Alex took Grace back to Glasgow. He cleaned up the kitchen in the shared house above the shop and filled it with bread and cheese and pasta and fruit, unpacked the fruit cake which Christine had made for her. Two of her housemates were in residence and he didn’t know whether it was Grace’s bereavement which made them creep around so meekly, bursting with their repressed shy sympathy, or his inhibiting presence and forbidding age. He stayed overnight, in a sleeping bag on a dank sofa whose springs had collapsed, and the next day he escorted her to the Art School. In a chilly damp studio looming with unborn or half-born forms amid sodden sandbags, filthy with stone dust, he watched Grace in goggles and dust mask cut vindictively into the lump of half-carved limestone she’d left behind her in another life. He had a feeling she was only obliterating every trace of her old intentions, returning her artwork to pre-existence. He offered to stay another night, make sure she was OK, but she didn’t want him. He wasn’t any use to her, he was the wrong person, he wasn’t Zachary. He telephoned Christine to let her know he was setting out for home.

— Alex is en route, Christine announced to Lydia, yawning and then rousing herself, wifely. She ought to cook something, get some milk in, tidy up. Lydia said vaguely then, only half meaning it, that she should go back to Garret’s Lane. Alex had had enough of her, she should leave them alone, couldn’t really spend the rest of her life battening on to her friends’ domestic arrangements. The two women had lapsed, in Alex’s absence, into slow hours of reading and desultory talk, not quite intimate, amidst a debris of dirty coffee cups and wine glasses, plates of crumbs.

— Don’t go!

Christine protested, but in that same moment was aware that there might be something stale in their conversation, if it continued any longer. They were falling back on old patterns inherited from their past, and might be wearing out their shared present. Now it was as if Alex’s impending arrival tolled a bell; blinking, they looked around them, surprised by the time. He gave a form to their formlessness, punctuated it with necessity. Lydia insisted, her idea taking hold. — Seriously, I’m in the mood. Alex will be exhausted after all that driving. He won’t want me in the way. I’ll call Grace up and talk to her for company.

— In the way of what? Don’t be silly. But just for one night perhaps. Your home is always here, if you want it. Don’t be afraid or sad, will you, in that place on your own?

— I will be sad, Lydia said. — But I’d better get used to it.