The Victoria Embankment these days always stands, to Neith’s eye, on the brink of catastrophe. The engineering genius of 1870 did not anticipate the consequences of two-hundred-odd years of global warming, and even the subsequent reinforcement only emphasises the comparative scale of the wide grey Thames and the sea beyond. A river man once told her, as they trawled the silty water for a lost tourist, that it required only the concurrence of three natural events—a spring tide, a storm surge driving water inward from the estuary, and a heavy rain over Wales and the Downs—to flood the Parliament buildings and some of London’s most expensive real estate. So far there had only ever been two out of three, but the day must come, he’d said. Sooner or later, it must.