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  With his chocolates, M. Loman created and sold fantasies—even to himself. He found a little fantasy was necessary to get through each day because, up until the age of fifteen, when he reached this country after several failed attempts and was finally able to claim political asylum, he had had a very difficult life.

  Even now, granted leave to remain in the UK and with a long apprenticeship at his craft, followed by longer years as a successful businessman, life was not easy. M. Loman read the English newspapers and worried. The articles complained of illegal immigrants and overcrowding. M. Loman had the sense of something closing in. The tax on luxury goods had increased, making his chocolates slightly less attractive to customers than they had been the previous year. There were peaks in sales. Valentine’s, of course, was a good time for purveyors of chocolates. He wished the world were more romantic. French is one of several languages he speaks. The English, so proud of their fair-mindedness, so self-deprecating about their plodding kindness, were in fact very quick to judge. And mean with money. Why not splash out on treats? All they had going for them was their National Health Service, and they were quietly dismantling that. He had suffered horribly in his past. The things he had seen…Mostly he wanted to forget, but he couldn’t forget. Talking helped. Helping others helped. And he had treatment for the injuries to his body from caring professionals. M. Loman paid his taxes and national insurance like everyone else, and was a regular visitor to the outpatient clinic near his home.

  The business he ran involved catering to pampered, rich people who had no idea what it was like to try to balance the books every day. He wished he could say that none of them had any idea what he himself had endured, so far away, so long ago. But sometimes he saw someone, an exile from a corrupt regime, or even a current participant in it, and there was something in their eyes—not cruelty so much as knowing. They knew there was evil in the world because they had witnessed it or participated in it. They came into the shop and bought bonbons for pretty daughters, or they got out their credit card to pay for a chocolate unicorn ordered by a mistress for an extravagant party, and they looked at Cyril Loman and he looked at them, and they both knew. They were in a chocolate shop in an ornate historical covered arcade in Piccadilly. Green Park was in front of them, Hyde Park was just over there. Buckingham Palace was a short walk away in one direction, Fortnum & Mason in the other. Mayfair was behind them. The law was all around them. Fresh air and calm green spaces, shopkeeping, the British legal system—all these things were prized both by the British public and Cyril Loman. It (as well as his admiration for the NHS) was what had persuaded him to make his home here—at great expense; his family had spent everything on his passage here, and there was no safety net. But, in the end, it might not be enough to protect him. Those bullies with the knowing eyes knew it. They looked at him as they bought their bonbons for their pretty daughters and sometimes—choosing at random a half-pound box of chocolate-covered bitter orange sticks, or chocolate-covered maraschino cherries—they said, “Give me one of those, as well.” And M. Loman smiled and added it to the order, knowing they didn’t intend to pay for it. They stood there, in their expensive suits that had been tailored to fit their big, greedy bodies, and they took a pound of chocolates without paying for them, because it was all M. Loman had to give, and because they could. Were they suggesting, by doing it, that they suspected M. Loman had not got here strictly legally? That, though he dutifully paid his taxes and his national insurance on behalf of Cyril Loman, they suspected Cyril Loman might be surprised to know it, having died prematurely around twenty years ago. M. Loman was a man whose shop stood, metaphorically speaking, on quicksand. He was not surprised when he felt his feet sink half an inch or so into the cold mud below him, and he knew it was best not to struggle or he would just go deeper in. But if it came to it, he would throw a rope around something or someone to pull himself out, and if they should fall in beside him, he couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t step on their shoulders to get himself out. Because wherever M. Loman came from—was it the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Was it Haiti? Was it Rwanda?—he had no intention of going back.

  The doorbell jangled, and M. Loman put the newspaper down and leaped lightly to his feet. The customer was one he recognized and was cautiously fond of. A slightly eccentric, elfin woman in a blue angora beret who stretched out both hands to him (rather awkward—a handshake was more businesslike, the two-hand grasp implied that one of them had just won a BAFTA, and that wasn’t ever going to happen).

