‘Well, we must have a party,’ Kate says.

She is glad for a subject as mundane as a birthday party, age and ageing, the masochism of celebrating one's own mortality. The fact that Silas is turning fifty spreads to the people around them, a jollity builds, drinks are passed, a premature toast proposed, he is pressed to organize a party. He does not take much persuading, there is already a determined gleam in his eye.

When they go home, Silas is happy, the tension drained away. He toys with the notion of asking Lydia to sleep with him tonight, sex helps bring sleep along, they need to ease each other's loneliness. But his intention, having grown firmer as they drive, is quickly undone when they get home. They hear voices.

‘Well, Michael is home,’ he says, aware of how strange this name sounds.

Another voice, a young woman's. Music playing, there is laughter, they hear Michael say something, his voice is muffled, a silence ensues. What is he telling her? Lydia asks herself. That his parents are home, they are old-fashioned, he has never brought a woman, a girl home before? The light under his door goes out. Silas and Lydia exchange looks.

They stand in the shadows, uncertain of what to do or say.

‘I'm going to have a party,’ he says at last.

‘A party?’

‘It will be December soon…’

‘My God, your birthday!’

‘Fifty.’

They regard each other for a minute. November has slipped away, how the year has flown. Affection flickers once more, a brief, candlewick flame that hisses and goes out. They smile at each other. She'll help, she says, then they climb the stairs and go to their separate rooms.

Lydia is restless. It is the first time Mikey has ever done this, brought someone home to sleep with. Well, except for Kate, and that was an aberration. She turns to the bedside table, finds the sleeping tablets – non-addictive, the doctor said. She is glad she has decided to see a counsellor. She presses a tablet out of its foil package, pours water from a jug into a glass at her bedside. A habit picked up in hospital.

She listens to Silas in the bathroom, imagines him standing at the basin, preparing his sleeping draught. She counts at least twenty drops – that's far too much! Her concern momentarily eases the hard knot of alienation in her stomach, and she is tempted to get up and speak to him about this habit. But she realizes how hypocritical this is, and quietly wishes him a good night's sleep. All she has to offer him now is this distant tenderness. She swallows her tablet, waits for her own dark, drugged sleep to come.

She hopes that Mikey's visitor – and Mikey himself – will be gone when she goes down into that great whirlpool of sunlight and shadow that the house becomes in the morning. It is the one pleasure she takes from this otherwise forbidding house and she does not want it spoiled. With this thought, the immediacy of the new, dislocated world she finds herself in recedes.