Replacing the phone in its socket after she’d spoken to Lydia, Christine sat poised on the edge of the sofa with her knees pressed together, waiting to see how she would feel. Her knees were trembling so that perhaps she couldn’t have stood even if she’d wanted to. Of course, she was devastated. But she floated above that in her mind, observing it wryly. This humiliated her: it was as if she’d been stripped bare in public. And now everyone would have to condemn them and be horrified by what they’d done – Alex and Lydia, Lydia and Alex! Their pairing seemed suddenly so inevitable, it had been bound to happen. And Christine was bored in advance with all the sympathy she would enlist, and the outrage – she was furious with distaste at their incurring it, those two, and at the stupid necessity for emotion and action and reaction they had unloosed. What an unattractively dreary role she, Christine, would have to play – the wronged wife!

— I knew, I knew, she said, needing to reassure herself.

Hadn’t she known and not known – what had she ever thought Lydia would do, now that she didn’t have Zachary? And why had Christine called her and no one else, when Alex was missing? At least, anyway, Alex wasn’t smashed up in an accident, she was let off that hook. No horrifying maiming, no hospital visiting: she could get on with things. But what things? Now, how would she live, if Alex left – or if she threw him out? Recognition after recognition tumbled down, giving way under her, leaving their gaping vacancies; when she thought of the word husband she was most stricken, although in all the time she and Alex had been married she’d never used it quite sincerely. Now perhaps she would be no one’s wife. Christine stood up confidently enough then and went all around the flat, up to the top bedroom and into the kitchen, seeing it differently, in a surge of possessive passion. Whatever else happens, she thought, this place is mine. They don’t get this. And she was almost pleased, picking up objects in the rooms and putting them down again, straightening pictures, admiring the rich accumulation of interesting things as if she’d just come into some inheritance. It would be so convenient, to have all this to herself.

Everything she saw that was Lydia’s she snatched up, stuffing it into a black bin bag: her scarf, magazines, bits of her wet washing on the clothes horse, letters from the bank and her solicitors, lighter, shoes. Lydia had taken a few of her things home, but left most of them. How untidy she was, how she spread herself everywhere! In the spare room Christine began dragging Lydia’s clothes off the hangers, shoving them into the bag, dropping bottles from the dressing table and bathroom in on top. In her vindictive cold soul she repudiated the other two, felt herself retracting away from them. It was a kind of freedom. But could she manage solitude? Wasn’t she a coward? All the years with Alex might have been only the staving off of solitude. For a moment she imagined explaining this to Lydia, who understood things.