— I don’t care anyway. I vastly prefer what I do now. It’s such a relief to feel myself acting impersonally. And I hadn’t expected the classroom’s warmth. How interested I am in all of them.

— And now you’re translating your dad’s books. That’s a lovely thing too.

— Well, they’re not lovely books. They’re brutal. I don’t know if there are readers for them in our soft age.

Leaping ahead in his thoughts, Zachary jiggled his tiny coffee cup of thick china, though there was nothing left in it. — Do you think it’s a male thing?

— Brutality? History would probably gently nudge us towards that conclusion.

— No, no: that inhibition you talked about, feeling you lived in the aftermath, with nothing left to say. Because in the visual arts, you know, it’s occurred to me that women have been exempted from certain forms of self-doubt, which might be gendered.

Alex looked at him vaguely. — Gendered? That’s an ugly word.

— Because the pen has been in the male hand and all that, for so long. Now that women have picked up the pen – for writing, for painting, for everything – they may feel all kinds of doubt but not that one. Because they’re not belated. As women they’re still near the beginning.

— But we all live in the same belated world, we men and women.

Zachary could tell that Alex wasn’t interested in his idea. He seemed sometimes to tolerate Zachary’s conscientious politics as if they were an occupational hazard, or a temperamental weakness. — Chris’s work for instance, Zachary persisted, wanting to persuade his friend in this moment of openness between them. He wanted to open it wider: embrace the women inside their intimacy. — How has she been able to make her art so freely? It’s poured out of her, hasn’t it? Why hasn’t she felt the heavy hand on her shoulder?

Alex looked startled, before a shutter fell across his expression, across some secret. It took him aback, Zachary saw, to have Christine’s work invoked in the same scale as anything he, Alex, might have done. Zachary was startled too. He hadn’t known that Alex didn’t take his wife’s work quite seriously: didn’t, in their horrible old schoolboy phrase, really rate it. He must have only been kind, and condescending, and keeping a domestic peace, when he had acquiesced for all these years in seeming to rate it. The implications of Alex’s mistake – Zachary was sure it was a mistake – seemed for a moment fairly tragic. And the night’s happy mutuality deflated, each man was disappointed in the other. — As you say, Alex said drily, but with finality, as if it were the end of any discussion he wanted to have. — It pours out of her.