Christine sometimes went guiltily back to bed in the afternoons, before Alex came in from school, to read or doze. Coming downstairs once when she woke after a nap, treading quietly because she thought Lydia too might be asleep, she saw through the open doorway that her friend was reading on the sofa in the sitting room. Something prevented her from stepping forward across that threshold, offering to make tea, breaking the spell of Lydia’s solitude. Her concentration on her book was so intense, almost severe; frowning, straight-backed, wearing her reading glasses, sitting forward from the sofa cushions, her face uncharacteristically slack and plain because she believed herself unobserved. Lydia was reading Alex’s poems. Her hair, fastened in a clip at the nape of her neck, glinted with bronze in the sunlight from the window, and she wound and unwound one loose strand around her finger.

A breeze fanned the newspaper on the table, the smells of a city summer were wafted through the open window: tar and car exhaust, the bitter-green of the flowering privet hedge. Police horses went past in the broad street, their hooves clip-clopping conversationally alongside the voices of the women who rode them; the stables were nearby. Christine saw in the hard light how the flesh was beginning to be puffy under Lydia’s eyes and drag down her cheeks. Yet this late ripeness was attractive in itself, she could see that too, softening Lydia’s haughty beauty, filling it out with character and experience. Lydia must be so afraid, now she was left alone, of wasting this late flare of her power on no one, on emptiness. In a few years they would be old women: sixty! There wasn’t much time.

Christine stepped back from the door, then sat down on the stairs in the dim light, to think where it was cool. Lydia appeared to be studying Alex, setting herself the problem of what he was. Long ago, when Isobel was a baby, Christine had fought Alex for her life, so that he would acknowledge that in the domain of the mind they were equals, separate as equals. She couldn’t remember now why this had mattered so much, or where her appetite had come from for those long late-night sessions, prising away layer upon layer of resistance and falsity, confession matched with counter-confession. The lovemaking that usually ended things had sometimes amazed and reconciled them, sometimes seemed the continuation of their fight by other means. When Isobel woke them in the early morning their eyes had been sore with lack of sleep, they’d gone about in a daze of exposure.