Christine didn’t want to think about Alex, whom they hardly knew and were in awe of, having sex with anyone. She said she had no idea. Yet she couldn’t help her own curiosity, in relation to the material thickness of these lives – Juliet, too, became glamorous by association with Alex. The girls searched in the fridge, tried the alcoholic drinks, read the postcards propped on the windowsill among the plants, even read a few letters left lying around; they felt for married secrets in the arrangements of the rooms. It was clear two forces were at odds in the tiny house, pitted against each other. On the female side there were the jars of lentils and pasta with gaily painted lids, the child’s drawings stuck on the fridge, the Indian embroideries on velvet, plants everywhere. Juliet was good at growing things. Ranged against this female brightness and optimism were the books in their plain covers on the shelves in Alex’s study, in English and French and other languages they didn’t recognise, piled punishingly high and thick with dust. The electric typewriter, the desk with its brimming ashtray, the broken dirty venetian blind hanging at a slant against the dark outside, the swivel chair on its chrome stem: all these were so deliberately ugly, modern, an austere exhibition of the life of the mind. Black-and-white photographs propped on the shelves or pinned on the walls were all photographs of men, other writers presumably, taken in rooms very like Alex’s study, also piled untidily with books and papers.

Christine flushed at something antiquarian in her own studies, her fusty lovelorn lady poets. And she felt protective on Lydia’s behalf, against what was forbidding in Alex: the whole weight of a world of knowledge they didn’t share, a history and prestige in other languages which shut them out, showed them up as provincial and ignorant. Lydia was betting on the power of sex, against all this monumental difference. — Are you sure that Alex’s right for you? Christine wondered carefully. — I mean, even if he wasn’t married and everything. I think he’s quite cold. I admire him but I don’t think I like him.

Lydia agreed, accepting her doom. — He’s completely the wrong person. But it’s love, I don’t have any choice.

In spite of her lady poets, Christine didn’t quite believe in that kind of love. She was always falling in love herself, with her supervisor, with a brother of one of their housemates – even with a boy who worked in the butcher’s shop. And at the same time she could drily watch herself stoking her own anguish and abjection, knowing she could be free in one minute if she chose. But perhaps what Lydia felt was the authentic thing, and it was her own ironic detachment which was exceptional, shutting her out from life.