By the time Alex and Juliet returned from the dinner party – they found their babysitters watching television innocently, side by side on the sofa – Alex was in a better mood. He joked with them while Juliet searched in her purse for the money to pay them. He asked if they were still reading Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Had they given up on decadence yet? Lydia turned on all her charm and chattered eagerly, punctuating her remarks with false-sounding bursts of laughter. — Oh no, she said. — We’re going to be decadent for years!

But Christine felt how Alex didn’t respond to this charm as he was supposed to. Lydia’s audacious frankness, her wide-eyed amused delivery, complacent like a purring cat, which had been so confounding to other men, didn’t impress him. In Alex’s presence, so perfected and adult, Lydia’s cleverness seemed flawed and home-made, embarrassing like a precocious child’s.

Soon Lydia was round at Kensal Rise almost every day. She didn’t see much of Alex, though; mostly she was babysitting for Sandy or drinking coffee or wine at the kitchen table with Juliet, who poured out to her all the dissatisfactions of her marriage. Actually Lydia liked Juliet. Lydia was really very impressionable, although she appeared so disabused and knowing, and had such decided opinions. She was drawn into strong connection with women she met, studying them for clues as to how to grow up, what kind of person to be; she admired Juliet’s bright little house, her tidy cupboards, her competence and toughness – and was rather afraid of her, fascinated by the idea of her intimacy with Alex. She could not imagine achieving for herself any existence so strongly flavoured, so deep.

Alex was moody and difficult, Juliet complained. He didn’t know how to enjoy himself. He loved his little son but thought he could just go on with the old life he’d had before there was a child, reading all day and tapping away on his typewriter, or just leaving the house without saying anything, not coming home sometimes for hours on end. He expected Juliet to take the brunt of the childcare – which made it difficult for her to get any acting work, even though it paid much better than his poetry. In fact his poetry didn’t pay at all. Juliet wasn’t supposed to say a word about all the books he bought, although they were so short of money that she had to cook for weeks on end with lentils and potatoes. — He doesn’t care, she said. — He hardly notices what he eats.

Lydia entered sympathetically into Juliet’s difficulty in living with Alex: and yet these stories at the same time made him more desirable. She thought that if she had him she wouldn’t try to tame him, tie him down. And then, who wouldn’t rather buy books than lentils?