[...] Really he was a solitary thinker, not interested in most of his colleagues. The vision he had for the school – with children as thinkers and artists at its core – went needless to say against the grain of public policy on education. It went against the way the world worked. And unlike Zachary, Alex had no conviction that progress was possible, or that you could build any institution into a power for good. There was a contradiction, Christine thought, between his passionate scepticism and his commitment to the children’s education. He didn’t believe that anything could get better, and was often despairing – yet he dedicated himself to building and nourishing their imaginations, as if hope depended on it. She also sometimes thought, when she was angry with him, that when they left his class he forgot them.

There was something intolerable in the expectation in that room, strained around Zachary’s absence, which could not be filled. The time when they might have been waiting for him to walk through the door was so recent, so close at hand, that it seemed vividly possible; they could imagine how he’d make his entrance, noisy with reassurances, full of jokes, puzzled by their glum faces. He was always so up to date on everything, so full of news. It seemed impossible he didn’t know this latest fact, his own death.

In the street things were better. She gulped down the tarry, tainted city air, felt the heat of the car engines on her legs and the paving stones hard under her feet, took in the shopfronts one after another in all their vivid detail: the bolts of African fabrics, rows of bottles of coloured varnish in the nail parlour, jars of vermilion peppers lined up on the shelves of the Polish delicatessen. All this was a relief: the impersonal solid forms of the world which would persist without Zachary, without happiness, without her.

Alex turned on his side, to face her in the dark; he put his hand on her pyjama top, onto her breast. Christine was shocked by the violence of her reluctance to make love to him. She knew they ought to be opened up to each other: Alex was right, his instincts were always good, more generous than hers. She half longed for the comfort he wanted to give her, and to comfort him. It was the same as when he’d made her listen right through to the end of the music, the day before. In her mind she understood how sex and death were both part of the mystery of entrances and exits, both opening onto this same strange place where they all belonged now, in the sudden shadow of Zachary’s death. But her body contracted against him in spite of her mind, she felt withdrawn inside her flesh, concealed in its sealed chamber, fierce against its violation. She wanted to try to explain to him that she couldn’t bear to be touched, not now, not yet: but she couldn’t, the words seized up in her chest, they wouldn’t come out. She pushed his hand away without a word, turned over with her back to him and pretended to sleep.

Lydia felt herself at some crisis, now they’d arrived at the end of their formal education. Dissent and scepticism had been easy while they were held tight inside its frame – now something more was called for, and she dreaded testing her reserves of imagination and energy, finding them empty. At first she had played at falling in love with Alex because it gave a shape to her days, and a motivation: then her obsession had swallowed up its original purpose. Her lack of him gnawed at her, making her incomplete; she thought fatalistically that if she had any talent it was probably for this, for a destructive passion. Lydia had the biggest room in the shared house, with the biggest bed – where she slept sprawling luxuriantly in dirty sheets, rarely getting up before midday. Her room was chaotically untidy, with clothes heaped on every piece of furniture, or dropped on the floor where she’d taken them off. She had a gift for finding treasures – old couture silks and satins, stiff net petticoats – among the dross in junk shops; everything smelled of mothballs, or of beer and cigarette smoke from the bar.

Christine was bemused now by the long days when she had nothing to do except study in the university library, or at her desk at home. She didn’t need a job because she had a full grant for her PhD – and she hadn’t embarked yet on any university teaching. She was diligent, and liked her work, but it couldn’t really fill all the hours of her day, or all the space inside her. And so she too, like Lydia, lived in a suspended state, expecting to discover something more serious to be the business of her life. Perhaps it would be motherhood, Christine sometimes thought. Her own mother spoke significantly about the happiness that came with children, and Christine believed in it – and yet that possibility seemed remote, so she waited patiently.

Soon Lydia was round at Kensal Rise almost every day. She didn’t see much of Alex, though; mostly she was babysitting for Sandy or drinking coffee or wine at the kitchen table with Juliet, who poured out to her all the dissatisfactions of her marriage. Actually Lydia liked Juliet. Lydia was really very impressionable, although she appeared so disabused and knowing, and had such decided opinions. She was drawn into strong connection with women she met, studying them for clues as to how to grow up, what kind of person to be; she admired Juliet’s bright little house, her tidy cupboards, her competence and toughness – and was rather afraid of her, fascinated by the idea of her intimacy with Alex. She could not imagine achieving for herself any existence so strongly flavoured, so deep.

By the time Alex and Juliet returned from the dinner party – they found their babysitters watching television innocently, side by side on the sofa – Alex was in a better mood. He joked with them while Juliet searched in her purse for the money to pay them. He asked if they were still reading Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Had they given up on decadence yet? Lydia turned on all her charm and chattered eagerly, punctuating her remarks with false-sounding bursts of laughter. — Oh no, she said. — We’re going to be decadent for years!

But Christine felt how Alex didn’t respond to this charm as he was supposed to. Lydia’s audacious frankness, her wide-eyed amused delivery, complacent like a purring cat, which had been so confounding to other men, didn’t impress him. In Alex’s presence, so perfected and adult, Lydia’s cleverness seemed flawed and home-made, embarrassing like a precocious child’s.

Christine was surprised by the violence she felt, being wrenched out of her concentration on her picture. Usually, if she was working on her thesis, she looked forward to being interrupted at this time of the evening. She was uneasily aware of her growing preoccupation with her drawings: as if what began as a small black inkblot at the centre of her vision was spreading, eating up the attention she was supposed to be devoting to criticism, sapping her intellectual rigour. She borrowed art books from home without asking her mother, kept them under her bed and pored over them secretly, joyously: the flame-orange hair of Degas’s women, the ferocity of his black lines, the sublime modernity of his figures cropped inside the frame, the jagged angles of their elbows, his compositions cut across with empty space. It was wrenching, humiliating, to go back from these to her own stupid efforts. And yet the noise of the nib as she scratched at the black wax felt intimate as breathing, filling up the room. She was back inside the irresponsible absorption of her childhood, when she had drawn lying on her stomach on the floor in her bedroom, inventing a whole alternative universe, an island with mountains and a city and its own history and fragments of language. She could still remember letters from her secret alphabet.

— I like their emptiness, the absences in them.

— That’s only because I can’t do people yet. I’m going to learn how to do them. I’ve signed up for life-drawing classes.

— Don’t put people in them. People only spoil things.

— Oh! So that’s why your poems are all about furniture.

Alex laughed. He hadn’t known that she had read his poems. He took this girl in properly for the first time: her stiffness and thinness, her evasive look, her dark-blooded lips in their asymmetrical smile so wary and withholding. He forgave her for preferring the kind of poetry that rhymes.