Chapter 3: Heads of Terms

"No," Harriet said.

Gil wrote it down. He wrote it in capitals, NO, with a pencil he had apparently been using since 1993, and underlined it once, and looked at it.

"Good," he said. "Because if there were, I'd have to take you off Ashworth in the morning, and Daniel would take the business with him, and I'm too old to find another client who pays on time."

He stood. At the door he paused, with his hand on the frame, and for a moment looked less like the senior partner of a law firm and more like a tired man who had once, a long time ago, been fond of somebody he shouldn't have been.

"Mind your hand," he said, and went.

Harriet sat for a long time after the corridor lights clicked off on their timer.

It was true. She had checked it the way she would check a trial bundle, page by page, with nothing skipped: every chambers party, every training course, every conference in every overheated hotel in Birmingham. She did not know Noor Saleh. She had never known her. The answer was no, and the answer was correct, and she had given it to a man who trusted her, in her own office, under her own name.

So there was no reason for it to sit in her chest like a swallowed stone.

· · ·

For nine days, Ms Saleh was flawless.

Her letters arrived on time. They were courteous and exact and contained no jokes of any kind. Dear Ms Lane, we acknowledge receipt of your client's amended Form E. Dear Ms Lane, we confirm our attendance at your offices on Friday. Dear Ms Lane, please find enclosed. There was nothing in them that Rosalind Webb could not have read aloud at a partners' dinner.

Harriet hated them.

She answered each one within the hour, in the same register. Dear Ms Saleh. She read Noor's letters twice, out of habit, and on the second reading looked for the person who had written them and couldn't find her anywhere. Once, she caught herself running her thumb along the base of her right palm, where the cut had closed into a thin pink line, while she read a paragraph about pension sharing. She stopped. She put her hand flat on the desk. She did not do it again for nearly a whole afternoon.

The note was in her top drawer. She had not decided to keep it. She had simply not thrown it away, which over nine days had become a different thing. It lay folded in the lid of the box her pen had come in, and twice, looking for a staple remover, she had seen the corner of it and closed the drawer again faster than a staple remover warranted.

The FDR was listed for Thursday the third of December. The round-table at Pellow Grange was the Friday before. Six days, if it failed, to prepare for a judge to tell both clients, in a small room on High Holborn, what a judge would probably do to them.

It did not fail.

It took eleven hours. The meeting room on the first floor at Bedford Row was called the Library, though nobody had read anything in it since the war; it had a marble fireplace that had not been lit in living memory and three portraits of dead Pellows looking down with expressions of mild disappointment. The clients sat in separate rooms. Harriet and Noor walked between them along the landing, carrying figures back and forth like waiters, and met in the Library to compare, and went out again.

At a quarter to two they passed each other on the landing, Harriet coming up from Daniel with a figure, Noor going down to Claudia with another. The landing was narrow. Noor stood back against the banister to let her pass, holding her papers to her chest, and Harriet saw that her lips were pale and that there was a faint tremor in the hand holding the pages.

"Have you eaten?"

Noor looked startled, as though the question had come from one of the portraits. "I had a coffee."

"When?"

"Seven-ish."

Harriet said nothing. She went on up the stairs and into the Library and put Daniel's figure on the table, and then she went into the outer office and spoke to Maureen, who had been her secretary for six years and did not ask questions.

When Noor came back up twenty minutes later, there was a plate in front of her chair. Two sandwiches, cut into triangles, on the firm's second-best china, with a paper napkin folded beside them.

Noor stopped in the doorway and looked at it.

"Is this a bribe, Ms Lane?"

"It's cheese and pickle."

"Because I'm fairly sure there's a rule."

"There is," Harriet said, without looking up from her draft. "It's my meeting room. I make the rules in it."

There was a pause. Then the scrape of a chair. Harriet kept her eyes on paragraph six and her pen moving, and listened, despite herself, to the small sounds of someone across the table eating a sandwich very slowly, as if it were something that might not be offered twice.

When she did look up, Noor was watching her. Noor didn't say thank you. She wiped her fingers on the napkin, folded it, and put it under the edge of the plate, and her face was doing something complicated and private that Harriet, for once, made no attempt to read. Then she picked up Claudia's figure and went back down the stairs.

By four o'clock the money was nearly there. By six, it was there. Daniel kept the house on the Common. Claudia took a lump sum of three million eight hundred and fifty thousand pounds, with the value of Fennick Cottage folded into it in a single dry paragraph that Harriet drafted and Noor did not change. Iris would finish the school year at the school with the green blazers. Cafcass would report on Lisbon. Nobody would shout.

At twenty past eight, the clients signed heads of terms in separate rooms. Then Harriet sent Daniel down the front stairs and Noor took Claudia down the back ones, the way you'd clear a building of two people who must not, at any cost, meet in the hall.

· · ·

By nine o'clock it was only the two of them, and the dead Pellows, and the rain.

