Chapter 12: The Journal, First Reading

Vera heard her coming.

Not the footsteps — those were ordinary enough, a woman's measured tread on the stair, unhurried, not performing caution — but the particular quality of the air displacement that preceded her, the way the atmospheric pressure in the hallway shifted three seconds before the knock. Centuries of this. You learned to read the world at a remove, the way sailors read weather in the colour of the sky the evening before, the way surgeons learned to smell infection before it was visible to anyone else in the room.

She had been sitting in the kitchen with both hands around a cup of tea she had not drunk. Cold now. She had made it because making tea was the kind of thing a person did in the evening in a flat in London and she was, currently, a person in a flat in London, and the habits of performed normalcy had long since calcified into something that was either second nature or the only nature she had left. She was not certain there was still a meaningful distinction.