The Museum Of Doubt. James Meek

did not.

      You did. The officer is your friend. Let’s move to the country.

      The country.

      Then I’d be outnumbered two to one instead of two to a million and still outnumbered.

      Cate turned away and shook her head. I don’t understand, she said.

      At last! said Adam. He grinned. Good.

       The Queen of Ukraine

      Off Cape Hatteras the sea arched up to her, a gymnast too perfect to be had but wanting to be wanted. Only a detail of scale stopped the Queen of Ukraine sticking out a tonguetip to tickle the muscled water, make the sea plunge concave with a gasp. The ghost of the taste of salt filled the back of her mouth and she ordered Captain First Rank Gubenko to lower a champagne bucket over the side. A steward brought her the seawater on a tray and ladled it into a tumbler of Lviv crystal. It was grey and swirled with plankton and the dandruff of the deep. She took a mouthfull, swilled it round and spat it over the side, sending the glass after it.

      Crystalware overboard, she said, and wiped her mouth with the back of her gloved forearm, making a roadkill-crimson smear on the white satin. She walked towards the prow of the SS Lesya Ukrainka, pride of the Black Sea Shipping Company. Twenty-five knots in all weathers, your majesty, Gubenko said each night at dinner, morsing dots of red caviar onto a buttery trencher. Give them money and they could never find the place between vulgarity and frugality. In all Ukraine only the Queen knew where that was.

      Forced to choose, of course, vulgarity every time.

      She stood alone in the bows among the anchor chains, back to the bridge, and the officer of the watch eye-gorging on her. An optic nerve with fingertips and a mouth, tease the curve of her spine and swallow the fruit of it with a snap and a gulp. Cherry on a stalk. The west wind had a coldness. She drew her shawl, an embroidered tribute from the women of Lutsk, gold fleurs-de-lys merging into trezubi on white lace, more closely around her. The sun wasn’t long up. Through clouds like torn strips of sodden cardboard the redundancy of a lit barsign on the empty streets of dawn, or a gleam of noonday hustle from the other side of the ocean, while here, off the cape, night had dismantled America, which could, it seemed possible in the diluting blue, with nothing but a hazy code of buoys and lighthouses to remind it of the order of things when it went to bed, be obliged to build it all again.