— Don’t you feel bad? Christine said. — I mean, letting Juliet give all this away to you, while all the time your plan is to carry him off? Are you going to start an affair?

— But I don’t even see him! The only one besotted with me is the kid. He can’t get enough of me, he’s always trying to put his hands up my skirt or into my bra. And he drives me up the wall with his questions. Remind me never, ever to have children.

— It would be different if it was your own.

— You think? Maybe.

The girls pored together over Alex’s poems, when his book came out. Lydia read them aloud one at a time, trying to crack them like a code, find the key to what he wanted. Each poem was short enough, set apart at the centre of its creamy page, and the words weren’t in themselves incomprehensible, they were the plain words of everyday speech. Superficially the poems seemed to be about real material objects – a sofa or a coal shed or a bread knife – or actual moments in the real world. And yet the girls, trained as they were, had no idea how to read them or what to take from them. They learned from the author’s note that Alexandr’s family had come to Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1968, when he was nine, and that his father had been a writer too, a novelist. The poems reminded Christine of the solid things in Alex’s study: not charming or poignant like the poetry she was used to, but dense and heavy on the page, functional, the words fitting his thoughts as closely as tools worn smooth with handling. Their power was in the resistance they offered to any reading that was pretty or comforting.

Juliet told Lydia that publishing the collection had made Alex miserable. He ought to have been delighted, fame at last. — Not that anybody’s reviewed it yet or anything, she said. — Of course, that’s a sore point. He says in England it’s just little circles of posh poets, reviewing one another.