When he’d gone the familiar anguish of loss cut her down like a wielded sabre: she could have sunk to her knees. Now she burned up for him, when it was too late. Oh, Alex! Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart, My silent heart, lie still and break. But she knew better than to give way to this. Instead, willing her dead limbs to work, she found her bag and her coat and keys and went out. Even the first gasp of polluted city wind, snatching at her when she opened the front door, blowing her along with scraps of greasy litter, restored her sanity like a slap in the face. She wanted to sew new cushions for the front room; a shop round the corner traded in bright wax-resist printed cottons, made in Holland for the West African market. There was an electric bell to press beside the shop door, and when they let her inside the place was noisy with Nigerians buying up bolts of fabric in quantities to fill their suitcases. By the time she’d puzzled over her choice of colours, she was all right again. This agony of parting came in spasms, it appeared; one had only to endure them, to get beyond them. She was pleased with the joyous pink and mustard-yellow fabric when she got it home, and fetched down her sewing machine right away from the attic storage-space. With no one else to take into consideration, she could order her days according to her own whim, sleep and eat and clean up when she liked.

The cruel truth was, Christine thought, that when she got past the pain and humiliation of their parting, she had no more use for Alex. The pain was a phantom, crying out in longing for something that was no longer part of her. She started and stopped the sewing machine in furious-sounding bursts, snapping off her threads jerkily, measuring for her cushions, calculating. Such ice-cold wisdom: she was half horrified at herself. But it would have been cold wisdom too if she’d taken Alex back – if he’d even wanted it. Once their lives had been full of the hidden meanings each sought out in the other, but that was years ago. And now he’d torn through all those intricate filaments of their coexistence which had bound them, and so she could learn to live without him. He was right: Lydia needed him, and she didn’t. There was always the fundamental question – shied away from in imagination even as she sewed – of her work, what to do. But Alex couldn’t help with that.