out of the country, can I?”

  He dug his hands in his pockets and hunched down slightly so his face was closer to hers. “You are magnificent, aren’t you? All right, I’m not calling your bluff. We’ll bury the Imij thing.”

  “Or you might say something complimentary about how the company has quickly moved to improve our anti-abuse terms and penalties, making any government intervention unnecessary. Have you thought of signing up yourself? You’re on other social media platforms, but we have a wider demographic, and you really want to work on younger voters, don’t you?”

  “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” the Prime Minister said, his hand on her again. His thumb stroked the underside of her arm. “Perhaps we should set up a private meeting to discuss areas of mutual interest.”

  “Margaret Wright said we’d get on,” she said.

  “Margaret is always right about everything.” He smiled and withdrew his hand. Margaret was friends with his mother-in-law. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I can’t possibly spend too much time standing and talking to someone I actually want to talk to. That isn’t in the job description.” A wink, and he was gone.

  “Impressive.” Babar’s friend was standing nearby, holding two flutes of champagne. He handed one to her, and clinked rims. She felt drunk already. How easy it all was once you were in this circle, how lightly everything could be done. Billion-dollar deals saved in a tone of banter. The classic elegance of a game unchanged across nations and centuries. She took a long sip. New possibilities slipped through her veins, drop by golden drop.

  Late afternoon light fell on the olive tree on the balcony and slanted into the living room, dappling the wooden floor with leaf shapes. She could still see the Khan family as they had been, spread out across the room—Maryam’s father in the armchair, working his way through The Times’ crossword; her mother on her knees by the teak coffee table examining fabric swatches for the redecoration of one of the run-down properties that she would sell at an enormous profit; her sisters lounging at opposite ends of the sofa, looking at magazines, then laptop screens, then smartphones as the years went by. Maryam stood in the doorway, observing how they could share a space and be separate in it. In a moment she would walk in, and a ripple of disruption would accompany her.

  “Feeling nostalgic?” Zahra said, and Maryam shook her head and stepped into the room, empty now, the armchair and sofa long ago donated to charity during one of her mother’s bouts of remodeling, the coffee table claimed by her youngest sister for her home in Dubai. Only the olive tree remained—the new owners had said they’d like to keep it, along with the cabinet that had once displayed the Gardner collection, now packed up and on its way in a container to Karachi.

  “I never liked this flat,” Maryam said. “Did I ever tell you that?”

  “Because it wasn’t the house in Old Clifton,” Zahra said, meaning there had never been a need to tell her.

  This had never been home. Only Zahra came close to understanding that moving to London all those years ago had felt like leaving herself behind. Maryam had swiftly won over the popular girls at her new school, did well academically, wasn’t exactly unhappy. But there was always this knowledge that she couldn’t be known, not really. All her subtexts and shadows left behind; each summer she’d fly back to Karachi to return to them, return to herself.

  All that was long ago, before Layla had come along and shown her how one person could step into your life and see you more deeply than you’d ever believed possible. But still there had persisted this knowledge of the thinness of her relationship to this country. “Home” had once been a city of millions, then it had shrunk to the size of a house in Primrose Hill. But in the last few weeks she’d felt herself expanding out into England, occupying new kinds of spaces in it. She’d thought the word homecoming as she stood in that garden in Chelsea.

  “It’s so strange without them. Layla thinks I feel abandoned.”

  “You were never theirs to abandon.”

  “That’s what I said. Layla’s just worried I’m going to feel abandoned when she leaves.”

  “Convince her you will, and she’ll stay.”

  “Get behind me, Lucifer.” Layla would stay for love of her, and so for love of Layla she had to make it feel all right to go. And Zola was so excited about going to school with her big cousins.

  “So, not abandoned but . . . ?” Zahra rubbed her thumb in an indentation in the balcony doorframe, and Maryam remembered the edge of a drinks cabinet that had caused it.

  “Turns out, even if your parents are useless you still miss them when they go away.”

  Maryam opened the door to the balcony and stepped out. This was a busier Kensington street than the one Margaret lived on, identical red-brick mansion blocks on either side of the road. She leaned on the balcony rail, looking down. Two elderly women were walking on the pavement below—one with steel-gray hair and a yellow jacket, the other taller, white-haired, one hand in the pocket of her red corduroy trousers. When she stumbled a little and righted herself, the hand in the pocket slipped out and there was no hand, only an empty sleeve. The yellow-jacketed woman took hold of the empty sleeve, placed it back in the pocket of the red trousers, adjusted it for jauntiness. The two women carried on walking.

  Zahra and Maryam moved closer to each other.

  “How different life would have been if I’d listened to you about Hammad,” Maryam said.

  “What a strange thing to say.”

  “Well, that’s what started everything that led to London.”

  “London led to Layla and Zola, so are you really still complaining about that?”

  “Now who’s saying strange things? Since when have you decided that an injustice stops being an injustice at the moment you manage to right your life again?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Remember the gold chains, all that macho posturing? The endless boring phone calls. God, so embarrassing. The things he used to say to me on those calls that I never told you about. He was almost eighteen, I was fourteen. And you know what we’ve never talked about?”

