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.