He must be making it up, they exclaimed, it was too perfectly nun-like. Or it was like a passage from a novel by Colette.

— No, really, that’s what they’re saying, listen!

Zachary had the gift of taking his difficult work lightly, shedding it when he came away, putting himself entirely at the disposal of his friends. Alex would say it wasn’t a gift, it was Hannah, who would take care of Zachary’s emails for him, manage the gallery in his absence like his second self. Still, there was a kind of genius in how thoroughly, between bursts of his gargantuan energy, Zachary could fall back into relaxation. His presence now, lounging in sunglasses and T-shirt and frayed straw hat on a sagging canvas chair between Lydia and Christine, only shallowly absorbed in one of the novels Lydia had cast off, was palpably whole, not thinned by any lapses of concentration or twinges from elsewhere. Yet in a week or so he would pick up his tasks of networking and negotiation with unflagging enthusiasm. Christine wondered what it meant, to belong so wholeheartedly to the world as Zachary did, have it cast its net of possession so far across your self, trawling so deep. It must be a virtuous thing: someone had to run the world, and save it. But she couldn’t imagine it for herself, couldn’t imagine not wanting to keep everything back from the net, or almost everything. Was Zachary cheapened, allowing himself to be made instrumental?

She had her sketchbook out and was drawing him: not Venice, that was impossible, what was there left to see? But she was trying to capture this aspect of her friend, his eagerness to please, in the bold strokes of her charcoal: black scribble of beard, swell of paunch, long lines of the arms flung back in abandon, book half fallen from a lifeless hand. The Art Dealer. Christine had been drawn recently to the work of certain figure-painters of the twenties and thirties – James Cowie, Felice Casorati: they had influenced what she was doing. Not everyone understood or liked her new pictures, narrative art was still suspect. Alex said that they were too explicit – although if she pressed him to explain what he thought they meant, then he couldn’t do it, or wouldn’t. She had hoped that over the years her works would get bigger – it seemed to be a prerequisite for a career of matching size. But instead they’d shrunk. Not many of them, now, were much larger than a modest TV set.