  “I’m going to the loo,” Zahra said, and disappeared inside.

  The two old women were almost out of sight at the end of the road, and they seemed to be deep in conversation—perhaps the older one’s slight stoop came from a lifetime of bending to hear her friend’s whispered secrets.

  “What have we never talked about?” Zahra said, stepping back onto the balcony just as Maryam was beginning to wonder why she was taking so long.

  “Why was he so keen for you to come along on the ride? Were you a treat for Jimmy?”

  Zahra bunched up her fingers and caught hold of a leathery-skinned olive that had clung to its branch through the winter months and showed no sign of letting go. The leaves flashed silver as they moved in the slight breeze. “What would you do if you saw Hammad again?” she asked.

  “I’ve never thought about it. I used to think a lot about what I would do if I saw Jimmy—and I did see him. Out of the corner of my eye, all the time in those years right after. But Hammad? Too pathetic to think about. All hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas.”

  “How do you know what they say in Texas?”

  “Episode of Dallas, I expect. Where else does all our deep knowledge of Texas come from?” She pointed to the railing across the road, where there was a sign she couldn’t make out from this distance but knew well. polite notice it said, before going on to deliver a stern warning about bicycles being removed if they were chained there. “I mark my deep knowledge of London as starting the day I realized how aggressive the words polite notice are.”

  Zahra ran her palm along the wrought-iron balcony rail. “England felt like home to me almost right away. Not because of England, but because you were here. And not just you, but this flat, with its paintings and furnishings from the Old Clifton house. I walked in here for the first time and it was Wednesday afternoons after school when my father was in the TV studio.”

  “Remember my parents wanted to take you to some fancy restaurant for dinner on your first night in London? All you wanted was a McDonald’s but you thought it would be rude to say so.”

  “So you took me to the high street for a Quarter Pounder with cheese, and then we walked all around Hyde Park very fast to build up an appetite for a second dinner. It was the most exciting evening of my whole life.” She touched the brick wall behind her and Maryam realized that all afternoon she’d been imprinting her hand with different surfaces of the flat. “One of us is feeling very sad about saying goodbye to this place, anyway.”

  It was time to go. They had checked every drawer and cupboard for anything left behind and found no trace of Khan-lives. In a few seconds they would leave, and Maryam would lock the doors and put the keys through the letter box, never to enter again.

  They turned their backs to the street for one final look at the living room, so reduced with all the furniture removed. Their shadows extended across the floor, equal in length, olive leaves shivering around them.

  Where’ve you disappeared?

  I think it’s time for this to come to an end

  Meaning?

  Don’t buy that train ticket from Paris

  Do I get some explanation?

  I don’t want to see you

  So we just keep texting?

  I don’t want that either

  You’ll change your mind

  You really don’t know me

  Time will tell

  The exchange brought with it a tiny bit of disappointment, nothing more.

  Summer

  Summer in London, a Pakistan-England Test match under way, and everyone from Zahra’s school days seemed to be here at Lord’s, a number of them crowded into the Venture Further corporate box, drinking rosé and Pimm’s, the men wearing linen and sometimes straw hats too, reflecting their first encounter with a certain kind of Englishness via the BBC adaptation of Brideshead Revisited that had done the rounds of Karachi society via pirated video in the early eighties. Some pulled off the look with the breeziness of parody, most seemed dressed for one role while reading from the script of another. The women were more varied in their attire—Zahra had on a halter-neck dress that went all the way to her ankles, and Maryam wore the green trousers and white shirt that she always wore to the first day of the Test, her sole act of superstition. She had long been the fulcrum of social activity for the old school friends who flew in from Karachi, Dubai, and New York, timing their holidays with the Lord’s Test whenever Pakistan was touring. It never ceased to amaze Zahra how much time Maryam had for even the most boorish of the people who hadn’t been a regular part of her life since she was fourteen. She extended endless generosity to anyone from the golden days of her childhood who—in Maryam’s words, sounding so much like Zeno—“made an effort,” even if that effort was just a text mentioning that someone was going to be in London on these dates and couldn’t wait to see Maryam and oh, by the way, did Maryam know how to get hold of tickets for the sold-out match?

  Layla was surprisingly tolerant of it all, but she drew the line at coming to watch a cricket match, so Zahra didn’t have her as a buffer against the feeling of outsiderness that never went away among this particular crowd, whose parents and sometimes grandparents had all known each other, and who were fluent in unraveling how one person’s second cousin was another person’s aunt’s sister-in-law. She leaned forward in her chair on the balcony, looking down at the green field and the men in white dotted around it. The stands were full, more white faces than brown, which you would’t find at any other match in an England-Pakistan series, but Lord’s with its rules of membership and its ridiculously priced tickets remained a place apart. It was one of those slower passages of play: the fast bowlers off, no turn in the wicket, the batting pair well set but playing cautiously, mindful of the wickets that had fallen early in the day. With no cover from the midday sun, it was blazingly hot—on the field, the players’ shirts clung to their backs with sweat—and most of Maryam’s guests were in the air-conditioned indoors section of the box, half watching the match on a mounted screen, half catching up with each other. Zahra had been inside herself until a few minutes earlier, when conversation segued from whether or not potatoes were a desirable addition to biryani to the incredible stock market performance of some company that almost everyone present seemed to have invested in, based on Maryam’s advice. Zahra had a limited appetite for conversations in which victory and defeat were measured on the FTSE Index.

