But how should her questions be answered? It wasn’t just the problem of balancing tact with honesty, the etiquette of talking with someone so terribly sick, it was her own painful uncertainty as to what the answers really were. Did she still love Larry? She supposed that she did, but her ‘Yes, of course’ had about it the ghost of a qualification, as though she had said ‘probably’, or ‘most of the time’, or ‘not like I used to’. The difficulty was being able to see him clearly, to have, as she had had in the past, a single clear idea of him. These days he seemed to shimmer, being at the same time the man she had strolled with on Muir beach in the weeks before the wedding, the pair of them lit up, laughing because they were getting away with it, this remarkable trick of happiness, and some stranger who shambled in and out of the rooms of the house in shorts and sweatshirt (his favourite had ‘Barney’s Beanery’ printed over the heart), tumbler in one fist, cigarette in the other. He reminded her sometimes – still a big man, still solidly built – of a boxer who, the night before the fight, has unaccountably lost his nerve and begun to unravel. What was his problem? What had so bent him out of shape? His father? The drink? Losing his job? Was it something organic? Something in the air? Lead insult? How was she supposed to tell?