for her to stand upright or move her arms away from her sides. The one to which she was led down unlit steps treacherous with soil, and then narrow sloping passages so lightless that her eyes felt caked with earth, would press her head and shoulders low with its cold stone roof. Even before the cell shut with a dull thick slam that resounded into the underground distance, she would feel like a crippled child. For an endless moment she scarcely knew she was hearing a voice. 'Anyone there?' it said or finished by saying.
Charlotte glared around the office, which was almost deserted. 'I still am.'
'No,' Ellen said and seemed to wish she could leave it at that. 'I asked was there anyone with you in your dream.'
Why had Charlotte thought the room was only almost deserted? Nobody was visible in front of her. Everyone else had sufficient intelligence to leave while there was air to breathe, before the walls collapsed inwards as their age proved unequal to the weight of earth. Meanwhile Ellen's question had revived the sight of eyes no longer buried, blinking away earth to peer gleefully up at Charlotte. 'This isn't getting us anywhere,' she said more sharply than Ellen deserved. 'We'll have to cut it short. They're locking up.'
Having felt desperate enough to invent this as a reason, she was irrationally afraid that it might prove to be true – that she could somehow be imprisoned in the subterranean room all weekend. 'See what you can find out,' she said and struggled to believe that her next breath didn't taste of earth. 'The sooner we've got your synopsis the better, all right? And if you need to call me don't hesitate.'
She would never have expected to be so briskly professional with Ellen. Perhaps her tone was why Ellen didn't answer, instead giving way to a silence that felt not just deep but dark until Charlotte cut it off. She shut down the computer before leaning left to retrieve her bag. A dark shape, vague but eager, swelled out of the corner in response – her own shadow. She grabbed the canvas bag and shoved Ellen's chapters into it, followed by three sets of bound proofs. She was already on her feet, and didn't spare the restlessly shadowy area behind her desk another glance. All the movements that she was unable to avoid glimpsing under desks as she hurried out of the basement room had to be her shadows. No wonder they seemed to be imitating her as they kept pace.
She wasn't anxious to use the lift, even if she would have such space as it offered all to herself. She almost ran along the corridor narrowed by lockers to the stairs. Such was her haste to reach the street that the door was creeping shut on its inexorable metal arm before she was fully aware that the staircase was unlit. Someone must be working on the lights; she heard activity above her – it couldn't be below her – in the dark. Shouldn't the electrician be using a flashlight? Presumably the scraping, like nails on the concrete, showed that he was applying some tool to the problem. She thought of asking how long it would take to fix, and had opened her mouth when she realised that the clawlike sound was approaching out of the dark as the wedge of light around her dwindled to nothingness. Barely in time she blocked the door and dodged into the corridor. She would use a lift after all.
One was waiting behind its doors. It hadn't finished opening when she darted in and jabbed the button to send it upwards. As the doors faltered and set about meeting again, a Ram editor emerged from the Women's and sprinted for the lift. She'd shoved her handbag between the doors when a fellow editor called for her to wait. 'Sorry,' she said to Charlotte and withdrew.
'Sorry,' Charlotte responded, having automatically retreated into a corner, and lurched forwards. She'd said it without thinking, but to whom? She hadn't backed into anyone tall and thin, let alone taller than she was and considerably thinner. The dry jagged sound beneath the nonchalant hum of the lift was too faint to define; it certainly wasn't the clicking of teeth bared in a delighted grimace or already far too bare. Nevertheless she twisted around to see that she was utterly alone, unless someone had sneaked behind her as she moved. The sight of the lift was oppressive enough, the windowless grey cage little wider than her outstretched arms and so indefinitely lit that she couldn't tell how many shadows were sharing the space.
As soon as it lumbered to a halt she dragged the doors apart, bruising her fingers, and ran across the unguarded lobby. The crowd outside on New Oxford Street made her feel hemmed in, particularly at her back. If a smell of earth seemed to linger in her nostrils, it must be as imaginary as it had been in the first place. A bus to Bethnal Green and beyond was approaching, but before she could risk a dash across the road she saw that it was too full to stop. She wanted to be home, up on the roof. Hugging her stuffed bag as if it were an emblem of her ability to function, she struggled through the crowd to Tottenham Court Road.