  Babar came to sit next to her, holding out his hand for the binoculars that she’d been using to watch the bowler’s grip, as her father had taught her. She passed them to him without a word, enjoying that feeling of a familiarity that placed their interactions beyond politeness, no need for “please” or “of course”; his knee touched hers as he swiveled his body slightly to look at the player’s balcony in the Pavilion, and this was without friction or frisson. Babar was an investment banker in New York with a wife and two daughters, and though he and Zahra had seen each other only rarely in the last quarter of a century, there was a sweetly nostalgic intimacy between them, a reminder of childhood crushes and first kisses. Her first kiss, at least, on the beach that moonlit night. It was the summer before uni. She hadn’t wanted to arrive at Cambridge entirely inexperienced, and Babar was game for a summer romance that meant nothing and everything.

  “Couldn’t take any more tales of how-my-grandfather-taught-your-grandfather-to-crawl?” she said.

  Babar lifted and lowered his shoulders to claim equanimity about all those things that had once bothered him. “Came out to check you’re okay. You seem a bit lost today.”

  “It can feel like culture shock to move between my professional life and this lot.” She gestured behind her.

  “Hmm. I think I’m ‘this lot’ myself. Kutti!” Babar made his hand into a fist and extended his pinkie finger in the schoolyard gesture for Friendship ended, a hangdog expression on his face.

  “Dosti.” Zahra tucked his finger back into its fist and tugged at the index and middle finger, extending them in the Friendship restored gesture.

  “Phew,” Babar said. Then, “You can’t let politics get in the way of friendship.”

  “Other people’s lives aren’t politics. And anyway, I’m sitting in the Venture Further corporate box—I’m hardly incapable of navigating differences.”

  “Look at you two, so cozy together.” Saba appeared, and leaned against the balcony railing, phone held up toward the upper tier of the Mound Stand.

  “Who you taking pictures of?” Babar asked.

  “Everyone,” she said, rotating at the hip in one direction and then the other, an old-fashioned camera-shutter tone each time she took a photograph. “Imij is so amazing. Zahra, what username are you hiding under? I can’t find you. Ooh! Seven.”

  “I’m not hiding, I’m just not there. Seven what?”

  “She’s tagged seven people in the stands,” Babar said. “You don’t have to be such a Luddite just because tech is Maryam’s thing.”

  “I’ll have you know, Maryam is among the chorus of voices instructing me to stay off social media sites. Don’t you find this face-tagging thing a bit creepy?”

  “I never opted into it.” He whispered, “I don’t want Saba finding me in a crowded place.”

  Saba made an annoying Saba sound that wanted to draw attention. Babar and Zahra ignored her. She made the sound again. Babar tapped Zahra’s foot conspiratorially. They continued to ignore her, and she flounced off back inside.

  “God, it’s hot.” Zahra had been using the Test souvenir magazine as a fan and now opened it to its center page and placed it, spine up, on her head as a makeshift hat.

  Babar caught hold of the edges of the back and front cover of the magazine and curled them upward. “The traditional Dutch cap is overdue for a fashion revival,” he said, and she swatted his hand away, glad to be so indifferent to looking ridiculous. Maryam’s voice rose above everyone else’s, and Babar smiled fondly. “She’s unstoppable, isn’t she?”

  “Always has been.”

  “Yeah. I mean, other than you, we’re all profit-driven assholes in our professional lives, but I think most of us would draw the line at joining—what’s it called? Head Table? Top Table?”

  “High Table,” Zahra said, after a slight pause in which a rock attached to her heart plummeted, tugging hard.

  A truncated gasp from the entire ground as the batsman hit a ball into the air, but it fell well out of the reach of all fielders. It gave Zahra a moment to turn and look at Maryam, unchanged, the same Maryam as always.

  “How do you know about the High Table?” Zahra said.

  “Guy I knew at Wharton met her at one of their gatherings. Hadn’t spoken to him in about a decade, but he called to say could he have her number, she’s definitely someone he needs to know when he moves to London. Apparently she pulled Imij out of trouble, got some amazing business ambassador position, and fended off a pass from the Prime Minister, all in the space of about thirty seconds.” He leaned forward to watch the game more closely. It was palpable, the shift that said something was about to change; an equilibrium between batsmen and bowlers had been reached, and now someone would do something brilliant or foolish. This was one of the things cricket taught you—equilibrium was always a way station, never an end point.