Some part of Anna sought comfort, or familiarity at least, in the suicide bathroom. That part of her welcomed it as a concept as much as a place, a key theory about the world she had held since she was young, a psychic refuge at the very same time as a site of existential terror, something  that would always be there for her: but the part isn’t the whole, and by eight o’ clock on the morning after her swim the rest of her had begun cheerfully demolishing it.

Marnie  found  her there just after lunch, crouched  under  the sink in a cleaning-woman overall, with her hair tied up in a batik scarf.

‘What do you think, then?’ Anna said.

She had emptied the bathroom  of everything that would move and  piled it into  the bedroom.  Patchy success with the marble cladding had encouraged her to lever off one of the larger sections of mirror; this she had dropped from the bedroom window into a flowerbed where it lay, unbroken  except for a chip at one corner, amid the childlike planting of lobelia and ox-eye daisy. The pipes and cavities exposed by these operations,  she had done in gold or silver, according to mood. ‘Later,’ she said, ‘I’ll paint fish on them.  Starfish. Seashells. Bubbles. Those kinds  of things.’ The major surfaces had taken their first coat, dark blue emulsion with enough white in it to suggest a kind of Spanish azure, applied fast with a tray and roller. As soon as it was dry she intended  to put on more white, in dry combed streaks to give the effect of foam. It covered the walls well enough, but the mirrors would need more. ‘I’m planning to keep to these pastelly greens and blues,’ she told Marnie, ‘for everything but the detail.’ For the detail she had laid aside three or four of the smallest brushes she could find, beautiful sablehair modelling points. ‘But also if I can get some light into them, I will.’

Marnie stood in the doorway of the suite, stiffly considering the heaps of bath towels and broken fittings; the carrier bags stuffed with  leaking Moulton-Brown  shower  products;  the  torn  black rubbish sack half full of triangular  shards of marble, none larger than  three  inches on a side. On  the fitted taupe  berber  by the bathroom  door, Anna had prised open every can of paint in the house, from little unused tins of fancy enamel to five litre drums of professional obliterating emulsion. All of this Marnie observed in disbelief. She picked her way over to the open window and stared down at the mirror  in the flowerbed. After a moment she passed one hand over her face and said:

‘Anna, for God’s sake what are you doing?’

‘I’m decorating,  dear. What  does it look like?’ Anna  pushed some hair back under the scarf. ‘You can help if you like.’

‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ Marnie said tiredly.