On her way to tell Alex, Christine paused outside the open door of her studio, where the shapes of her work waited faithfully for her in the dusk: bottles of ink, twisted tubes of paint, the Chinese porcelain pot with her pens and brushes, the pinboard stuck with postcards and pictures torn from magazines, feathers, stained cloth, scraps of weathered plastic. Creamy sheets of thick paper, laid out on her desk, waited for her mark; primed canvases were stacked against the wall, pieces in progress were on the easel or pinned onto boards. She came to this scene of her labours each morning like coming to a religious observance, performing little rituals she had never mentioned to anyone. Her strongest desire these days was to be at work in there – standing up at the easel, or head and shoulders bowed over the paper on her desk in concentration, absorbed in her imitation of forms, her inventions. But now the idea of this work – the fixed point by which she steered – was sickening. It seemed fraudulent, the sticky project of her own vanity: she closed the door on it quickly. Then she opened it again – there was a key in the lock which she turned sometimes when she didn’t want to be interrupted. She took out this key and locked the studio from the outside, put the key in her jeans pocket.

The music was still playing in the front room.

— Was it your mother? Alex asked.

Her heart lunged in thick beats in her chest, she didn’t know if she could speak. It was terrible to have to ruin his happiness with this news, standing over him where he lay propped up on cushions on the sofa, untroubled – or no more troubled than usual. — It was Lydia.

— What did she want?

— Alex, I have to tell you. Zachary has had a heart attack. It sounds as if it was a heart attack.

— No.

— He’s dead, he’s gone.

For a moment Alex was exposed to his wife in his raw shock, vivid against the brilliant red of the cushions. — Oh no, you’re kidding. No.

Usually he seemed so completed and impervious, with his springy compact energy and pugnacious sharp jaw, shapely head alert and sensuous like an emperor’s.

— She rang me from the hospital, UCH. I’m going to her now. I’ve called a cab.

His book fell to the floor and he stood up in the darkening room. — It can’t be true. What happened?

— One minute he was at his desk in the office at the gallery, talking to Jane Ogden, perfectly fine, the next he keeled over, hit his head perhaps, everything went flying. Hannah tried CPR, the paramedics tried everything. Before they got him to the hospital, he was dead. Jane had to phone Lydia, she was out shopping.

— What time was this?

Christine wasn’t sure, some time in the late afternoon or early evening.