  “Monsieur Loman,” she said, in her smoky Marianne Faithfull voice, “I have the most marvelous sponsorship opportunity for you. Are you busy now? Can we talk about it?”

  M. Loman knew what this meant. This lovely lady, who lived in material comfort in her tidy little million-pound townhouse in Highgate, was not going to stiff him for a box of handmade chocolates. No indeed. She was going to stiff him for forty boxes. And he was going to pretend to be happy about it. Business was business. Something might come of it.

  “Is it time for the conference already, Mizz Blakely?” he inquired. “How the days go by so fast.” He took her two hands in his, bowed, and kissed them. He was the perfect French gentleman. The creator of fantasies.

  *

  Zena was lying in the bath in her flat in Muswell Hill in North London. Not lying in it: she was luxuriating in it. Her fingers, with their purple-painted nails, hung loosely over each side of the enamel rim at the top of the bathtub, ensuring the skin stayed wrinkle-free. Her hands and her mind were perhaps the two most important parts of Zena, because they helped her to earn her living. She needed her fingers for typing, and she protected them from potentially damaging household chores, like cleaning and cooking. She didn’t like to open so much as a can of tomatoes for fear of slicing her fingers and slowing her progress at the keyboards. Paper cuts were an unavoidable injury in her line of work, but she tried to avoid all other possible injuries to her hands, so far as she could. Her mind was to be treasured more than any physical part of her. She visualized it as a beautiful dove that nestled most of the time in a jeweled cathedral (the high domed ceiling of the cathedral was created by the bones of her skull; the jewels that decorated it were her brown tourmaline eyes and her pretty white teeth), but some days she sent the dove flying off beyond the physical limits of its existence by expanding her consciousness, then brought it home again bearing some magical gift for her in its beak. Zena was a person who was unembarrassed about thinking of herself as the center of the world, and being showered with gifts.

  This morning the dove was still perched in its cathedral, its soft breast fluttering as it dreamed the stories that fed her imagination, while Zena’s body swam safely in the waters of the warm, silky, scented artificial lake she had created within the porcelain shores of her bathtub in North London.

  The bathwater covered most of Zena’s body and all of her modesty. There were just the two dark brown islands of her knees above the milky sea that she lay in, and of course her neck, face and head, her hair hidden away beneath a puffy, purple bath hat.

  Zena hummed. Why not? She was happy. It was midmorning and she was in the bath. It was part of her job to lie here and prepare herself to write her sensual stories. She was an indolent person, but when she thought of her preparations for her writing day, she compared herself to an athlete—in those few moments before a sprinting race when the fingertips touch the ground, when mind and body are in tune, and then—whoosh!—all the power of the body is unleashed. In her case, as she lay here, fingertips touched to the enamel of her bathtub, water cooling, she was preparing herself for the moments afterwards when her mind would be unleashed.

  Zena liked to rehearse the events of the day in her mind before she carried them out. It was an exercise in positive thinking, but it also helped to reinforce her sense of herself as some kind of North London goddess: she imagined something, and then it came to pass. And, a little like the gods and goddesses of ancient mythology, if something didn’t c
ome to pass exactly as she had imagined it, she could sometimes be a little cranky, to say the least.

  This morning, she imagined receiving a call on her mobile phone. And, lo, the phone started to ring. Of course, this was because Zena had booked a call with a local journalist. But in imagining it, she was prepared for it.

  The voice on the line said, “Hiya! Zena? It’s Trevor here. This a good time to talk?”

  And Zena said, “Yes, baby. Ask me anything. Zena’s ready for it!”

  “Tell me about your day. What’s in store for you?”

  “Being a spiritual person, I usually spend an hour chanting in the morning.”

  “Football?” said Trevor, a little surprised. He wasn’t a sports fan himself. But the rivalry between London teams was notorious: Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur in North London, Chelsea and Fulham in the west, West Ham in the east, Millwall in the southeast. He wouldn’t have pegged Zena for a footie fan, but if she was, presumably she favored Arsenal or Tottenham. He just couldn’t imagine her chanting songs popular on the football terraces for an hour every morning, unless perhaps she did it to train her voice.

