was the configuration of the café itself that was important. This was intended to be a brief encounter. Couples who met at a place where standing was the norm did not intend to linger. Still, smart thinking on Flavia’s behalf, he had to concede; in her shoes he would have done the same.
He had thought carefully about his clothes. The signet ring was off and a thin silver bracelet was on. Under an old black leather jacket he wore a green trainer top with a hood that hung over the jacket collar like an empty pouch, and under that a white T-shirt with the hem of the neckband unpicked to create an inch-long frayed slit. He had on well-washed black jeans that had turned an uneven grey and sensible, unpolished black shoes with a heavy rubber sole. His hair was deliberately mussed and he had deliberately not shaved. The ambiguities and counter-signals were nicely balanced, he calculated – style, and the deliberate avoidance of style; cost present but impossible to evaluate – he could have been anyone – could work in a bookshop or a bar, could be a video-tape editor, an off-duty postman, a pub-theatre actor, the floor manager of a recording studio. Perfectly democratic, he thought, nothing that would surprise Flavia, no unwitting clues.
At 6.35 the doubts began to crowd in. Telling himself that there was probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for her late arrival, he ordered another coffee and read his way diligently, page by page, through an abandoned Standard. At 7 o’clock he borrowed a pen from behind the bar and began to do the crossword puzzle.
‘Lorimer Black?’
She was standing there in front of him, right there, wearing a big quilted jacket and with a loosely woven oatmeal scarf wound round and round her neck. Her hair was different, darker than the last time, almost aubergine, the darkest ox-blood. She was carrying what looked like a typewritten script. He slid off his stool, a stupid smile breaking on his face.
‘You waited,’ she said, unapologetically. ‘You were serious, then.’
‘Yes. What can I get you?’
He fetched them both a cappuccino and stood by her stool as she searched her pockets and failed to find any cigarettes. His heart was punching violently in its socket behind his ribs and he said nothing, content to be beside her and have this opportunity for close-quarter observation.
‘Have you got a cigarette?’ she asked. White, even teeth. What has she done to her hair?
‘I don’t smoke.’ A hint of an underbite gave a pugnacious edge to her beauty, a slight jut to the jaw. He offered to buy her some cigarettes but she declined.
‘It won’t kill me.’ Strong eyebrows, unplucked, dense. Those brown eyes.
‘So,’ she said, setting down her coffee cup. ‘Mr Lorimer Black.’
He asked her, for politeness’s sake, and simply to start conversing, what she had been doing and she said she had just come from a read-through of a friend’s play.
‘Which is a load of crap, really. He has no talent at all.’
Finally she removed her jacket and scarf and finally he was able to look, guardedly this time, at her breasts. From the pleasing convexities and concavities of her vermilion polo-neck he calculated they were of perfectly average size but flattish, rather than protruding, more grapefruit-halves than anything particularly conic. He was glad to have this atavistic, but essential, male curiosity satisfied and returned his full attention to the animated and luminous beauty of her face, still not quite able to believe his astonishing good fortune, as she continued to run down and generally demolish the aspirations and pretensions of her playwright friend’s efforts.
‘What’s this all about, Lorimer Black?’ she said suddenly, more sharply. ‘What exactly is going on here?’
‘I saw you one day in a taxi and I thought you looked beautiful,’ he told her, candidly. ‘Then a few days later I saw you in that commercial and thought, “This is Fate” —’
‘Fate,’ she said with an ironic laugh.
‘And when you came into the Alcazar that lunchtime I knew I had to do something about it. I had to meet you.’
‘You’re saying you fancy me, are you, Lorimer Black?’
Why did she keep repeating his full name, as if it amused her in some way?
‘I suppose I am,’ he confessed. ‘But thank you, anyway, for coming.’
‘I’m a married woman, me,’ she said, ‘and I’ve got to bum a ciggie off someone.’
The other five people currently drinking coffee in the Café Greco were all smoking, so she was spoilt for choice.