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.