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The Freekirk's interior had been divided into a large two-storey (in estate agent's jargon, ‘double volume’) reception-room – the former hall of congregation – and a more conventional half, with kitchen and utilities downstairs and bedrooms and bathroom above. Unable for some reason to sleep, Chamcha wandered at midnight into the great (and cold: the heatwave might be continuing in the south of England, but there wasn't a ripple of it up here, where the climate was autumnal and chill) living-room, and wandered among the ghost-voices of banished preachers while Gibreel and Allie made high-volume love. Like Pamela. He tried to think of Mishal, of Zeeny Vakil, but it didn't work. Stuffing his fingers in his ears, he fought against the sound effects of the copulation of Farishta and Alleluia Cone.
Theirs had been a high-risk conjoining from the start, he reflected: first, Gibreel's dramatic abandonment of career and rush across the earth, and now, Allie's uncompromising determination to see it through, to defeat in him this mad, angelic divinity and restore the humanity she loved. No compromises for them; they were going for broke. Whereas he, Saladin, had declared himself content to live under the same roof as his wife and her lover boy. Which was the better way? Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
In the morning Gibreel ordered an ascent of the local ‘Top’. But Allie declined, although it was plain to Chamcha that her return to the countryside had caused her to glow with joy. ‘Bloody flat-foot mame,’ Gibreel cursed her lovingly. ‘Come on, Salad. Us damn city slickers can show the Everest conqueror how to climb. What a bloody upside-down life, yaar. We go mountain-climbing while she sits here and makes business calls.’ Saladin's thoughts were racing: he understood, now, that strange hobble at Shep-perton; understood, too, that this secluded haven would have to be temporary – that Allie, by coming here, was sacrificing her own life, and wouldn't be able to go on doing so indefinitely. What should he do? Anything? Nothing? – If revenge was to be taken, when and how? ‘Get these boots on,’ Gibreel commanded. ‘You think the rain will hold off all fucking day?’
It didn't. By the time they reached the stone cairn at the summit of Gibreel's chosen climb, they were enveloped in a fine drizzle. ‘Damn good show,’ Gibreel panted. ‘Look: there she is, down there, sitting back like the Grand Panjandrum.’ He pointed down at the Freekirk. Chamcha, his heart pounding, was feeling foolish. He must start behaving like a man with a ticker problem. Where was the glory in dying of heart failure on this nothing of a Top, for nothing, in the rain? Then Gibreel got out his field-glasses and started sca
This speech took Saladin by surprise. You poor bastard, he thought, you really are going off your wretched head at a rate of knots. And, hard on the heels of this thought, a second sentence appeared, as if by magic, in his head: Don't imagine that means I'll let you off.
On the drive back to the Carlisle railway station, Chamcha mentioned the depopulation of the countryside. ‘There's no work,’ Allie said. ‘So it's empty. Gibreel says he can't get used to the idea that all this space indicates poverty: says it looks like luxury to him, after India's crowds.’ – ‘And your work?’ Chamcha asked. ‘What about that?’ She smiled at him, the ice-maiden facade long gone. ‘You're a nice man to ask. I keep thinking, one day it'll be my life in the middle, taking first place. Or, well, although I find it hard to use the first person plural: our life. That sounds better, right?’
‘Don't let him cut you off,’ Saladin advised. ‘From Jumpy, from your own worlds, whatever.’ This was the moment at which his campaign could truly be said to have begun; when he set a foot upon that effortless, seductive road on which there was only one way to go. ‘You're right,’ Allie was saying. ‘God, if he only knew. His precious Sisodia, for example: it's not just seven-foot starlets he goes for, though he sure as hell likes those.’ – ‘He made a pass,’ Chamcha guessed; and, simultaneously, filed the information away for possible later use. ‘He's totally shameless,’ Allie laughed. ‘It was right under Gibreel's nose. He doesn't mind rejection, though: he just bows, and murmurs no offoffoffence, and that's that. Can you imagine if I told Gibreel?’
Chamcha at the railway station wished Allie luck. ‘We'll have to be in London for a couple of weeks,’ she said through the car window. ‘I've got meetings. Maybe you and Gibreel can get together then; this has really done him good.’
‘Call any time,’ he waved goodbye, and watched the Citroen until it was out of sight.
That Allie Cone, the third point of a triangle of fictions – for had not Gibreel and Allie come together very largely by imagining, out of their own needs, an ‘Allie’ and a ‘Gibreel’ with whom each could fall in love; and was not Chamcha now imposing on them the requirements of his own troubled and disappointed heart? – was to be the unwitting, i