Noor sat at the long table with her shoes off under it, typing up a clean copy of the heads so both sides could initial every page before they went home. Her eyes ached. Her pad had run out an hour ago, and she had written the final lump sum on the inside of her left wrist in biro without thinking about it, the way she'd done since she was a student. 3.85m. It had already begun to smudge.

Across the table, Harriet was reading the draft. Her jacket was off, her sleeves turned back twice, and she had taken her earrings out at some point in the afternoon and lined them up by her water glass. She looked, Noor thought, like a woman who had been carrying something heavy all day without once putting it down.

Say it, Noor told herself. You've had nine days. Say it now, before the taxi comes.

"I saw him," she said.

Harriet looked up.

"Daniel. Outside Bruno's. In his car, on the yellow line, watching the window." Noor kept her hands on the keyboard. "When we took the order back across. I saw him, and I didn't tell you, and somebody asked you about me afterwards. Didn't they?"

Harriet put the page down.

"Yes."

"I'm sorry, Harriet."

It was the first time she had said the name aloud. It came out quieter than she meant, and she felt it land somewhere in the room and stay.

Harriet did not answer straight away. She turned one of her earrings over on the table, a small gold hoop, with one finger.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Because I'd have had to say he saw you let me hold your hand. Because you'd have said I was putting on a plaster. Because you'd have been right.

"I didn't know how to say it without making it sound like something it wasn't."

"Mm." Harriet looked at the earring. "My senior partner asked me whether there was anything between us. Past or present. He wrote down my answer." She raised her eyes. "I said no. If I was wrong about the past, Ms Saleh, I need to know. I've put my name to it."

Ms Saleh. Still. Even now, at nine at night, with her earrings out and lined up like exhibits. After the sandwiches. Noor almost laughed. It wasn't funny.

What do you want her to say? she asked herself. That she remembers? She doesn't. You've watched her not remember you for a month. Do you want to make her feel bad about it? Do you want to stand in front of her with a coin you've been carrying for eleven years and watch her try to work out what it's for?

"You weren't wrong," she said. "Nothing happened. You were kind to a stranger for an hour and forty minutes on a Tuesday night, and then you went home. That's all. That isn't a conflict. It isn't anything."

"Where?"

"No."

"N—"

It was nearly her name. It stopped at the first letter, as though Harriet had heard herself starting it and shut a door. Noor watched her do it. Watched her jaw set, and her hand go flat on the table.

"If I tell you," Noor said carefully, "it becomes a fact about me. Something I kept. I've kept it for eleven years." She looked down at her wrist, at the smudged blue figure. "I'd rather it was a fact about you."

Her phone buzzed on the table. Your driver is 6 minutes away.

· · ·

Harriet saw her out.

It was what one did. You did not let opposing counsel find her own way down two flights of a Georgian staircase in the dark, past the coat rack and the dead umbrella stand and the door to the post room that stuck. Harriet went first, putting on lights. Noor came behind her with her shoes back on and her coat over her arm, and neither of them spoke, and Harriet was aware of every step Noor took on the stair above her as if it were being counted.

Bedford Row was empty. It had stopped raining properly and started doing the other thing, the fine, hanging, November thing, so that the air under the street lamps looked full of dust. The plane trees dripped. Somewhere towards Theobalds Road a bus went by, lit up and empty as an aquarium.

They stood under the portico. There was not much room under it.

"Six minutes," Noor said, looking at her phone. "Four now."

"I'll wait with you."

"You don't have to."

"I know."

Noor put the phone away. Then, without asking, she reached out and took Harriet's right hand, and turned it palm upward in the lamplight, and looked at the place where the plaster had been.

"Healed," she said.

Her thumb moved along the thin pink line, once, from one end to the other. Harriet felt it in the backs of her knees.

She should have taken her hand back. She had done it before, in Bruno's, deliberately and well. Instead she turned her own hand inside Noor's, so that she was the one holding, with Noor's wrist lying across her fingers, and lifted it a little towards the light.

3.85m, in blue biro, half gone.

And something moved.

Not a memory, not yet. The shape of one. A radiator ticking under a high window. The smell of instant coffee and wet coats and floor polish. A folding table with a wobble in one leg that she had fixed with a beer mat. A girl in a coat too big for her, with her hair coming down on one side, saying Sorry, sorry, I haven't got anything to write on, and Harriet, twenty-four and exhausted and out of paper, saying Here, then, and watching her write a number on the inside of her own wrist—

Harriet looked up.

Noor was very close. Closer than the portico required. Her eyes were dark and wide and absolutely steady, and they went, for one moment, to Harriet's mouth, and came back, and did not apologise for it. Harriet could feel the warmth coming off her through the damp. She could feel her own pulse in her fingertips, where they lay against Noor's.

Neither of them moved away.

Harriet had spent eleven years not doing things. She was very good at it. She stood perfectly still under the portico of her own firm with opposing counsel's wrist in her hand and felt, for the first time in a long time, that standing still and stepping forward had become the same thing.

"Noor," she said.

Noor's breath caught. Harriet heard it.

"Was it the church hall. On Tuesdays, in Whitechapel. You wrote my number on your—"

The taxi at the kerb leaned on its horn.