Confronted with the door to her studio, she remembered that its key was in her handbag. No, not in her handbag, she’d moved the key recently to a blue coffee pot where they kept receipts, on a kitchen shelf. She could fetch it easily: wasn’t her art her resource in this crisis, now she was left alone? Art was supposed to come out of what was ripped open. Also she would need money, she’d need to start earning again. But she was too afraid of what lay behind the door, she veered away and felt nausea at the idea of it, in case it was a failure, a rotten dead nullity – in case she never sold another thing. The time hadn’t come for testing her work, not yet. Too much was at stake. She might sink altogether, if it turned out she was no good any longer.

When she heard the car draw up in the street outside she hurried to push the bolt across the front door to the flat, then watched from the sitting room, through the crack of sight down the side of the blind, as Alex approached the house. How strange that he was entirely familiar even though everything else was changed: in his quick abstracted walk, head down, hands clenched into fists – in the past, with a cigarette half concealed, poking between the knuckles. She used to think, he walks as if his path is marked out for him on the pavement, taking him somewhere, only no one else sees the marks: when she’d drawn him, she’d tried to draw this. From her viewpoint above, when the security light came on, she watched as he used his key in the outer door, saw the vulnerable spot where his faded tow-coloured hair was thinning. If only Lydia hadn’t spoken, and she hadn’t had to know! This stupid spasm of sex could have been buried decently, under the surface of the rest of their lives; they could have gone on growing old together, the three of them left. Then Christine thought of dropping something on Alex’s head, to kill him. She returned to sit in her usual place on the sofa, arms hugged around her ribs, listening out for his step on the stair – so that she wasn’t really on the other side of their front door when Alex was so sure he sensed her closeness. He gave up calling her name and went downstairs again and tried to phone her from the car; the peremptory loud ringing was like an invasion into her self-possession, excruciating. Yet until the last moment she expected herself to let him in, pick up the phone, have explanations out with him. She switched off the lights and stood waiting in the dark.