Blaise found he didn’t even mind being sane and solid. He saw Isobel’s responsible anxiety for her mother, and also her frank disappointment, cheated of what she wanted: which, surprisingly, was him. Her eyes were strange as he looked into them in decent concern, with their short dense black lashes and concentrated gaze, a taut crease under the lower lids. When he remembered that her father was Czech her rather thick calves and ankles seemed romantic, and the downy hair on her arms. He understood for the first time then how she was desirable and exceptional, not at all ordinary. He never told anyone afterwards that to begin with he’d thought Isobel was ordinary. For everyday, she wore her disguise as a nice girl.

Lydia brought Alex coffee in bed like a handmaiden – she who was more accustomed to being the princess. She knelt in her silk nightdress on the bed beside him, watching him drink. — I’ve always loved you, Alex, she said, in that intensely serious voice it was impossible to distinguish from her mock-serious one. — You do know that? From the moment I first set eyes on you in the French class. I’ve never wavered.

— These are fairy stories, he said, not unkindly. — No one believes in them in any more. You should have lived in the nineteenth century for all that: true love, the one and only. It helped when everyone died young. If this had happened twenty years ago you’d be disenchanted by now, I can assure you.

She shook her head. — I won’t be disenchanted, ever. Don’t misunderstand me though: you’ll never know how nice I was to Zachary. You never believed I was good enough for him: but I was. And I swear he never had any inkling of what I felt about you. I knew how lucky I was to be married to him. I made him happy. He saved me when my heart was broken because I knew I couldn’t have you.

Alex marvelled at her. — You’re wilful. You invented a romantic story and you’ve stuck to it in your wilful heart. It’s an act of will.

Lydia thought about that. — But how else does anyone live?