When finally they were standing beneath the famous ceiling in the Sala, she was exceptionally receptive not because she was prepared, but because she wasn’t. It caught her out in her passivity, the blank of apprehension she presented to it. A pale clear light came in through windows composed of rounds of glass like bottle-ends; voices in the street outside were remote as the swifts’ shrieking. Dizzily she turned round and round where she stood, staring up, making her neck ache, trying to disentangle individual figures – whose foot is that, whose legs are those? – from the billows of gorgeous drapery, masses of rich form soaring against empty skies. She seemed to experience these colours – sumptuous pinks and gold and pale green – on her skin, the bodies’ torsion in her own muscles. Every ordinary day, while their lives went on elsewhere, the Virgin presided in here, a superb queen – and the force of the angels’ strong wings was like great birds’, so that you felt the updraught of their movement. She was in the presence of what was momentous. And in one corner was an awful darkness – an open grave, bones, brown filth, suffering, two hands emerging from a cloud, forming between fingers and thumbs an O for nothingness.

— Oh, it’s … I love this, Zach.

He put an arm across her shoulders. — I love it too. They staggered together, craning their heads backwards, gazing up, pointing; then Zachary found mirrors backed with polished wood, put out for visitors to use. Humility with her long eyes, in pink and silver with a crown under her foot, cuddling a lamb, didn’t look humble in the least; they both agreed she looked like Lydia. Another couple, French, ascended the staircase, reading aloud from the leaflet; determinedly Christine and Zachary exuded an air of prior possession. By the time the French gave up and left, Christine was sitting on the wooden bench which ran around the base of the wall, looking into the mirror on her lap to take in the whole ceiling. Zachary sat down beside her and leaned over to see what she saw; Christine excitedly met his eyes in the glass, his reflection smiling out at her. — I love the past, she said.

— Oh yes, me too, the past.

— But I mean it, I’m serious, listen. Sometimes these days I almost think I can do without the present. The past is enough for me, it’s enough for my life. Does that sound insane? I could only say it to you.

— It’s not insane.

Watching his eyes in the mirror, she saw him feel with her what she felt. — I’m not saying that the past was good, she went on, — or fair, or better, or anything. But nothing will ever be more beautiful than this, will it? It’s surpassingly beautiful. It surpasses anything I could have imagined. It fulfils me, it’s enough for me.