Evensong

They walked along the seafront. The mast-rigging of the small boats drawn up on the beach thrummed in the wind. They walked past the arches Anwar had walked past yesterday, and past some arcades with games. There was one where things popped up and you had to knock them down with a rubber mallet, only for others to pop up, also to be knocked down. She watched it for a while.

“Remind you of fundamentalists?”

“Yes,” she hissed, “and they’re filth! Scum! I hate their beliefs more than I love mine.”

“I only meant,” he said mildly, “how they pop up somewhere else if you...”

“Theocrats, creationists, racists, homophobes, all of them! The death of dialogue. ‘If you don’t agree with me, you’re better off dead.’ Knock them down in one place, they pop up somewhere else.”

“I don’t like their beliefs either, though it may not matter to you. But they’re not all filth. Or scum.” The words had a strange echo for him, of the greeting he would sometimes exchange with Levin. “Some of them just want certainty.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Don’t hate them so much. It makes you ugly.”

“If I didn’t hate them so much, I wouldn’t be who I am! And what business is it of yours if something makes me ugly?”

“You’re right, it isn’t. But if you hated them less and understood them more, maybe even more people would support you. Including some of them.”

She looked up at him sharply. “I didn’t expect that. I thought you were just a Consultant.”

They climbed a stairway up the embankment to road level, just before the old Palace Pier. They walked across Marine Parade and into East Street, which led upwards, away from these a front. It was busy and crowded, a mix of shops and restaurants, mostly upmarket. There was the usual doppler effect of approaching and receding conversations, and the usual mix of smells: things being cooked, substances being smoked. Still nobody appeared to give them a second glance.

He spotted Gaetano’s people. He liked how they worked: discreetly, keeping a distance, constantly changing their patterns. She didn’t seem to see them, but he knew she’d assume they were there somewhere.

Ahead they could now see the original Royal Pavilion in Pavilion Gardens with the Indian Gate. The New Anglicans, careful as always, had made sure the original Royal Pavilion and the New West Pier were never in direct sight of each other.

Leading off East Street on the left was the Lanes district, with small esoteric shops selling bespoke interiors, designer clothes, antiques and curios and books. It was an area of narrow alleyways, sometimes called twittens and catcreeps. The walls were patchworks of old brick, flint, cobblestone, and stucco. The Lanes had been the original fishing village of Brighthelmstone.

Anwar took them to Ramsden’s Bookshop, in Meeting House Lane. The proprietor nodded, apparently casually, but somehow giving the impression that he remembered Anwar from his last visit, two years ago. It was a small musty shop, but carried a good stock of Shakespeares, including the one Anwar had reserved online for collection: a replica of the 1609 Chalmers-Bridgewater edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. So much, these days, was a replica, but this was a very good one.It wasn’t cheap. Even replicas could be valuable in their own right.

They continued along Meeting House Lane.

“There,” she said. “Frobisher’s Tea Rooms. Come on, I’m buying.”

Where Ramsden’s had been genuinely old and musty, Frobisher’s was a modern copy of age and mustiness. None of the darkwood wall panelling or furniture had ever been part of, or even near, a real tree.

It was more utilitarian than its outside appearance suggested, or than Anwar guessed she was used to. It was crowded, and she joined the queue at the counter.

“Self-service for the self-serving,” she muttered. She got a pot of English breakfast tea for both of them, and a selection of cakes for herself.

“Fifty-five euros forty.” The cashier pronounced it with a rising note of accomplishment on forty, as if it was the culmination of a trick he’d done. She’d forgotten she was buying, and took the tray to a table. Anwar paid and joined her.

“So you got your book.”

“Yes, it’s a nice edition.”

“A replica?”

“Partly. It reproduces the typesetting and font of the original, but puts each sonnet on a separate page.”

“May I look?”

“Of course.” He slid the book across the table to her.

“Sonnet 116 is my favourite. Especially the first four lines.” He watched her turn to it, and said the words to himself as he watched her reading them.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

“Each phrase,” she said, “has at least three or four possible meanings. Is that what he intended?”

“I think so.”

“Didn’t he write the sonnets to a mysterious Dark Lady?”