Wearing a T-shirt only and sitting on a towel, in the kitchen, with the spread newspaper, the pot and the wooden spoon, Nicola depilated her legs for the last but one time; she unpeeled the sections of simmering beeswax, like industrial elastoplasts, from her smarting calves; she sang while she worked . . . Nicola didn't know this (and knowing it wouldn't have made any difference), but she was emerging from the kind of mid-project doldrums that all artists experience, in the windless solitude halfway between outset and completion. The thing is there now, and you know you can get to the end of it. It is more or less what you wanted (or what you felt you'd finish up with); but you start to wish that the powers that be, the talent powers, had thrown you a little further or higher. How to keep that spring in the stride, that jounce in the rump, as black-stockinged Jack mounts the beanstalk for the hundredth time? The tricks she was going to play on Keith and Guy were good tricks; but they were low and cruel and almost unrelievedly dirty. If she could do it all sitting upright, fully clothed (indeed, beautifully turned-out), pressing buttons with impeccable fingertips, and not a hair out of place! But it wasn't going to be like that. She would have to get all hot and sweaty, and roll up her sleeves and her skirts, and put in a lot of time down there on the kitchen floor.