Christine hoped that Alex felt himself shut out of the attractive room. Painting, she had felt as if she were sealing its walls against him, closing out any return of their past together. She had even given a little dinner party in here for a few friends, and enjoyed the ease of her social relations now that she didn’t have to calculate for his severe judgement, his moods. But this afternoon he seemed not to want to leave. They spoke about a play they’d both seen, though not together. For an instant a picture, distinct and materially fleshed out as a hallucination, imposed itself: that one day Lydia might sit in here between them, and their whole history be merely the gaudy backdrop to a new normality. Christine saw her old friend composed and defiantly nonchalant, turning her eyes from one to another while they talked, managing her trick of conveying that she was bored without restlessness, withdrawn inside herself. The idea made Christine nauseous. She hadn’t seen Lydia since they sat together at the concert.

Alex went to stand at the tall mirror above the mantelpiece, contemplated himself as if he were thinking about something else.

— Oh Alex, you’re not as young as you used to be.

He leaned in to scrutinise more critically. — Do I look older?

— You’re starting to look distinguished and senior, not the fiery rebel.

— Senior? Surely not yet, he exclaimed. He tilted his head to look from a different angle, dissatisfied. — You see you can manage very well without me, he said, as if she wounded him. — Lydia’s the broken one.

Christine recoiled, the gin bottle jumped in her hand as she poured. When she sat back in her chair she drew her knees up, pulled the baggy jumper down over them; burying her nose in it she breathed in the safe smell of her father, the detached expert Englishman. — Is that how you rationalise it to yourself?

— But don’t you think it’s true?

— You come off very flatteringly in this version of the story. As Lydia’s self-sacrificing saviour.

Alex dropped his gaze from himself, frowning, and played with the objets along the mantelpiece, adjusting their position without seeing them. These were lovely exceptional things Christine had found over the years: a small drawing of an interior by one of Sickert’s pupils, a glass sculpture like a frozen wave, an eighteenth-century porcelain pink-and-gold cup without its saucer, old type from an Arts and Crafts printing press. He handled them clumsily because she was watching him, as if she were afraid of his dropping something. — The thing happened, anyway, he went on. — So now there’s a new set of circumstances. Everything was changed already, because of Zachary. Everything was chaos. Lydia and I … And aren’t we bound to continue, all three of us? Being connected, I mean.

— Alex, you threw all that away!