She was still wearing his cufflinks.
That was the detail Talia Ward would come back to for the rest of her life — not the hotel, not the taxi, not the extremely undignified business with the zip of a dress that had cost her four hundred pounds she did not have. The cufflinks. She had put them in her bag on the Saturday morning while he was in the shower, out of what she had told herself at the time was spite, and had then not been able to give them back, because on the Sunday she had realised that she did not have his number, and on the Monday she found out why she was never going to need it.
"Talia — good, come here." Marguerite Achebe was in the clerks' room with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. "This is the one I told you about. Six years' call, absolutely insufferable, wins everything. You'll be up against each other constantly and I want you to know now that I intend to enjoy it enormously."
And Nathaniel Carr turned round.
He was extremely good.
She had to give him that, afterwards, in the two years it took her to admit that anything about him was good. He did not blink. He did not do the small flicker men do. He put out his hand, and said, "Talia. Marguerite's been talking about you for a month," in the voice of a man who has never met anybody, and she shook it, and said something about how nice that was.
And then his eyes went down, just once, to her wrist.
She had rolled her sleeves. She was wearing a man's cufflinks, silver, plain, slightly too heavy for her cuff, in a room with nine people in it on her first Monday at the bar.
Nathaniel Carr's mouth did something very small at one corner.
"Nice cufflinks," he said.
She got into the loo on the second floor and put both hands on the sink.
Three days. She had been called on the Wednesday. She had gone to a chambers drinks on the Friday, where a man had leaned on the bar next to her and said you're the new one, and she had said and you're the drunk one, and he had said not yet, and eleven hours later she had left a hotel on Aldwych at seven in the morning with her shoes in her hand.
She had not asked his name. He had not offered it. That had been the entire point of it — a woman who had spent six years in pupillage and bar school and a great deal of unpaid work getting one single night in which she was nobody at all.
Talia looked at herself in the mirror.
"Right," she said.
She took the cufflinks off, and put them in her bag, and did not give them back for eleven months.