AI The rain found her between Greek Street and the last delivery of the night, a thin, driven Soho rain that came sideways and found the gap at her collar. By the time Rory had handed eight portions of salt-and-pepper squid to a man in a shuttered gallery on Frith Street, the thermal bag was beaded dark, her jacket smelled of ginger and hot fat, and the green neon bird above the door across the road was hissing in the wet.
She only meant to wait it out. Five minutes under somebody else's roof.
The Raven's Nest was dim the way old bars are dim, the light pooled rather than thrown, the walls papered floor to ceiling with maps — overlapping, whole continents gone soft at the corners — and black-and-white photographs of men squinting into foreign suns. A radio murmured somewhere behind the bottles. Two drinkers at the window. A Tuesday.
She took the stool nearest the end, the one that faced the door, and set the bag on the seat beside her like a fellow passenger. She didn't examine why she'd chosen it. It had simply become the kind of thing she did, the way she noted exits now, the way she'd stopped wearing her hair up.
The barman was at the far end, polishing glasses against a towel. When he came down the bar toward her he came unevenly, the left leg offering itself at half its price, and she looked away from the limp out of courtesy and read the drips on the counter instead.
"What's the cheapest thing you've got?"
He didn't answer straight away. He set down the glass he was holding and looked at her properly, the way almost nobody in London had looked at her at all.
"Aurora," he said.
Nobody called her that. Nobody was left who would have. She raised her eyes and the years arrived all at once, without warning, the way they do: hazel gone grey at the edges, auburn gone grey through the middle, a beard kept short and honest, and the silver ring — always the silver ring — on the right hand.
"Uncle Si," she said, and heard that she was twelve again.
He came around the bar with his stiff stride and didn't hug her, which she was grateful for, and didn't make a sound about it either, which she was grateful for more. He turned a stool to face her.
"Sit. Let me look at you." He did, for a long moment, and she let him, which surprised her. "You look like Jennifer."
"Mum's greyer."
"Mums are permitted." He vanished into the back and returned with two mugs and a kettle's worth of steam. Tea, in a bar. "There's whisky if you want it."
"Tea's fine."
"It is," he agreed, and sat, and for a while they both held their mugs and let the rain do the talking against the glass.
"You're a long way from Cardiff," she said finally .
"Fifteen years. Give or take."
"You disappeared." It came out flatter than she meant it to.
"I know." He turned the ring once around his finger. "I got hurt. Then I got proud. The two of them together kept me away long after the leg stopped complaining." He said it to his tea, not to her.
"Dad waited up the first two Christmases. Kept the phone in the hall."
"I didn't know that."
"You'd have liked to, though."
"I would," he said, and didn't flinch from it, and she found that worse, somehow, and better.
Somewhere in the pause a man in a grey coat came in from the rain, nodded once. Silas tipped his chin, barely, and the man passed the end of the bar and through a seam in the shelving that Rory had taken for a wall of books. When she looked back, Silas was watching her look .
"Storage," he said mildly .
She decided, for once in her life, to let a thing be what it was called .
"And you," he said. "University. Brendan's great hope."
"Two years of law." She shrugged. "It didn't take."
"I'm sorry."
"I'm not." A lie, but an old one, worn smooth. "Eva got me work. Golden Empress, over on — you don't need to know where. Kitchen to door, door to kitchen. Mr. Cheung pays on Fridays and doesn't ask questions."
"Good man, then." He studied her over the rim of his mug. "You used to talk from the moment you woke up. You'd narrate breakfast. Full commentary, both sides."
"People grow up."
"That's not growing up," he said, mild as milk. "That's being taught."
The kettle of her heart didn't boil; it just went very quiet. He let it. He wiped a ring off the bar that didn't need wiping and she understood, in the way you understand a locked door by the shape of its keyhole, that he had seen everything the sleeves were doing and would never once say so.
She reached for the teapot to refill his cup, an old reflex from her mother's table, and her cuff rode up her wrist.
"The garden wall," he said quietly. "You were nine. It was my dare, and your father held it over me for a decade."
"You remembered that."
"I remember the whole afternoon. You didn't cry until the stitches, and then only because your mother cried first."
She laughed, and it cracked in the middle, and she covered it by drinking.
"Where did you go?" she asked. "After."
"Prague. Then a hospital in Roehampton. Then here." He gestured at the maps, at the whole papered night of them. "Places I've been."
"All of them?"
"Mostly. Some are just places I got to leave."
"You could have written."
"I could have." No excuse came after it. He sat with the absence of an excuse like a man who had practiced sitting with it. "It's a strange arithmetic. You let one bad year turn into a bad decade because the decade's less embarrassing to confess to."
"I did something like that," she said, to her tea.
Neither of them elaborated. The radio filled the space with a saxophone doing its best.
Then he smiled — she saw it coming a half-second too late, saw the old glint arrive in him like a lit window — and his hand flicked up, quick, toward her ear, the move he'd done a thousand times across her mother's kitchen table, coin from behind the ear, tada —
She was off the stool before she knew she'd moved. Tea slopped across the bar. Her heart was going like a fist on a door and she was standing in a fighting stance she'd never been taught on purpose, and the room had gone very still.
Silas closed his fist slowly . Opened it. Set the coin on the bar between them, face up, a fifty-pence piece with no business behind anybody's ear.
"Old habit," he said. "Mine. My fault."
He was handing her the words to wear. She took them. "You startled me."
"I did." He fetched a cloth and wiped up the tea without hurry, and when he'd finished he folded the cloth into a neat square and put his hands flat on the bar, where she could see them, and left them there.
"There's a flat above the bar," he said, as if continuing a sentence begun long ago . "Empty since spring. The boiler's sound, the roof doesn't leak, and the stairs are short enough that even I can manage them."
"I can't afford Soho."
"It's above a bar, Aurora. The rent's whatever you can manage. I'd rather have the child of a friend over my head than a stranger."
"You don't know me anymore."
"I know the house you came from," he said. "Blue door. Roses gone feral by August. Your mother's tomatoes and your father losing at chess and blaming the light." He turned the ring, once. "That's a start. That's more of a start than most people get."
The rain had thinned to nothing. She looked at the window, where the green bird burned on above the street, doubled and trembling in the last of the water, and she did not get up, and he did not point out that she did not get up.
He reached beneath the till and set down a deck of cards, soft-cornered, older than she was, and began to shuffle with a flourish that his knee had nothing to do with.
"You still deal from the bottom?" she asked.
"I never did."
"You did."
"I taught you never to get caught. There's a difference, and your father never appreciated it."
She laughed then, properly, the first laugh in months that hadn't been performed for somebody's benefit. She pushed her sleeves up to her elbows to take the deck — the crescent scar pale at her wrist, and whatever else was pale there, shown and unremarked upon — and cut the cards clean.
"Deal," she said.
He dealt. Somewhere behind the shelving a door closed softly , and outside the rain moved on down toward Charing Cross Road, and the green sign went on buzzing above the entrance, keeping its watch , saying nothing.
She had taken, out of long habit, the seat that faced the door. It was the first room in months she'd stopped checking it.