  “It’s part of my Buddhist practice, Trevor. Nuthink to do with football, you lemon. I chant to align the spiritual and the physical dimensions of my world.”

  “Oh, I see!” Trevor sounded relieved.

  “I’m interested in nature. See, I have a keen sensibility for the influence of taste, touch, smell, sound and sight on my well-being. I put fresh flowers on the windowsills. I burn incense on the altar in my house. I’m drawn to certain colors, like gold and purple—empress colors. Knowing how much influence even the most fragile elements of the universe can have on me, I try to influence the universe—not just with words. There’s more subtle ways. There’s the chanting…”

  “And the altar? You said you have an altar?”

  Zena laughed. “You think I’m gonna tell you I practice black magic, yeah? Only a little Zena magic, bro. The lady’s black but the magic isn’t.”

  Trevor laughed, too. He was also black, so he didn’t mind Zena kidding about the color of her skin—he knew she wasn’t doing it to see if it made him uncomfortable, the way she might with a white journalist. Just so long as she kept off the subject of football, he could get through the interview without any awkwardness. He really didn’t know anything at all about football.

  “What do you worship on your altar?” he asked. “Do you use it for worship?”

  “Say there’s some element of your life, yeah, that needs acknowledgment or control? That’s what it’s for. So if there’s something that I want to celebrate or influence, I’ll place it on the altar. I might put one of my books there, and be thankful that it’s been published, and hope it’ll do well with sales. Or I might put a little doll there that represents a person who’s important to me. My grandma, say, when she was sick for a while.”

  “Oh yeah!” said Trevor. “Yeah, I can see why you’d do that.” He almost sounded convinced. Like many nicely brought-up young men (and some of the bad boys too), Trevor loved his grandma.

  “See what I’m saying! He’s listening to Zena now,” said Zena. She was all for speaking in the third person when the drama or emotion of a situation demanded it. “Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be all about celebration, Trevor. See, right now, I’m trying to give up smoking cigarettes. So I put a cigarette butt in there, on my altar, and I ring the little silver bell I keep to the side, and then I crush the cigarette butt with my fingers; I peel off the paper and shred it; I mash up the nasty, sticky, brown filter. Symbolically, I’m crushing a very nasty habit. Yeah? And that prepares Zena to beat it in real life. So that’s how I use my altar. Plus, when I light it, the incense smells nice.”

  Trevor laughed. She imagined him scribbling away, impressed, though he might actually just be recording this. Did he realize she was in the bath? It would only add to her allure, like the earthly goddess Cleopatra before her.

  “I grew up a sassy North London girl, Trevor, with my share of setbacks. I’m not afraid to strike out at someone or something I believe is holding me back. Sure, Zena’s a bold, beautiful, spiritual woman who has risen up in life, and she likes to help others rise up. I’m a mentor to wayward children, disaffected youth, disenfranchised adults and other writers.”

  “Me too, I’m a mentor to some kids in a local school. What is it about being black that means we’ve all got to be a beacon for our local community? You ever wish you could be frivolous, Zena, instead of being a saint?”

  “You don’t have to be a saint, brother. Someone wants to make an enemy of me? They better watch out. I can be a saint, but I can be vindictive, too.”

  “I bet you can,” said Trevor. “Someone would have to be an idiot to make an enemy of you.”

  “You’re right. Crush or be crushed, yeah? Ain’t no one ever wants to know what it’s like to be crushed by Zena.”

  “Unless in the most passionate, romantic sense,” said Trevor, dutifully, offering Zena an opportunity to chat about her work (the real purpose of the call) and her new novel, a sensual romance called Venus in Velvet. Zena explained that she would be discussing the book during her appearance at the upcoming Romance Writers of Great Britain conference. She plugged a few other events—a book signing at a shop in Kensington, a reading at a spoken word event in Shoreditch—and made sure that Trevor was clear about where his readers could buy her books, both in store and online, and then they ended the call.

