I thought of the river and Nour.

My mother said, ‘Since you’re so mad about clothes, Lili, you can help me alter the wedding dress.’

‘OK,’ said Lili nonchalantly.

Someone had lent Robert a car. He had the expatriate knack of being lent things and getting himself looked after on his return to the native land, and as they talked it became apparent that we were to be entertained to lunch by the gallery owner.

‘Won’t he mind if I come too?’ I asked.

‘I don’t care if he does,’ said Robert rather ungallantly.

‘No one cares about him,’ said Lili.

My heart misgave me. Together with the other pains of youth, I was shy.

‘We were going to stay with him,’ said Lili, ‘but it’s much nicer staying with you. The least he can do is buy us a decent lunch.’

I wondered if Lili and Robert were short of money since his government had impoverished Lili’s father. I had the impression that unless you were famous there was little money to be made from art.

I asked, ‘Is it difficult to sell paintings?’, thinking this a quite decorous way of framing my question.

‘Yes,’ said Robert.

‘Not if you know how,’ said Lili. ‘I shall sell a lot at the opening. I shall spike the wine and tell people how beautiful they are.’ She sounded excited at the prospect, alert, like any animal at the beginning of something—a race, a hunt, a battle.

‘How beautiful who are?’ asked Robert.

‘The people and the paintings of course,’ said Lili. ‘I must flatter people and arouse their acquisitive instincts at one and the same time.’

‘You’re good at that,’ said Robert, but he didn’t sound, as I thought he might have done, condemnatory.

‘I enjoy it,’ said Lili. ‘It’s good for me. It gives me a role in life. A positive helpmeet to my husband. Now if you were rich I should have nothing to do. I should be a silent shell, wealthy and withered and bored. As it is, I have been forced into positive action, into vitality and life.’

She spoke to her husband, but I thought she was addressing me, for he must have heard this before, or at least known what was in her mind.

He said mildly, ‘I always told you you shouldn’t have given up dancing.’

Lili said, ‘I was tired of dancing. I wanted to stay with you, not go all round the world, dancing.’

‘You wouldn’t have gone round the world,’ said Robert. ‘Summer seasons in Fayyum perhaps.’

Lili laughed.

I thought—if it had been my parents who had been talking, they would have been doing it at the tops of their voices, for surely on the content alone that conversation had been a row. I wondered whether Robert and Lili had spoken so often like this that neither had any longer the energy to shout, or whether there never had been anger between them. They were quite outside my experience. It was as though they were creatures of the same species, possessed of a venom which might kill an outsider, but were powerless to injure each other.