The Angel's Cut by Elizabeth Knox Page A

rooms.’
    Xas opened his mouth to answer this, but couldn’t. He was moved beyond his intelligence. He felt something closing around him, something like the warmth of a room from which all light has been excluded. He left his mouth open to taste what the man had said. Then he kissed the man, and kissed him. Then, after a moment, he stopped and thought to ask the man why he hadn’t sailed with the actress.
    â€˜I did think I might want to marry her, so I had everything arranged. Then I thought I might not want to—I might prefer to work on breaking records. I decided that I’m not in a hurry with anything else.’
    â€˜What else?’ Xas stroked the lobe of the good ear.
    But the man’s gaze had moved to take in the body above him, and his face stopped looking clever and turned blank and greedy again. ‘Are you really like this?’ he said, nonsensically.
    â€˜What else?’ Xas said again, hungry to learn who this person was.
    The man made a noise of exasperated delight and seemed about to answer when Xas heard someone whistling. The whistling was a tuneful, carrying rendition of a popular song.
    The man was watching his face. He lifted his own head to listen. He frowned in concentration. ‘Is someone coming?’
    â€˜Yes. Whistling.’
    The man scrambled up. Xas followed. They began fastening buttons. They were laughing, wasting time looking at each other instead of attending to what they were doing.
    Xas saw the woman first, crossing the field, against a blue and mushroom pink sky—the sun wasn’t up yet. She was wearing a fox stole and a cloche hat, which framed the long, pale oval of her face. Her dress was cut on the bias, a thin fabric that showed her hollow thighs and the round bosses of her hip bones as she walked. She was carrying a brown paper bag. She came into the hangar and stopped, raised an eyebrow at the two of them, and set the paper bag down on the trestle table.
    â€˜It’s only Flora,’ the man said, breathless.
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    Flora had dressed and got out of the house when it was still dark. She had a danish and coffee at Albert’s, while the baking shift made Cole’s sandwiches with the day’s first bread. The sun was just below the horizon when she crossed the bridge over the mire the county had made of Coral Canal. The oil rigs lining Trolley Way stood against the pre-dawn sky like black latticework.
    At Mines Flora parked her car and went toward the hangar that housed Cole’s experimental distance racer.The morning was so still that the airfield felt like a soundstage. Flora pursed her lips and began to whistle, and her tune floated away from her and seemed to echo against the pale shell of the twilight.
    When she came to the hangar door Flora saw that Cole had his back to her and was buttoning his shirt. His hair was tousled and he was laughing his disconcerting, shiftless giggle. When he laughed, Cole looked his age, which was twenty-five. He seemed big, gangling and coltish.
    The man Cole was with was even younger, but was at that moment more composed and in better order. His hair was neat, cropped, and a velvety black, and, as soon as he saw Flora, he stopped trying to tidy himself, as if not wanting to draw further attention to the opened layers of his burrowed in clothes. He only ran a hand across his mouth and stood still. So still, it was as though he was attempting to vanish. It was something that Flora had only ever seen wild animals do.
    She put the paper bag of sandwiches down on Cole’s plans. She said to her employer, ‘Here’s your very particular order.’ She flicked it with a finger.
    Cole fell on the bag and rummaged in it. He took a sandwich and stuffed it into his mouth then groaned with pleasure. ‘Have a sandwich,’ he said to Flora, around his sandwich. Then, ‘This is Flora,’ to the other man.
    Flora had only recently begun to understand the broad prejudices of