Brown says, “Another vodka, then?”
“No,” says Zan.
“This story is somehow directed at me, I take it?”
“I’m not sure anymore,” Zan says sincerely, “but then I’m not finished. Let me finish and we’ll decide.”
“Lovely,” Brown shifts in his chair.
“There’s two points, really, one I was trying to make to Viv, whose culpability in the matter of whatever happened to the woman who may or may not be Zema’s mother—”
“Whose?”
“—Sheba’s mother is far less than mine in the whole Ronnie Jack Flowers affair, and that point is, Viv is responsible for doing what she can to make things right, but she can’t hold herself responsible for how things turn out, because we live in a world where sometimes the right thing is just not going to turn out. The other point has to do with Ronnie himself, who I saw being interviewed on a ‘news’ cable channel, if you can call this particular channel such a thing, while we were waiting in the airport to come to London and for Viv to go on to Ethiopia.”