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trimmed.
    The man also wore wrap-around reflective sunglasses, the cord of which lay on his broad shoulders. Yet, far from annulling his features, this near-clownish mask of plastic and hair only enhanced them.
    Tom couldn’t tell what ethnic group – or mixture of ethnicities – the man’s face betokened. The sharp, flat triangle of a nose and the high cheekbones suggested he was Asiatic, but his skin was too red for this. His sheer bulk might mean he was Tugganarong – or had Tugganarong blood – for the Feltham Islanders often tipped the scales at over 300 pounds. However, the island people, unlike the mainland natives, had only sparse and wispy body hair.
    Could the hair be the result of a generous measure of Anglo genes? Tom considered. Or was the man a member of some grouping previously unknown to him?
    The driver forestalled all of this by flicking a finger to his brow in casual salute, and saying a single word: ‘Hi.’
    This ‘Hi’ – lazy, apparently unconcerned – brought with it an astonishingly physical sensation of psychic intrusion. Tom felt the hairs rise on his neck – and even his arms. He began to sweat. It was as if the clown-masked man had walked in through one of his eyes, and was now crouching down in the bony cave of Tom’s skull. It was altogether uncanny, and Tom couldn’t recall ever having had such a vivid first impression of anyone before.
    Certainly not of Martha. Martha, who now emerged from the SUV herself. The way she sidled from one haunch to the other, the way she extended a slim foot to the ground, the way her long neck arched – all of it recalled to her husband the first time he had seen her, across a crowded room, at a dull party in their home town. It was this air of languorous self-containment that had attracted him twenty years before, and which now impinged upon him once again. For, just as the clown-masked man had marched into his head, so Martha, quietly and deliberately, seemed to be quitting it.
    ‘Tom,’ she said, coming across to him, ‘this is Mister–’
    ‘Jethro, Jethro Swai-Phillips,’ the man cut in, and reached out his hand. Tom noted that the fingers were of equal length, so that the whole appendage seemed squared off and artificial. Tom took hold of it reluctantly, thinking: how many goddamn times am I gonna have to shake hands today? It’s like these people really do have to check that a man’s not packing a gun.
    ‘Jethro saw us waiting at the taxi stand in town,’ Martha explained. ‘There were no cabs; apparently there’s some kind of a race meet on today, so he, very kindly, offered us a ride.’
    ‘It’s the least I could do for visitors to my country, yeah,’ Swai-Phillips boomed. He had the deep yet ebullient tones of a voiceover for a radio advertisement. ‘We have a saying here,’ he continued. ‘ “The wayside inn should have as many beds as there are folk under the setting sun.” ’
    ‘Is that what you do?’ Tom asked, keen to put the conversation on the ground of masculine competitiveness. ‘Are you a hotelier?’
    ‘Lord, no!’ Swai-Phillips laughed – a big rich laugh with overtones of helpless hilarity. ‘No, no, I’m a lawyer. And I hope you’ll forgive me, but your good lady here took the liberty of filling me in on your current difficulties, right?’
    Christ! How that meaningless interrogative the locals involuntarily added to the end of their sentences annoyed Tom.
    ‘It’s nothing,’ he snapped at the lawyer. ‘Everything’s fine.’
    Realizing he was overreacting, yet powerless to stop himself, Tom took a twin in each hand, gripping their shoulders as if they were suitcase handles, and started back towards the front door of the Mimosa. Martha sucked her breath in through gritted teeth. However, Swai-Phillips refused to be snubbed. ‘No,’ he boomed after Tom, ‘I don’t believe it is nothing. You’re not in your own country now, Mr Brodzinski. Personal-injury cases here can be more than just