Perfect Day

time.’ She imitates, and he watches her, fascinated to know where this is leading.
    ‘It’s a test of how much you love someone,’ she says, categorically, ‘if they’re a messy eater and you still can sit across a table from them. Sorry,’ she says, for talking too much. Her accent makes the word ‘ sorreh ’.
    He doesn’t know whether this is her way of saying that she’s not interested in having dinner with him.
    ‘Another test,’ he says, wanting to keep the conversation going, ‘is whether you can stand to be with them when they’re speaking a foreign language.’
    ‘Yeah?’ Now she looks at him as if he’s crazy. Then she says, ‘I’m going for a walk. D’you want to come?’
    ‘OK.’ He quickly picks up his espresso cup and tips it into his mouth as if there is still liquid inside it.

    In the street, she walks briskly, slightly ahead of him, dodging pavement tables, not looking around. He watches her slight but determined body weaving through the passers-by.
    ‘Where are we going?’ he calls.
    He was born and brought up in London but he cannot remember ever going for a walk in London . They lived in Kentish Town , he and his mother, and when they went into town it was to do something, like see a play or an exhibition. Later, when he and his friends were teenagers they hung around the pubs of Camden , or roamed about on skateboards in scrubby playgrounds where there were tyres for swings and disused turquoise paddling pools spotted with brown puddles of rainwater. The centre of town was for tourists.
    At Charing Cross Road , Kate looks back, misses him for a second, then sees him, and her face goes from grumpy to pleased, like a child getting the lollipop she wants at the checkout in Marks and Spencer.
    ‘Let’s go through the piazza. See if there’s a band.’
    He’s content to be led.
    They walk through a cloud of caramel-flavoured air around the vendor of sugared nuts, past a near-naked man painted grey, sitting in the pose of Rodin’s Thinker, down the back of the newly refurbished Opera House.
    His mother used to bring him here. He was always the youngest person in the auditorium and he has never been able to dissociate opera from the fidgety tiredness that comes from sitting still for long periods. He remembers struggling to understand what it was about the murky spectacle on stage that kept the adults around him so rapt, and inventing counting games to make the time pass. Sometimes, in the stifling heat of the amphitheatre, his mother would fan him with a red programme and whisper a translation of an aria. At the interval as they stood in line for cardboard tubs of ice-cream, she would try to explain the story. He remembers the pain in her eyes when he asked once, ‘How much longer is it going to go on?’

    There’s a string quartet playing in the basement level of the piazza. Kate leans over the rails and when they finish the piece, she claps hard.
    ‘I’m going to ask them what that one’s called,’ she says, as if it’s a pop song.
    ‘It’s called “Air on a G string”,’ Alexander tells her.
    ’Go on!’ She looks at him as if he’s having her on, then runs down the steps and asks the black guy on cello. He looks up from sorting his music and smiles at her. She makes people smile. Alexander notices how faces going in the other direction lift as she passes. She bounds back up the steps.
    ‘You were right,’ she says, in astonishment, when she returns.
    ‘It’s the name of one of the strings on the cello,’ he explains.
    ‘I know that,’ she says impatiently, heading off across the cobbles.
    ‘Where are we going now?’ he calls after her.
    ‘The river.’ She turns and smiles at him. He likes her quickness to take offence, and to forgive.
    He looks at his bare wrist again and wonders what he is doing roaming the streets of London with a woman he does not even know.

    The Thames is at full tide. In the evening light, the bulging expanse of water is breathtaking. He looks upriver into the mellowing sunshine. The London Eye revolves slowly like the giant paddle of a surreal steamer.
    This way is my favourite big view,’ says Kate. They lean on the railings, side by side, sharing it.
    ‘Do you have a favourite little view?’
    ‘Blue sky through pink cherry blossom,’ she replies immediately, unaware that he is teasing her. ‘You have to narrow your eyes and try to forget what you’re looking at,’ she demonstrates, ‘and then the blue is so