– I’m miserably drunk, Gracie, he said. — But at least I’m warm. I thought it was the end of the world, waiting outside. I needed you. I can always talk to you. You’re sweet. You’re a good girl.

— You’re safe now.

Making some involuntary grunting, assenting noise, he turned his back on her eventually and fell asleep; fascinated, Grace kept watch over his absence. Hours passed while rain washed against the window, cleansing and purifying. Sandy’s intricate, difficult self was in abeyance, his beautiful body left behind was like her hostage. When the grey dawn came round, she leaned over his sleeping form to view him in its sober light, and saw through him for the first time: her enchantment had passed, the sexual spell she’d been in thrall to since before she knew what sex was. That god had slipped away without any fanfare, out of the mortal guise he’d taken. When Sandy made love to her in the morning – rather perfunctorily and shamefacedly, as if he owed it to her – although Grace was eagerly pleased, it didn’t make much difference to anything.

Six

THEY WERE ALL in Venice, but not for the Biennale. Zachary and Lydia would stay on for that, Christine had preferred to come a couple of weeks before it opened – which coincided anyway with the school holidays, for Alex. She’d rather look at the old art, she said, her heart was there. Her feelings about the Biennale were complex: critical, competitive, hostile, excluded. Anyway she wasn’t that kind of artist, she worked on a more intimate scale. Nathan Kearney was with them too, for fun, and they had left the girls at home – Isobel was revising for her A levels and being paid to look after Grace, who was fourteen and had refused to join them. Grace was going through a phase of despising all art galleries and museums: she said she was an anarchist, and was contemptuous of the rituals of high culture she’d been brought up on, a cloying diet of too many private views, first nights, award ceremonies. Her critique delighted Zachary and amused Lydia; only Christine felt bruised, though she was also ashamed of this. Grace was only a child, what could her opinion matter? But she felt the danger of Grace’s contempt, how it shrivelled her work’s meaning. Grace in her crazy clothes was audacious and stylish, dismissive of tradition and nuance: she might be the future.