Then, as though they had been swimming farther out than they had realized, the three friends were caught up in the grim business of success. Franklin’s big aerosoled canvases were bought by image-conscious banks and dealers in New York like the Wildenstein family, while László’s plays, with their insistence on the futility of action, began to seem prophetic, and drew first-night crowds of the chic and famous. Laurence became a darling of the lifestyle magazines on both sides of the Atlantic (‘AT HOME WITH MRS FRANKLIN WYLIE’, ‘LA BELLE MUSE FRANÇAISE DE FRANKLIN WYLIE’), but she exited her thirties childless and with many anxious lines on her face. That charm which had made men of all ages want to be her friend, but also to put a hand on her thigh, showed itself more fitfully as each of her husband’s feebly concealed infidelities left its mark. Franklin became a specialist in rage. On his fortieth birthday, inspired by demons whose names László could only guess at, he rammed his car into the side of a tour coach full of startled though miraculously unhurt elderly Americans on the rue des Ecoles, and was only saved from the consequences by the US ambassador, who persuaded the police to view the incident as essentially artistic rather than essentially criminal. Two years later, he beat up, with no obvious provocation, the owner of a Lebanese restaurant in Belleville with whom he had long been on friendly terms. Most recently he had been fined five thousand francs for throwing his chair at a waiter in the Brasserie Lipp (a fellow with a moustache like a hussar). But for László, nothing in this catalogue had been more dismaying, more sad and perplexing, than the day he called at the apartment on rue du Deguerry to find Laurence carefully scraping dried food off the wall of the studio, the floor brilliant with smashed glass and china. It was the moment he had given up trying to understand them, for unless you had grown up beside a person from the beginning, had breathed the same air, there was too much about that life you would never be able to explain. You had to love, if you loved at all, as an act of faith, uncomprehendingly.