  Zena stepped, finally, out of the bath, with the grandiosity of a rock star emerging from an onstage water feature to rapturous applause. She planted one foot onto the bath mat, then the other, her ten purple-painted toenails making a V-shape like migratory birds. She pulled off her purple shower cap and shook loose her plaited hair so that it tumbled almost to her shoulders. She patted the moisture off her skin with a towel, and then made a fair attempt to put a little back in by rubbing coconut body salve over herself. She hummed again. Almost everything she did was self-congratulatory, but then there was a lot that she had to be happy about, considering her past and what she had overcome. She was inspirational—many people had told her so: at the schools where she went to talk to excluded children, and the institutions where she went to talk to adults with difficult lives. She thought of herself as having a calming influence. But she was a big woman, and she could be physically intimidating. Her physical presence was one of the reasons she was listened to with respect by wayward children. They respected her powerful physique and the thrilling tales of all the awful things she had got up to at their age; they were slightly baffled when she started talking about doves and jewels and cathedrals.

  Zena got dressed. Breakfast would be next—toasted crumpets with butter and honey on them, and a pot of sweetened mint tea. She used to finish breakfast by rolling herself a cigarette, lighting it and inhaling deeply on its calming smoke. But now she was a nonsmoker. Instead she would take deep, calming breaths…

  She put two crumpets in the toaster and set the timer. When they popped up with a promising ping, hot and crunchy, she slathered them with butter so that it would melt and dribble into the random, tiny holes on the surface of each. Then she took the lid off the jar of honey, dipped her knife in and scraped around. There was hardly any honey left in the jar—not enough to sustain a bee, let alone a big, busy black woman with cigarette cravings. Zena lived alone, there was no one to blame for having used the honey without buying a new jar to replace it, but she didn’t feel she herself was at fault. She blamed the universe. She took the jar and flung it at the wall, where it shattered, leaving a sticky smear, and then fell tinkling onto the tiles of her kitchen floor. Her heart pounded and her breath came quickly. Being calm, being sensual, was hard work sometimes. The little dove in her head fluttered and pecked, anxiously. On days like this she wished she had a gun: she’d shoot the stupid thing and bake it in a pie.

  Zena took a moment to calm herself and review how the day had gone so far (good and then not so good) a
nd how it might go after this, and how it might go in the days to come. She was looking forward to getting to the conference, catching up with Morgana and the rest of the guys, room service, lots of pampering in the spa. Maybe what she needed was contact with humankind—with womankind. She had kept herself shut away for too long in her flat in North London. She hadn’t realized it at first, but the shattering of that honey jar symbolized her shattered ego. The universe was trying to tell her that she suffered too much for her art.

  For now, she could get herself back on track by chanting, and lighting the incense at her altar. When she’d agreed to answer questions from that journalist, she hadn’t expected so much interest in her altar! More people should have them: hers was a very useful addition to her life. So useful, in fact, that she also had a small, portable version that she could take with her anywhere, with a tiny silver bell, an incense holder, and a place to put a miniature representative of whatever she sought to influence…or crush. She would be taking it with her to the conference in Bloomsbury. There was no telling when she might need powerful magic like that.

  Chapter Two

  THE CORAM HOTEL

  The day was drearily damp and gray when Emily arrived at the Coram Hotel in Bloomsbury. Her short, dark hair was neatly combed; her shoes were new but comfortable to stand in. She was wearing her best coat, and she was carrying a small case she had packed with the requisite amount of underwear, some smart clothes for the daytime and a flattering dress for dinner. The hotel was an enormous Gothic structure fashioned from salmon-colored bricks, the sky above it as gray as a slab of panfried tuna. From the street, it was impossible to tell what it would be like inside; it might be musty and mildewy, more hostel than hotel. But the salute from the elegant doorman, who touched his right hand to the brim of his gray bowler hat as Emily arrived, hinted at lavish interiors and first-class service beyond the heavy door he held open for her. Emily felt her shoulders relax as she went through into the dark calm of the hotel, the cool air spicy with the perfume of long-stemmed lilies. This weekend was going to be as relaxing as a spa break—a much-needed antidote to the stress of working in the cutthroat environment of London’s financial district.