She had been so keenly interested, then, in what Alex thought. But after a while things weren’t so difficult after all, and she never really knew how much that had to do with all those sessions of interrogation. Anyway, she didn’t think any longer about the truth in that same way: as a core underneath a series of obfuscations and disguises. In the long run, weren’t the disguises just as interesting, weren’t they real too? She and Alex were so unlike, really: associated through some accident in their youth – the accident of his choosing her, because of what he thought she was. Since that beginning, they had both changed their skins so often. Marriage simply meant that you hung on to each other through the succession of metamorphoses. Or failed to.

Lydia must have sensed Christine’s presence in the doorway, or felt its alteration in the light, at just the instant she withdrew it. After a pause Christine heard her stand up from the sofa and walk over to the door; she stood at the foot of the stairs, staring up, her eyes taking time to adjust to the different light. Alex’s book was still in her hand dropped by her side, finger holding it open at a certain page – she made no attempt to conceal what she’d been reading. Why should she?

— Chris, what are you doing there?

— Just thinking, Christine said. — I was thinking about the four of us.

— What about us?

— You know, all our history together, the way we were.

— Oh, I see.

Lydia sounded disappointed, as if she’d waited for something else.

— Is it drawing to a close, do you think? Our bourgeois sensibility. All our sadness and our subtlety, our complicated arrangements. Our privilege of subtlety and irony is at an end. What’s in that Polish poem Alex quotes? Something about how the barbarians don’t object to irony. They just grind it up and use it as their salt.

— So it’s all up for us, the lilies of the field.

— You’re a lily. I’ve never been a lily.

Lydia climbed the stairs and sat down beside Christine with the book in her lap. — Who wants to be a fucking lily? Although I must say, look how nice I was once, in your picture. What fun we had in those days.