Lydia understood, with a leap of sympathetic imagination, how he carried this burden of his father’s achievement, which blocked his own. Of course he couldn’t see himself as she saw him, so perfect in his offhandedness, his handsome young sadness, squinting in the smoke from his cigarette, pale face stark against his dark coat with its collar turned up. — I could change, Alex, she said, — if you helped me. What do you think I ought to do? Perhaps I could become quite noble and self-sacrificing if you told me to do something. I would really try.

— You ought to read more, he said.

She was disappointed, she’d hoped for some impossible mission against the grain of her nature: charity work or travel to some rugged, miserable place. — Is that all? That’s not enough.

He lent her a book, which he took out from his briefcase: Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. — I don’t know whether this is a good thing, he said. — But you ought to know what’s going on.

Lydia took it without enthusiasm. — I won’t understand it. I’m not as clever as you think.

When Alex asked after Christine, Lydia said she was fine, she was working hard. Chris was really the clever one, Lydia explained. — She’s the real thing. Why, do you like her? Yes, I’m not surprised that you like her. She has her own ideas, she’s not like me, she doesn’t just follow what everyone else thinks.

Christine and Zachary Samuels did go out together for a while. They really got on well. They spent hours in the National Gallery and the Tate, showing each other all their favourites, discussing them absorbedly. They enjoyed the same films and books, shared the same politics, spoke uninhibitedly. When they slept together it was very purely pleasurable: Zachary was so physically at ease and generous, enjoyed their lovemaking so frankly, undid something knotted and watchful in Christine. Yet when she remembered their happy companionship afterwards, she never quite thought of calling them lovers, even to herself. The word had too much excess in it, couldn’t convey how economically and smoothly they had been conjoined. There was supposed to be some violence in sexual love, which swept you away in its adventure; when she was with Zachary she had hardly felt the jolt to her own sensibility.