He kept the Garret’s Lane keys on his key ring. When he pulled up in the gallery’s cobbled parking space – beside Zach’s old plum-coloured Jaguar which Lydia didn’t want because she hated driving – his body was chilly from air conditioning, numb from his long journey; it was a relief breathing in the warm night outside the car, meaty and beery and tainted with traffic fumes. Taking the stone steps two at a time he turned his key in the lock, anticipating the peace of the empty rooms, where a faint veil of dust would have had time to settle on the designer furniture between the cleaner’s visits. The nothingness in him needed silence and stillness. Yet even before he pushed open the door he was aware of an assault of music, incomprehensible and outraging: Beethoven, Fischer-Dieskau singing ‘An die ferne Geliebte’, one of Zachary’s perennials, played on the sound system at top volume. Zachary had used to sing along to it in his enormous, tuneless voice, so delighted with himself and so stirred, his eyes and his heart full, big beard wagging, waving his arms around, conducting encouragingly towards his imaginary accompanist, missing every note.

Alex was almost vengeful; it didn’t occur to him to deduce logically that it must have been Lydia who put the music on and had every right to, in her own home. He didn’t deduce anything, only came striding aggrievedly, bewildered, from the hall through the sitting room and study into the kitchen, flinging the open doors noisily back against the walls. Then he set out up the stairs, in pursuit of his explanation. The music couldn’t be playing by itself. And Lydia in her bathrobe at her dressing table in the bedroom, warm from her shower, didn’t deduce anything logically either: only heard the front door slammed shut, and then the doors of the downstairs rooms banging open, someone advancing heavily upstairs. She seemed to be hunted down. When Alex stood in her bedroom doorway she was as shocked as he was, sitting staring in her bathrobe with her hairdryer turned off, raised in one hand, her other hand over her heart. Her iPod – or more likely Zachary’s, because he was always spending money on new devices to play his music – was in its socket on a chest of drawers, puny bland origin of so much magnificent tender drama. Auf dem Hügel sitz ich spähend/In das blaue Nebelland. Alex took a step inside the room and when Lydia stood up an antique ebony hand mirror fell out of her lap and cracked on the wood floor.

— Christ, Alex, she said: quavering, tearful. — I didn’t know who you were.