She announced this news to Alex as if she’d done it to please him. And he was pleased, relieved that the gallery would be kept open; although it turned out to be complicated setting up the new arrangements legally, having them approved by the Trustees. As the other executor of the will, Max must be involved at every stage, and was difficult, although – famously oblivious to everyone else’s crises – he surely didn’t know yet about Alex and Lydia. At weekends Alex sat at Zachary’s desk on the mezzanine, working out what Lydia needed from the accountants and her solicitors, filling out the forms for probate, sending emails in her name. Zachary had always done all the practical work in their marriage.

Of all things, Alex and Lydia had this in common – the loss of Zachary; there was some literal, physical sense in which their lovemaking assuaged their loss. Lydia was generous with herself, with her body – Alex took possession of her greedily, overwhelmed by the release and the relief of the sweetness they went seeking in the dark. There had been other women once or twice, in the years since he’d been married to Christine, but he’d backed off from something glib and counterfeit in those affairs. To his relief, Lydia wasn’t sexually athletic or competitive. Certain revelations of her character – reserves of her self kept back, like candles saved up to light a cellar or a cave – could only be had, he thought, through this sexual connection with her. He began to see how her intelligence was not wide-ranging but concentrated, and how she was remarkably without illusions, and stubbornly wedded to one or two ideas from her early youth. She was frank with him but never spilled over with self-doubt or asked for reassurance, nor did she want to know his secrets.

He had always been struck by her lack of any ambition for a life lived in public. Now her idleness, which he had once disapproved of, seemed profound to him – like a form of extremity, or a great risk. He thought about the mistresses of bankers and politicians in the past, hidden away behind their flower gardens in villas in St John’s Wood, alone all day with their mirrors and their thoughts. But wasn’t the stupid servitude of their men more degraded, bound to their wheel of daily work and success, their public banality? Strictly speaking, of course, in the material sense, Lydia was in no danger of becoming a kept woman; it was Alex who must look out, in case he became a kept man. When his car packed up, though, it made sense for him to use Zachary’s old plum-coloured Jaguar.