She found him on the sofa downstairs in front of the cold stove, sitting with his head bowed, fingers tensed against his temples, frowning at the floor in a despair that might have appeared theatrical at a different moment. Bringing the whisky bottle and one glass, she crouched between his knees on the rug, poured for both of them and drank first and deeply, then handed the glass to him. Her elbows on his knees, her face turned up to his, she claimed him for herself – whatever was between them wasn’t over. Alex touched her hair with resigned kindness. In the pressure of his hand, cupping the back of her skull as his eyes with their irony sought out something in her face – did he find it? her own irony? – Lydia felt all the reproaches he held back and explanations he gave up. He yielded to her and she was almost frightened, because the relation of her passion had always been to Alex’s resistance, his difficulty. He said that he had to go to Christine, talk to her.

— She won’t want to see you, not yet. She won’t let you in.

— I have to try.

She took his hand and put it inside her gown, on her warm breast. — But you’ll come back to me? Don’t just drop me, Alex, will you – not after this? I don’t know what I’d do.

He drove through the fitful imperfect darkness of the night streets, furtive with their intermittent traffic, red-eyed with lights; then alongside the shrouded Heath. What had happened? This new reality seemed like a trick of the darkness: momentous but so accidental. He had almost not gone to Garret’s Lane. And he had no idea what came next: much gnashing of teeth and wailing, no doubt. They had broken, he and Lydia, something that had been a monument containing everyone’s sorrow – how could they not be punished? He was in his fifties and for all he knew, the shape of all their lives was shaken loose now; his awareness burned with the hurt he had done to his wife. Yet an intimation surfaced, like a post standing up out of a tide for him to steer by: that he was strong enough for whatever it was, this twist of his fate. He had always known what lay behind this opening, more or less decently closed in his married life so far: the ocean depths of sex. This possibility had existed in him always, he was like his father.