She walked into the living room and, from the depleted stack of CDs, picked out the Chants d’Auvergne and put it on. Wild female voices, like wind pouring through her. So glorious – how had she never realized how glorious it was? It hurt her in the solar plexus and behind the eyes. It hurt her deep inside herself, in a place she never knew existed until now.

She helped herself to another tumblerful of whisky and when the music was finished she took the glass upstairs, into her bedroom. She closed the curtains against the softening light and took off all her clothes; then she sat at the bottom of the bed with her drink and looked at herself in the mirror. Was that her body? She had pale brown arms and legs and a milky white stomach with a low neat scar where she’d had a Caesarean with her last birth. Oh that birth. Her beautiful, beautiful baby. Bony ankles, hollowed hips, chestnut-red pubic hair like a fuzzy arrow’s head, jutting pelvis, narrow hunched shoulders with a rash of coppery freckles, thin neck beginning to show the signs of age. Long feet, long hands, poky wrists and sharp elbows. Hacked gingery hair. Was that her face? A triangular freckled face, freckles on her lips even and on her forehead up to her hairline. She stared at herself in the glass: was she really that plain, that sad, that mad?

There rose up in her mind another picture: a man and a woman and three little girls, glowing with life and excitement, passing a few feet in front of her and not seeing her where she stood pressed against the pillar.

No. This wasn’t her, not this raw, dismal creature bowed over at the end of the bed. The real her was somewhere else – a soft and curving golden girl with a waterfall of coppery hair who lay in the grass with the man who would be her lover, who laughed at the table surrounded by the people she adored, who danced through the night, who said I do I do I do I do to life. I do.