A date with Lily

"Plans?" you repeat, glancing at the smudged digits on the back of your hand, then at Claire, who is watching you with the patient delight of someone who already knows the answer. "I think I owe someone a text."

"Two someones, I'd say." She squeezes your arm and unhooks hers from it. "I'm going home to cook something ambitious and eat it entirely alone, out of spite. Don't wait up."

"You're not going to tell me who to choose? You are not... upset that i am seeing someone else?"

"Absolutely not. I'm a neutral party. A neutrally interestdd party." She grins, already walking backwards toward the tram stop. "Report back, though. In detail. I've earned it."

You watch her go, and then take out your phone and open a thread you've only just started, the one that begins with a number typed in by a stranger and ends, so far, with nothing at all.

*Good evening, Lilly. It's John. I wondered whether you might be free this evening. No dreadful "how are things" texts, I promise.*

You regret *dreadful* the second you send it, and spend the next four minutes pretending to read a shopfront menu. The reply arrives while you're still on the same line.

*Well. That was prompt, and rather well judged. I am, as it happens, free. I'd intended to spend the evening reading Hobbes in a state of mild self-reproach, so you've saved me from myself. Stephansplatz in forty minutes? I'll be the one who isn't looking at her phone.*

---

She is, in fact, the one who isn't looking at her phone. She's standing at the foot of the cathedral with her hands clasped loosely behind her back, studying the spire as though it owed her an explanation, and she doesn't turn until you're almost beside her.

"Ah. You came." A small, satisfied smile. "I was prepared to be disappointed, but I'm pleased to report I shan't have to be."

"You said Stephansplatz. I'm very good at following simple instructions."

"I'll hold you to that." She's changed since the afternoon, a dark green coat belted at the waist, her hair tucked behind one ear, the kind of effortless polish that makes you suddenly aware of your own jacket. "Right. I have a proposal. I've been in this city a fortnight and I've seen precisely three things: a registration office, a library, and the inside of a rather overpriced café. I should like to see the old town properly, with someone who can at least pretend to know where he's going."

"I can pretend very convincingly."

"Splendid. Lead on."

You don't, of course, know where you're going, but it turns out not to matter. The Innere Stadt does most of the work for you. You cut down the Graben, with its gilded plague column glowing in the dusk like a very ornate candle, and Lilly stops to read every inscription she can find, translating the Latin as she goes with a murmured, unselfconscious ease that makes you quietly revise your estimate of her. "Gratitude for deliverance from the plague," she says, tilting her head. "Which is rather a lot of gold for a municipal thank-you note. One does wonder who paid."

"The Habsburgs. Probably."

"Naturally. They never could do anything modestly." She glances sideways at you, amused. "I say that with the authority of someone whose own family has a chapel it doesn't use and a roof it can't afford to repair. Money has a way of becoming a monument to itself."

"Is that the family estate you mentioned?"

"I'm fairly sure I haven't mentioned it." She smiles, small and wry. "But yes. Draughty corridors, a garden my mother insists is prize-winning, an extremely elderly spaniel who believes himself in charge, and a moat that costs an unbelivable amount of govrnment grants to maintain. I'm told I'll inherit all of it, which is less a gift than a sentence. But it's a good wedding venue, and every year a hollywood production wants to shoot a few scenes."

You walk on, past shuttered shops and café windows glowing amber, onto the cobbled lanes that twist behind the cathedral, and the conversation slides easily between history and nothing in particular. She asks why you picked political science, and you give her the honest answer, the one about being a guest in other people's countries, always watching the rules from the outside. She listens properly, her pace slowing a little.

"That's rather perceptive, actually," she says. "Most people study politics to win arguments. You seem to want to understand why the arguments exist at all."

"Or I just like watching people argue."

"Also a respectable motive." A beat. "I did Oxford interviews at seventeen, you know. Terrifying. A man in a cardigan asked me whether a state could be said to have a conscience. I said it could not, and that I rather admired the ones that pretended." She laughs, soft and low. "I didn't get in. I was told my answer was *insufficiently deferential*."

"Their loss."

"I do like to think so." She says it lightly, but something in her glance lingers. "Thank you. That was kind of you."

---

By the time you reach the Hohe Markt, the sky has turned a deep indigo and the lamps along the square have come on, throwing long gold reflections over the cobblestones. Lilly stops beneath the old clock, the Ankeruhr, just as one of its little brass figures begins its slow march across the face, and watches it with the unguarded wonder of someone who has momentarily forgotten to be composed.

"Look at that," she murmurs. "Hundreds of years of people looking at that. And we're just two more."

"It's a good clock."

"It's a *magnificent* clock, John. Don't diminish it." She nudges your arm with hers, and this time doesn't move away afterward, her shoulder resting lightly against yours. "I'll confess something. I'd planned to find you rather boring. A nice, unremarkable boy from the colonies, tolerable enough for seminar partners."

"Colonies. That's generous."

"I'm being affectionate, you wretch." She turns her face up to you, eyes bright, a little flushed from the cold. "I'm afraid I've enjoyed myself enormously. It's most inconvenient."

"Inconvenient how?"

"I'd rather hoped to remain unimpressed." She holds your gaze, the clock still ticking quietly behind her, the square nearly empty around you. Her voice drops, careful and a little less certain than it has been all evening. "I've had a lot of practice at it, you see. It's frightfully difficult to unlearn."

You are close enough now to see the faint tremor of her breath in the cold air. Her hand, bare, rests at her side, an inch from yours, and neither of you has quite decided what to do about it. Behind you, the last chime of the clock fades into the quiet.

Understood, I'll drop the interruptions and mystery devices. This version uses nothing new from outside, only something Lilly offers in the scene. It picks up after "Behind you, the last chime of the clock fades into the quiet."

She exhales, looks at the clock for a moment, and then at you, and when she speaks the dryness has gone out of her voice.

"I'll be direct, since I seem to have lost the knack of being anything else. I have two tickets for the Staatsoper Friday evening. They were my aunt's. She's cried off with a cold, which I strongly suspect is a diplomatic cold, and I'd rather not sit beside an empty seat for three hours." She tucks her hair behind her ear. "I'm not asking you out. I'm asking whether you'd like to see an opera. Those are quite different things, and I shall deny having confused them."

She waits. It is clearly costing her something to wait.