Yet Lydia persisted in clinging to those truths of the body she’d found out when she was a teenager. Their act couldn’t be undone because it wasn’t nothing: their awareness of it was present in the room all around them like a shadow-play, overmastering their reasoning. There was no redemption in the world, only in this: teenagers knew. Alex had lost himself, and if Lydia let him go now he would hate her. He pissed in the bathroom then ran the tap full force and washed his face, dried it in her towel; without looking at her or speaking, he left the room and she heard him go downstairs. She waited without moving, listening out for the sound of the front door closing with finality behind him, shutting her out. But it didn’t come. Eventually she got out of bed and put on her gown, glancing at her reflection in the wall-mirror, running her fingers through her hair – dishevelled because she hadn’t finished drying it when Alex turned up. She didn’t look too bad.

She found him on the sofa downstairs in front of the cold stove, sitting with his head bowed, fingers tensed against his temples, frowning at the floor in a despair that might have appeared theatrical at a different moment. Bringing the whisky bottle and one glass, she crouched between his knees on the rug, poured for both of them and drank first and deeply, then handed the glass to him. Her elbows on his knees, her face turned up to his, she claimed him for herself – whatever was between them wasn’t over. Alex touched her hair with resigned kindness. In the pressure of his hand, cupping the back of her skull as his eyes with their irony sought out something in her face – did he find it? her own irony? – Lydia felt all the reproaches he held back and explanations he gave up. He yielded to her and she was almost frightened, because the relation of her passion had always been to Alex’s resistance, his difficulty. He said that he had to go to Christine, talk to her.

— She won’t want to see you, not yet. She won’t let you in.

— I have to try.

She took his hand and put it inside her gown, on her warm breast. — But you’ll come back to me? Don’t just drop me, Alex, will you – not after this? I don’t know what I’d do.