Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand

don’t think Larkin’s supposed to drink,” she explained to Daniel, who was still holding out the Veuve Clicquot. “She’s on medication, and Nick knows it. I don’t know why he would tell you otherwise,” she said, and, taking the champagne bottle, went back inside.
    Daniel turned to Nick. “You prick. Why—”
    â€œPay no attention to her. I know all, Danny-o.” Nick smiled and patted the chair beside him. “Never doubt me, Dan. Never doubt me.”
    Daniel sat, swiveling to look out onto an expanse of lawn green as a grass snake. An asphalt path etched its way through it before ending in front of a small gated enclosure, the local Two O’Clock Club. There were no children or beleaguered mothers there now; the ice cream stall was shuttered, the overflowing rubbish tip had been emptied. He sighed, turned, and stared to where the westering sun had turned the City’s shining caverns into a glittering dream of the Future, while behind it the immense blue-and-gold Mongolfier balloon moored at Vauxhall made its strange stately ascent every half hour. Gazing at this incongruous vista, his face bathed in syrupy light and mouth slightly open, Daniel looked even more daft than usual.
    â€œLook,” said Nick to a pigeon on the railing. “I bet he’s humming ‘Waterloo Sunset.’”
    Daniel grinned sheepishly. “Actually, ‘Shangri-la.’”
    It was the truth. He’d been coming to London for over twenty years, and he still saw it through the scrim of songs he’d grown up with: Terry and Julie crossing Waterloo Bridge, feckless women moving from St. John’s Wood to Knightsbridge and Stepney and Berkeley Mews, Muswell Hillbillies and London Boys. This city was a place his senses recalled more keenly than his conscious mind; with each return it seeped back into him, its ashy smell and dreamy crepuscular light, rain-swept curbs and crowds pouring from the Underground, Cockney back-chatter and the sibilant greeting of the grocer across the street.
    â€œ ’Sa fine day, Mester Roolands, ’sa fine day. . . .”
    â€œWell, cheers,” said Nick, handing him a wineglass. Daniel raised it to the leafy canopy, smiling, as Sira stepped back onto the deck with a platter of olives and bread and pale cheese wrapped in what looked like goldenrod.
    â€œDaniel—eat, please. I’m so sorry, dinner won’t be ready for a bit.”
    Daniel gulped his wine and stood. “Umm, I need to find the loo first—”
    â€œUse the guest toilet, Daniel,” said Sira as Nick speared a haunch of bread with his pocketknife. “All the way up, on the fourth floor—the other one’s not working right.”
    â€œGotcha.”
    He’d never been on the fourth floor. He didn’t even know the place had a fourth floor, but he dutifully followed the narrow twisting stairs from the cheery first-floor landing to the second (half-open bedroom door, suggestive scatterings of torn lace and leaves and candle-wax on the Baluchi carpets) and the third, until finally he came to a landing that Nick and Sira, slight as they were, would have had difficulty occupying at the same time. Daniel pressed one palm against the wall. The space was so small he couldn’t extend his arms outright: where the hell would you put a bathroom?
    But there was a room, behind a heavy brocaded curtain. He pulled the curtain aside, expecting to find one of those tiny head-knocking lavatories the English liked to torture themselves with.
    â€œWow,” he breathed.
    Before him a tiny bedroom had been fitted into the eaves. The slanted ceiling held etched-glass windows of amber, emerald, scarlet. The sills were carved with honeybees and octagons, the Turkish carpet patterned with stylized wasps and ants. A carved cupboard bed had been built into one wall; opposite it was a matching wardrobe. Beside the wardrobe hung another length of