Lydia knew he was scalded by what she had said to Christine. Not because he was a coward or had calculated on deceiving anyone, but because there was something ingenuous in how she’d delivered her news – so baldly, like a teenager who intervenes out of her depth, precipitating adult consequences beyond what she can understand. Recalled to himself, Alex had been appalled by finding he was embroiled with Lydia, the Lydia he knew, with her exasperating passivity and fatalism like a child’s. His arm sticky with sweat had been around her neck the whole time she was talking to Christine, strands of her honey-coloured hair alien against his chest. He had been helpless not to overhear Chris’s utterly unsuspecting innocence: she was so slow to understand at first, and then so wounded and bewildered. Casting around to make sense, she hadn’t even accused them or been outraged – not yet. How could Alex and Lydia not dread each other after that? When Christine cut off the call he’d pulled away from Lydia in cold horror.

Yet Lydia persisted in clinging to those truths of the body she’d found out when she was a teenager. Their act couldn’t be undone because it wasn’t nothing: their awareness of it was present in the room all around them like a shadow-play, overmastering their reasoning. There was no redemption in the world, only in this: teenagers knew. Alex had lost himself, and if Lydia let him go now he would hate her. He pissed in the bathroom then ran the tap full force and washed his face, dried it in her towel; without looking at her or speaking, he left the room and she heard him go downstairs. She waited without moving, listening out for the sound of the front door closing with finality behind him, shutting her out. But it didn’t come. Eventually she got out of bed and put on her gown, glancing at her reflection in the wall-mirror, running her fingers through her hair – dishevelled because she hadn’t finished drying it when Alex turned up. She didn’t look too bad.