The stairs to the Underground were so packed with commuters that she took a firmer grip on her bag, though the gesture helped the crowd to pin her arms against her sides. Whoever was immediately above her seemed anxious to travel, but did he really need to press against her back? She could imagine he was eager for his dinner – he felt famished to the bone. He was forcing her downwards step by helpless step, but nobody would notice, since she appeared to be acting just like them. As she reached the circular concourse at the foot of the stairs she opened her mouth to release some kind of noise and swung around. There was nobody in sight who resembled the person she'd sensed behind her. Everyone looked well-fed and entirely unaware of her, and she couldn't be sure that she'd turned to face a loitering smell of earth.
She was heading for the Central Line when she faltered at the ticket barrier. The relentless escalator would carry her down to a platform almost as overloaded as the train was bound to be. All at once she couldn't live with being borne into the subterranean dark amid a press of bodies and increasingly less air. Before she could step aside someone shoved her forwards – a businessman intent on finishing a mobile call. As she fought her way up to street level, against a descent of commuters so implacable it seemed as mindless as earth collapsing into a pit, she kept having to suppress the notion that a hand was about to seize her by the shoulder or the neck.
At last she stumbled out beneath the sky, which was too distant and too overcast to offer much relief from the pressure of the crowd, and battled along Oxford Street to the stop ahead of the one opposite the publishers. She was just in time to catch a bus, although she would have said it was full even before several passengers joined her in the aisle. As it made its ponderous halting journey to Bethnal Green, her view out of the windows was restricted to a parade of shops and bars supporting older architecture on their backs, a spectacle occasionally varied by a glimpse down a side street of a church or some other venerable building. The view made her feel all the more shut in, as though the windows were no better than antique panoramas exhibiting an artificial progress. Once she was off the bus she would breathe more freely. Had somebody behind her been gardening? That might also explain why they were so thin.
As soon as the bus reached Bethnal Green Road she left it, three stops short of hers. It sailed away before she could identify the passenger who'd stood so close. The pavements were crowded with homecomers, and even though the traders were packing up their stalls of clothes and discs and jewellery and groceries, the route still felt constricted. Charlotte took a side street that bordered a park, which accommodated several haphazard games of football and more supine forms of recreation. As she crossed the park she hesitated only once, distracted by the twitching of an elongated shadow beside her. It belonged to a young tree that must have shifted in a breeze she hadn't noticed. The tree was far too slim for anyone to have sidled from behind it or to be using it for cover.
An alley between gentrified four-storey tenements led from a gate in the railings to the pavement opposite her flat. She unlocked the door at the top of the steps and tramped up the stone stairs. Even the passage that enclosed them as they climbed from balcony to balcony felt unappealingly narrow just now. Without pausing to dump her bag in her second-floor flat she continued up to the roof.
She dropped the bag on the faded sunlounger flanked by potted plants – Susie's from the top floor – and leaned on the wall beside the communal barbecue shrouded in plastic. A train whined along the viaduct parallel to Whitechapel Road, beyond which an airliner as bright as a sunlit knife was sinking above the Thames towards Heathrow. Charlotte raised her face to the tattered sky and had taken several increasingly deep breaths when her mobile rang.
She recognised the number, though she had only ever used it to say that her train to Vivaldi was delayed. She thought it best to put on a voice as professional as it was amiable. 'Glen?' she said with a hint of surprise.
'Sure. Sorry if I'm calling when it's not appropriate, but I don't know if you need to hear the news.'
Whatever she might have expected of him, it wasn't this, especially his wariness that sounded close to nervous. 'I don't either,' she said.
'I guess that means you haven't. OK. Sorry.' His pause might have been meant to express further sympathy before he added 'I'm afraid it's about your cousin.'
'Oh, Glen, come on. Not more afterthoughts about her book,' Charlotte blurted, and then his silence gave her time to hold her suddenly tense breath.
