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later, Karen telephoned him.
    What a charming voice she had, to be sure. It had, unless he was much mistaken, a distantly Scottish lilt to it. There was an attractive roughness about the way she pronounced her Rs when using words such as ‘structuralism’ and ‘Derrida’ (for they began by discussing literary theory), an appealingly guttural quality to her intonation when she used phrases like ‘the auteurist conspiracy’ and ‘the camera as voyeur’ (for they ended by discussing film aesthetics). He wondered whether his own obvious Home Counties accent was annoying her.
    ‘Well, goodbye,’ she said, after forty minutes or so.
    ‘Same time tomorrow?’ he asked.
    ‘OK. It’s been nice talking to you.’
    ‘And to you.’
    ‘Not going home for Christmas just yet, then?’ she asked, after an awkward pause.
    ‘No, not just yet.’
    ‘Had many Christmas cards?’
    ‘Not many. And you?’
    ‘No, not many.’
    Richard never got many Christmas cards, certainly not as many as he sent out, and he never sent out more than a dozen. So far there was only one card on the mantelpiece, and that was from his next-door neighbours, a small and noisy family with whom he and Miles normally had no contact whatsoever. He didn’t even know their names, for the card simply said, ‘Happy Christmas – To All at 48, from All at 49’. This year, as last year, he had replied promptly with a card saying, ‘Happy Christmas – To All at 49, from All at 48’. Every year, Richard knew, his other next-door neighbours also got a card, directed to All at 47, from All at 49, and so he was never sure whether he, too, should send a card, to All at 47, from All at 48, particularly as he knew that they were invariably swift to return the compliment, with a card to All at 49, from All at 47. (He never did speak to the small, noisy family who lived next door. Some months later, returning home in the early evening, he found their flat swarming with police and ambulancemen. In a concerted suicide, the father had shot his wife, his son, his daughter and finally himself. They left a short note which read, ‘Goodbye Cruel World – from All at 49’. The incident had made the headlines and Richard’s picture was on the third page of the evening newspaper.)
    In fact, Richard found the impersonality of these exchanges curiously touching and intimate, certainly by comparison with one of the cards he received the next day, a pretentious effort from an old school friend which contained a long-winded and unnecessary photocopied newsletter. He gave this a cursory reading before opening another envelope, which turned out to contain a card from Karen.
    It was a big card, with a detail from Monet’s Water Lily Pond on the front. ‘Dear Friend,’ it said inside. ‘Not very Christmassy, I know, but I thought you might like it all the same. Have a very Happy Christmas. With Love, Karen.’
    He showed the card to Miles, who had just joined him at the breakfast table, and said:
    ‘It’s funny, we haven’t talked about painting at all. I wonder how she knew I was crazy about Monet.’
    ‘I told her.’
    It took a while for this to sink in.
    ‘You told her? You mean you’ve seen her? When?’
    ‘I wrote to her about a week ago. I told her all sorts of things about you.’
    Richard threw down his piece of toast in frustration.
    ‘For God’s sake, Miles, why did you do that? That spoils the whole thing, it ruins the whole damn… exercise. The point was that we weren’t supposed to know anything about each other.’
    ‘Well, she asked me.’
    Richard stared at him. ‘What do you mean, she asked you? When did she ask you?’
    ‘She wrote to me. She wrote me a letter, asking lots of questions about you.’
    ‘She did that?’
    Richard pondered this information in a silence broken, for several minutes, only by his friend’s sloppy consumption of breakfast cereal.
    ‘So?’
    ‘So what?’ asked Miles, looking up.
    ‘So what did you say about me?