Zachary began to give her a small amount of money secretly, and she paid one of the other mothers to pick up Isobel from school on her painting days, so that she could go on working for two precious extra hours, while Alex taught. Zach said he was investing in her career. There was even a relish, a hot triumph, in keeping secrets from her husband. She knew that Alex didn’t really attend to her opinions, or weigh them against his own. He liked to talk with men, or to have women listen to him; in company he was surprised if the women made too much noise, too insistently – he retreated then into his privacy, his irony. Christine beat against his indifference, in her mind. He wasn’t indifferent to her moods or her feelings, only her ideas. If he loved her, it was for what she was unconsciously. He didn’t mind her having opinions, but that wasn’t the same thing as his really taking notice of them – as he might do, for instance, if he thoroughly attended to a book which changed his mind. She desired this real, mind-changing attention from him, for her thoughts, for her work. Was it out of petulance or egoism merely? Otherwise her husband didn’t really know her. Didn’t she love him for the content of his thoughts? Didn’t she take so much of her truth from him?

It had been obvious all along that Zachary must open his own art gallery. And then almost as soon as he went looking for a premises he found a red-brick chapel, built by the Huguenots in a modest back street of terraced eighteenth-century cottages in Clerkenwell. The chapel’s main entrance and its row of arched side-windows fronted directly onto the street: the windows still had their original thick flawed greenish glass. In its proportions the place was domestic, friendly – the interior with its floor tiles worn by human passage into a shallow relief landscape, its dreamy underwater light, its gracefully curving upper gallery supported on iron pillars. After the Huguenots the chapel had been Wesleyan and the Wesleys themselves had preached there, then it was a school for a while, and then a chapel again – Bethesda, into the 1970s. An arched gateway wide enough for a wagon, fitted at some point with corrugated iron doors now rusted fantastically, gave access to a cobbled courtyard overgrown with buddleia and nettles and filled up high with junk – old chapel pews ripped out when the chapel was used as storage for a builders’ merchant, heaps of rotted drugget, plastic sacks of hardened cement, abandoned steel scaffolding poles and bolts, an ancient Gurney stove, hymn books rotted down to pulp.