It struck him, at the time, as an original reflection, being new to him, at any rate. And the person who had inspired it, sitting a few inches away from him at the glass-topped table, a small beaker of vodka raised to her lips, her eyes flitting evenly between Tony Buttress and Andrey Chersky as the latter tried to persuade the former of the many benefits of Soviet children’s holiday camps, was Emily, the girl from Wisconsin. The bar was crowded. Even though Andrey had told him that the dress code was not important, and that nobody would mind if he came in a lounge suit, Thomas still felt self-conscious, surrounded by so many impressive-looking figures in white tie. The air was buzzing with after-show conversation: much of it, but by no means all, in Russian. Thomas was only half-listening to his friends’ conversation, however. He kept finding his eyes drawn back to Emily, and not just because she was so good-looking: there was an element of that, of course (why deny it?), but this had more to do with the strange quality he was struggling to define – he supposed that charisma would be the word for it, or magnetism.
