Charlie Johnson in the Flames. Michael Ignatieff

the fucking point, the fucking point was – at which Etta put the phone down.

      Charlie was striding around the hotel room, shouting that they hadn’t even kept her ashes or effects, such as they were: a carbonised dress, one shoe, possibly an earring or a ring, though he couldn’t remember whether she had been wearing any jewellery. Etta said she doubted there would have been any, but Charlie didn’t seem to be listening. Whatever there had once been, it was all disposed of. He was working himself up into a tirade, and she knew what these were like. When Shandler had told him the assignment to Kabul was going to someone else, he had stormed back to his office, picked up a full glass bottle of Perrier and hurled it at the dartboard hanging on the back of his office door. She came and stood in the doorway and told him to stop being a child and he had laughed and kicked the glass at his feet back in her direction. Now he was striding around the room, declaiming at the thoughtless horror of modern life – those black plastic body bags, the industrial incinerators for human beings, the stainless steel sluice bays, the rubber gloves, the whole infernal machinery in which a human being was reduced to nothingness – when she said that he should get dressed and stop talking.

      He did so silently, feeling as if he had just been slapped. She put a shirt over his shoulders, pulled his hands through the sleeves, fastened the buttons. As she handed him his underpants and trousers, and steadied him as he put them on, she smiled at him to lighten him up, trying to get him to remember that there had been happiness just the other side of sleep, and that they must not lose it. But from his hooded, dogged look she knew that he was somewhere else. He was watching the woman go through those twin plastic flanges at the end of the tented corridor where the surgeons worked and she had never come out again, and here he was realising – he now said with absurd vehemence – that he hadn’t given her a proper Christian burial. Except, Etta added quietly, that she wasn’t Christian and they didn’t even know her name.

      From the way Etta fitted the coat on his back and took him outside into the rain-washed April air, it was clear that she was treating him like a convalescent lunatic. He submitted with dull ill grace, following her to a lugubrious café where they both had a coffee. He sat in a corner booth staring out through the smeared window at the people in the street. She had the antibiotics and the painkillers the Navy had given him in her purse, and she counted one of each out into her hand and made him swallow them with his coffee.

      He found himself wondering what Annie was doing at this hour. With the time difference, she would be in assembly, though since he had never been there, not being one of those perfect fathers, he didn’t know what the assembly hall would be like. He seemed to remember her saying that they had prayers. What prayers? he had asked her, and Annie, using the voice she reserved for her father’s dumber questions, had said they were about God and loving people and so on. Thinking about Annie filled him with a sense of weightlessness, as if he was coming untethered. He wanted to talk to Etta about this. Wasn’t the feeling of fatherhood supposed to tie you down in this world, give you a sense of belonging to someone? He asked her whether she had ever had any children and she said she hadn’t. Why not? Charlie asked, and she said it had just never happened, not wanting to go into the marriage to the German businessman that had got her safely out of her small town at nineteen or the later relationship that brought her to London and eventually to Charlie’s office, by this time on her own. Do you miss it? Charlie asked, and she said, Miss what? Having children wasn’t essential, it wasn’t an answer for anything, still less a way to belong to the world and be at home there. She didn’t say all of this, but enough so that Charlie said that he was going to resent all of her wisdom pretty soon.