One afternoon they met for tea at the Louis, to commemorate the occasions they’d missed meeting there in childhood. She had given him her drawings and a couple of small paintings to look at, things she’d done in her life classes, where she was learning to give her human subjects the same exaggerated presence she’d given to books and clothes in the old scraperboards. She contracted the human forms for density and pushed them forward to fill the picture frame. Zachary talked through the pieces one by one and said he loved them, they were so exciting. She had never spoken to anyone before about her art. He said she should take it very seriously. She should give up the PhD, put everything into it.

Christine was fearful, joyous. — But won’t I fail?

— You won’t fail.

She bowed her head, staring down at the brown tea circling in the flowery cup, and felt tears of happiness spring in her eyes. His confidence had the momentousness for her of an annunciation. He said it was a good thing she hadn’t been to art school, her kind of work wasn’t fashionable, they’d have set themselves against it and tried to change her. But she must have the conviction of her style. Afterwards, when they came out of the cafe into a thin rain, neither of them had an umbrella. — I could take you home, she suddenly suggested, although the idea hadn’t occurred to her until that moment: their relationship wasn’t at the point of needing to meet parents. — I mean, to my real home. The house where I grew up.

— I’d love that, Zachary said.

Christine still kept a key in her purse to her old front door, broad unpretentious entrance to a plain, well-proportioned eighteenth-century house. She was proud of herself, bringing home a real man – almost thirty – who would make clever conversation, and know the sort of people her family knew. The boys she’d brought home before had been too impossible. Christine’s mother Barbara was small and soft and pretty, full of subtle discriminations, exacting over her clothes, aiming for a French look with a tincture of earthy, arty colours; Christine took after her tall, thin father, an expert in health systems who worked for the UN. She and her father would decide from time to time that Barbara was frivolous, while her two sturdy brothers took their mother’s side.