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About the Author

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including Clever Girl and The Past, and three short-story collections, most recently Bad Dreams. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker. In 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize; in 2018 she was awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for Bad Dreams.

Also by Tessa Hadley

Also by Tessa Hadley

ACCIDENTS IN THE HOME

EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT

SUNSTROKE AND OTHER STORIES

THE MASTER BEDROOM

THE LONDON TRAIN

MARRIED LOVE

CLEVER GIRL

THE PAST

BAD DREAMS AND OTHER STORIES

Dedication

For Mum and Dad

One

THEY WERE LISTENING to music when the telephone rang. It was a summer’s evening, nine o’clock. They had finished supper and Christine was listening with intensity, sitting with her feet tucked under her in the armchair; she recognised the music although she didn’t know what it was. Alex had chosen it, he hadn’t consulted her and now she stubbornly wouldn’t ask – he took too much pleasure in knowing what she didn’t know. He lay on the sofa in the bay window with a book open in his hand, not reading it, the book dropped across his chest; he was watching the sky outside. Their flat was on the first floor and the sitting-room window looked out over a wide street lined with plane trees. A gang of parakeets zipped across from the park, and the purple-brown darkness of the copper beech next door fumed against the turquoise sky, swallowing the last light. A blackbird silhouetted with open beak on a branch must be singing, but the recorded music overrode it.

It was the landline ringing. Christine was dragged away from the music; she stood up and looked around her, to see where they’d put the handset down when they last finished with it – probably somewhere here, among the piles of books and papers. Or in the kitchen with the washing-up? Alex ignored the ringing, or only showed he was aware of it by a little irritable tension in his face – always liquidly expressive, foreign, because the eyes were so dark, outlined as if they were painted. This effect was more striking as he was growing older and brightness was leaching out of his hair, which used to be the colour of tarnished dark gold.