She knew the days now, she had retained a careful count of them. On a Saturday she went up to the attic. It was two weeks and a day, since he had brought her back, since their episode on the green-and-blue bed. The doors into the tower had stayed locked. She had been busy, walking and walking, sometimes in the fountains of the rain, doing her exercises. Some nights she drank three glasses of wine. She did not talk to Anna, only responded mildly when Anna spoke to her.

Camillo was not in the attic. It seemed he had lost all interest in that too. The rocking-horse stood still as a rock, she tipped its back to make it move. Three bottles had exploded off their tops and there were wine stains on the walls.

Rachaela sampled the wine. It was sour, as the old women had told her. Sour, but potent. She might try this brew, in preference to the civilized wine Michael dished up.

She searched the attic, and found a hammer lying between a sewing machine and a stuffed bird. As if in readiness.

She opened the clear window and climbed out.

The sky was blue, muddied with vast banks of cloud like cumulus from a volcano.

She walked across the two roofs and came to the tower and its window.

No sound. The piano was not being played. How quiet he was. Was he even there? Where did he go to when he disappeared? She had seen, he would brave the daylight. Was it only their affectation, to be afraid of it, as if it was expected of them.

She knocked courteously with the hammer’s hilt.

Was he there, and only dissembling. Burrowed in the tower, safe from her.

Nothing. Only the noises of the sea.

Rachaela rested against the tower wall. She longed to be elsewhere, to be another person. Anyone would do. Some spotty check-out girl, some sock-washing wife. Anything, anything rather than this.

She swung the hammer lightly. At her first swipe the glass cracked in the lion’s head. She lashed again. Pieces of yellow crystal dropped out on to the roof like strange sweets.

But she had not breached the tower. There was more glass, or some other thicker substance, behind the jagged hole she had made.

She smashed down hard against it with the hammer and the window shook, tiny cracks appeared like earthquake faults. The substance beyond and between the glass did not give.

She might have guessed. The stone-slinging mob had taught them. The glass was provisioned against attack.

She left the broken shards lying and took the hammer back into the attic and set it down neatly by a bird of paradise in lime and cherry feathers.

A useless aggression.

She had been shown. They were impervious to her.

And she was not a vandal, it was not natural to her to destroy things.

She went back to her room.