Problems, Problems

The ground floor of the Customs House still held last night's preview: boards reading SALTMARSH TOGETHER: A STRATEGY FOR A CONNECTED CITY, banners for a Festival of Cultures, and a scale model of something called the Global Quarter, all tiny glass towers and tiny trees. Canapé trays sat abandoned on the cloakroom counter beside a stack of cream leaflets: MISS CRANE'S SPEECH & DEPORTMENT. BE HEARD.

A steward, still in her festival lanyard, told you who'd been there. The Leader of the council, naturally. Sir Edwin Fairweather, the festival's patron, who'd spoken at ten, flawless, a voice like a well-oiled door, though for one word, dock, the vowel had gone flat as a plate for half a syllable before he'd corrected it, so quickly the room assumed it hadn't happened. Imogen Fairweather, thirty-three, director of his Foundation, smiling the way people smile when they've been told to. Forty guests, each of them holding a precise sixty-centimetre circle of air around themselves, drifting between the boards like polite planets.

"Marian left early," said the steward. "About half past ten. She said she had to meet someone about a railing."