"She hailed a taxi and sat in the back with her eyes closed most of the way back to her home in Primrose Hill. She climbed up the stairs and let herself into her top- floor flat. There were ten messages on her answering machine, which she simply erased without listening to them. She threw open the window in her bedroom and for a moment or two leaned out of it at the rather dangerous and awkward angle which allowed her to see a patch of the park. It was a small corner patch with just a couple of plane trees standing in it. The backs of some of the intervening houses framed it, or rather, just failed totally to obscure it, and made it very personal and private to Kate in the way a vast, sweeping vista would not have been. On one occasion she had gone to this corner of the park and walked around the invisible perimeter that marked out the limits of what she could see, and had come very close to feeling that this was her own domain. She had even patted the plane trees in a proprietorial sort of way, and had then sat beneath them watching the sun going down over London— over its badly spoiled skyline and its nondelivering pizza restaurants— and had come away with a profound sense of something or other, though she wasn’t quite certain what. Still, she had told herself, these days she should feel grateful for a profound sense of anything at all, however unspecific."
"A turning point came when a crack team of flying screechers discovered the zoo in Regent’s Park, and most particularly the reptile house."
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