Lydia felt herself at some crisis, now they’d arrived at the end of their formal education. Dissent and scepticism had been easy while they were held tight inside its frame – now something more was called for, and she dreaded testing her reserves of imagination and energy, finding them empty. At first she had played at falling in love with Alex because it gave a shape to her days, and a motivation: then her obsession had swallowed up its original purpose. Her lack of him gnawed at her, making her incomplete; she thought fatalistically that if she had any talent it was probably for this, for a destructive passion. Lydia had the biggest room in the shared house, with the biggest bed – where she slept sprawling luxuriantly in dirty sheets, rarely getting up before midday. Her room was chaotically untidy, with clothes heaped on every piece of furniture, or dropped on the floor where she’d taken them off. She had a gift for finding treasures – old couture silks and satins, stiff net petticoats – among the dross in junk shops; everything smelled of mothballs, or of beer and cigarette smoke from the bar.

The whole house was a semi-ruin and they lived in it like children camping, playing at grown-up life. Christine’s room on the ground floor was half the size of Lydia’s and chilly, with a greenish light she loved: its French windows opened onto a ruined conservatory and overgrown garden. It was in this green-lit room that Christine pored over her books of poetry, making notes, working in the evenings in the light from her desk lamp, hearing the subdued frisson of rain on the leaves in the garden at her back. Her PhD was on Christina Rossetti. The male teachers at university had tried to dissuade her, saying Rossetti’s verse was too flimsy, wouldn’t bear up under that level of sustained attention. She persevered, but not without self-doubt. If Lydia had a night off from bar-work, then Christine would take a tray of tea things up to her room at the end of the evening. Lydia would have been reading too: the whole house would seem charged with their separate concentration, their silence. But Lydia read so differently: always novels, not poetry, devouring them one after another, classics and contemporary fiction and thrillers muddled in together, opening up something new almost as soon as she’d finished reading the last words of the previous one. While she read she was utterly absorbed, then she closed the books mostly without comment, or with a snap judgement uttered with finality: dull, or excellent. Christine would pick up the book and puzzle into its pages, worrying over so many words. — But why is it dull?

— The heroine had such a silly name.