The opportunity for their debauchery in a foursome never came around again. It must have depended on being so innocently unplanned. They hadn’t got much further along than the preliminaries, in any case, and were all still quite decently in their clothes, when Zachary had caught sight of little Isobel in her nightie standing like a sentinel angel at the bottom of the spiral staircase, looking at them with frightened and fierce eyes. Alex reassured Christine afterwards that there hadn’t been anything for Isobel to see: at any rate she wouldn’t remember seeing it in the morning. Righteously Isobel had announced that Grace was crying. — She’s been crying for hours and hours. How come you didn’t hear her calling? She wants her mummy. Lydia, she wants you.

Five

AFTER CHRISTINE HAD telephoned and Lydia had spoken to her, Alex got up out of the bed, Zachary’s bed, and began putting on his clothes without looking at Lydia. She sat naked against the pillows with the white sheet across her breasts, watching him, drinking in his reality fearfully. Her eyes were unguarded for once, naked as her body – she had taken off her make-up before her shower. Lydia knew that in speaking to Christine she might have lost him. She waited for him to say something, to break the silence. What now? She couldn’t even make conversation or ask about her own daughter, how Grace’s spirits were when Alex left her in Glasgow. That domestic way was closed to Lydia for the moment, the prohibition heavy as a hand across her mouth. She and Alex had entered a forbidden terrain where their paths were blocked in all directions. And now, by speaking to Christine, Lydia had cut them off from saving themselves, from stepping back again into what they were before. She’d made it impossible – though not premeditatedly, she hadn’t had any plan when she picked up the phone – for Alex to step back.

Lydia knew he was scalded by what she had said to Christine. Not because he was a coward or had calculated on deceiving anyone, but because there was something ingenuous in how she’d delivered her news – so baldly, like a teenager who intervenes out of her depth, precipitating adult consequences beyond what she can understand. Recalled to himself, Alex had been appalled by finding he was embroiled with Lydia, the Lydia he knew, with her exasperating passivity and fatalism like a child’s. His arm sticky with sweat had been around her neck the whole time she was talking to Christine, strands of her honey-coloured hair alien against his chest. He had been helpless not to overhear Chris’s utterly unsuspecting innocence: she was so slow to understand at first, and then so wounded and bewildered. Casting around to make sense, she hadn’t even accused them or been outraged – not yet. How could Alex and Lydia not dread each other after that? When Christine cut off the call he’d pulled away from Lydia in cold horror.