A breeze fanned the newspaper on the table, the smells of a city summer were wafted through the open window: tar and car exhaust, the bitter-green of the flowering privet hedge. Police horses went past in the broad street, their hooves clip-clopping conversationally alongside the voices of the women who rode them; the stables were nearby. Christine saw in the hard light how the flesh was beginning to be puffy under Lydia’s eyes and drag down her cheeks. Yet this late ripeness was attractive in itself, she could see that too, softening Lydia’s haughty beauty, filling it out with character and experience. Lydia must be so afraid, now she was left alone, of wasting this late flare of her power on no one, on emptiness. In a few years they would be old women: sixty! There wasn’t much time.

Christine felt negligent then, wondering if she cared that Alex wasn’t writing. She didn’t think about it much. People did seem to like his poems. Although they hadn’t been much reviewed at first, in the years since they were published they’d acquired a certain cult following. Anyway, he had seemed stubbornly perverse to her, taking on seasonal work at the post office on top of his language classes, getting up in the freezing flat at an hour when it was still dark, when it wasn’t even conceivably morning. Why didn’t he try to find a job he liked? There was something self-dramatising in his sacrifices, though stoically he never uttered one word of complaint.

Alex was the moody prince with his pent-up angst. He was still slight at the waist and hips, still had his thick hair with its bronze gleam cut in the old style, fringe hanging into his eyes. The hazel cat’s eyes and curving mouth – too often closed in disappointment – were sensual and feminine despite himself. He’d have liked to give nothing away. And yet he was also vain, he was human, he was like everyone else: Christine knew how, although he avoided mirrors, if he caught sight inadvertently of his own reflection he straightened his shoulders and stood taller, renewed by these glimpses of his good looks, his power. When they went out in company other women looked at Alex surreptitiously or hungrily, and Christine was gratified that such a man had chosen her. But how long would the women admire him if he persisted in refusing to take on any substantial role in the world, or any status? Reading so much and knowing so much, but with nothing to show for it.

[...] A young woman, blonde, wearing a leather skirt and a white ribbed jumper tight over her breasts, was standing alone at the bar drinking coffee, her light mac folded over her arm because the night was warm. The bartender didn’t seem to know her. Perhaps she was a prostitute; Alex wasn’t confident that he could read the signs, in a strange country. Anyhow, he liked her pale skin and defined, small features, faintly cruel and impersonal – he thought of a Venus in a Cranach painting. She asked him for a cigarette and when he lit it for her she tilted her head and dropped her glance in a certain way – at once flirtatious and withheld – which made him nostalgic, as if it were a gesture from an old film. The bartender was cashing up, the bar was closing.

— Something’s always lost though. Even in the end of the Cold War.

— Nothing good was lost! Really, was it?

He thought about it. — Something crabbed and cobwebby and disenchanted. I hated that crabbed thing in my father. Yet it was also very ambitious, very purely intellectual. We may come to think that those dissident Central European cultures were the last to keep a classical ideal alive, an ideal of disenchantment.

[...] She was more used to her mother’s writing on shopping lists or birthday cards, or in contained, funny little postcard messages from holidays abroad. It was excruciating for her to see this turmoil exposed, garrulous and banally confessional as a teenager’s: like a mature person falling down in the street, all their accumulated self-possession turned to heaviness.

Isobel, softening, said she couldn’t imagine how bad Lydia must be feeling. Christine could imagine it. She knew Lydia better than Alex ever would or could, she thought; Lydia would always be performing for him. — She tells herself it was fated, it was bound to happen. And also that passion is always selfish and amoral, but can’t be resisted, only submitted to. She thinks what a selfish person she is, but thinks it luxuriantly.

Of all things, Alex and Lydia had this in common – the loss of Zachary; there was some literal, physical sense in which their lovemaking assuaged their loss. Lydia was generous with herself, with her body – Alex took possession of her greedily, overwhelmed by the release and the relief of the sweetness they went seeking in the dark. There had been other women once or twice, in the years since he’d been married to Christine, but he’d backed off from something glib and counterfeit in those affairs. To his relief, Lydia wasn’t sexually athletic or competitive. Certain revelations of her character – reserves of her self kept back, like candles saved up to light a cellar or a cave – could only be had, he thought, through this sexual connection with her. He began to see how her intelligence was not wide-ranging but concentrated, and how she was remarkably without illusions, and stubbornly wedded to one or two ideas from her early youth. She was frank with him but never spilled over with self-doubt or asked for reassurance, nor did she want to know his secrets.

In the Campo Ghetto Nuovo the five of them sat drinking Campari in the last warmth of a May evening – the spring’s heat was still tentative, hadn’t consolidated yet into summer. The women pulled light scarves around their shoulders. The rosy, dusky air was filled with the effervescent spritzing of darting swallows; yeshiva scholars with sidelocks came in and out of lit rooms belonging to some American foundation. Too many tourists drifted through the square, breaking up the picture, disproportionate to the substratum of local life, which nonetheless maintained its steady purposefulness, pretending to be oblivious of them – men heading home swinging briefcases, old ladies gossiping indignantly on the bridges, children’s high musical voices glancing in rapid flight, like the swallows, against the water and along the walls of pinkish brick and stucco. A cake shop was open, selling dolci ebraici, thin rolls of pastry stuffed with almond paste. They felt the guilt of being tourists, of Venice unravelling at its edges – and for so many decades and centuries now – into something frayed and spoiled. But it was also all exquisite and exalting: they had come from the Madonna dell’Orto full of Tintorettos, and this was the second Campari. Where could one go in the whole world, seriously, and not feel guilty?

When finally they were standing beneath the famous ceiling in the Sala, she was exceptionally receptive not because she was prepared, but because she wasn’t. It caught her out in her passivity, the blank of apprehension she presented to it. A pale clear light came in through windows composed of rounds of glass like bottle-ends; voices in the street outside were remote as the swallows’ shrieking. Dizzily she turned round and round where she stood, staring up, making her neck ache, trying to disentangle individual figures – whose foot is that, whose legs are those? – from the billows of gorgeous drapery, masses of rich form soaring against empty skies. She seemed to experience these colours – sumptuous pinks and gold and pale green – on her skin, the bodies’ torsion in her own muscles. Every ordinary day, while their lives went on elsewhere, the Virgin presided in here, a superb queen – and the force of the angels’ strong wings was like great birds’, so that you felt the updraught of their movement. She was in the presence of what was momentous. And in one corner was an awful darkness – an open grave, bones, brown filth, suffering, two hands emerging from a cloud, forming between fingers and thumbs an O for nothingness.