Grace and Isobel went over to Isobel’s flat in Queens Park, where Grace would sleep – it was only twenty minutes on the bus, they insisted they didn’t want a lift, or a cab. — I want to be normal, Grace said. They would come back in the evening to eat, so they could all be together again. When they’d gone, Christine took a lasagne out of the freezer. Then she stood for a few minutes alone under the sloping roof in her bedroom. It wasn’t like a stone after all, this intrusion of grief: a stone was cold and still, you could surround it, but this swelled inside her and receded then swelled again uncontrollably; she felt helpless against its violence, her usual self wrecked and lost, turned inside out. She called out subduedly to Alex, to come upstairs. They spoke in low voices. — Do you mind if I go out just for half an hour while Lydia sleeps? Will you keep an eye on her? I need to walk.

He touched her face sympathetically; the flesh under her eyes was swollen with crying and fatigue. In a crisis Alex was strong and she leaned on him: it was a form of laziness, a convenience between them. And it suited him too, she thought, to play the role of her protector from time to time. Neither she nor Lydia were conventional in their personalities, they called themselves feminists, yet both had chosen patterns of relationship with men which looked almost like their mothers’ marriages, dependent and sheltered; they lived their secret lives inside the strong shell of their husbands’ worldliness and competence. Now Lydia’s shell had been broken open and she was exposed, alone.

Christine didn’t often wear make-up but felt the need to put it on today, before she could show her face outside. When the drawer in her dressing table jammed she was flooded with rage and tugged so hard that it came flying out, scattering its stupid contents. She stared at the mess, then crouched to pick up the eye-pencils, hair grips, eyeshadow, tubes of face cream, sachets of depilatory cream, indigestion pills, contraceptives she no longer needed – even a couple of ancient Tampax from the past, their paper wrappings tatty and grubby. A film of dirty, greasy powder from the bottom of the drawer settled on the wool carpet.

In the street things were better. She gulped down the tarry, tainted city air, felt the heat of the car engines on her legs and the paving stones hard under her feet, took in the shopfronts one after another in all their vivid detail: the bolts of African fabrics, rows of bottles of coloured varnish in the nail parlour, jars of vermilion peppers lined up on the shelves of the Polish delicatessen. All this was a relief: the impersonal solid forms of the world which would persist without Zachary, without happiness, without her.