Carefully she tried to steady her voice, as if she were warning him – or warning herself. — But I so love our London afternoons at home. When you come round and it’s raining and I make tea, Alex is at school, we sit and talk. I never even mind that you’ve interrupted my work: you’re the only one, I’m horrible with anyone else who bothers me.

— Well exactly, I love those rainy afternoons too, very much.

— I couldn’t want anything like that to change.

— Nothing would have to change. We could go on afterwards just as we did before. We’d never mention it, even to each other: as if it hadn’t happened. Except that it would have.

Above them on the ceiling an angel composed of creamy light was about to catch a man falling back with outflung arms from a high scaffold, swooping to scoop him up with such grace and lack of haste, and a long loving look – as if through this act every catastrophe could be held off, everything could be saved.

The other episode went further, yet was more ordinary. A teaching assistant had joined his class, she was pretty and flirted with him, and once, when the staff had drinks after school, they kissed lingeringly in the car park. Then he drew back from her, with some relief. After all he had Lydia now. It was both a thirst and a blessing, the late renewal of his erotic life. When he was young he’d been too absorbed in the problem of himself to appreciate possibilities blooming around him everywhere. Now, how long before the women only looked at him with distaste, or pity? He thought that he understood his father at last, how he had accepted this pursuit of women as if it were in lieu of every kind of outward honour. Sex looked like a cheap trick from the outside, but in its moment it burned up the world. You could not have everything: the whole wisdom of life amounted to that. Whatever you had, was instead of something else.

And then after all that fuss of anticipation she didn’t much like the paintings. They bored her: that possibility hadn’t occurred to her, it really was a surprise. There was no danger of her shedding tears. It wasn’t that she thought they were false or pretentious exactly: she could imagine the very authentic journey the artist had made towards these big pale canvases with their silver and grey and wheat colours, their painstaking exact grids and geometries, fine as quilting. In pursuit of some truth of the spirit she had refined away every intrusion of ugly life: all the dirty marks it made, all its aggression and banally literal languages. There were some beautiful effects of paint: Christine liked one work in particular, where the acrylic wash had run between grey stripes into denser forms, like rain clouds. But the end result, nonetheless, seemed to her puritanical, and too wholesome and homespun: even sentimental, in its conviction of the possibility of purity, like a sentimental mysticism. You had to be so vigilant, if you banished all obvious meanings from the front of your art, that they didn’t return unobserved by the back door.