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screenplays?”
    She tells him about her job, and her flat in Hackney. Her life sounds trivial in the telling.
    “And there’s a boyfriend?”
    “Not right now.”
    “What happened to Laura’s son?”
    “Jack. He’s fine. We’re still good friends. I don’t know what happened. It just didn’t work out, I suppose.”
    “Who left who?”
    “It was mutual.”
    “Who cried?”
    “No one cried. Does someone have to cry?” It might have been easier if Jack had cried. “You can’t just go on drifting along, can you?”
    “It’s all about timing,” Nick says. “You can meet someone too early. And you can leave things too late.”
    A student who’s just entered the café stops by their table. She points one finger at Nick while with her other hand she brushes back a mane of blond hair.
    “You douche bag,” she says. “Why do you never get back to me?”
    Her voice is soft, almost pleading, in contrast to her words. Nick raises his arms in a silent eloquent shrug. The girl tosses her mane.
    “Why do I even ask?” she says, and sweeps away.
    Nick meets Alice’s eyes with a rueful smile.
    “You disapprove?”
    “None of my business,” says Alice.
    Before they part Nick says, “You must come over and visit us before you leave.”
    “Thank you,” says Alice. “I’d like that.”
    “My wife’s away in Boston at present. But I expect her back any day.”
    He draws her a map on a napkin to show where he lives: 35 Triangle Street.
    •  •  •
    There are five others on the tour of the Homestead. The guide is a brisk, handsome woman in her thirties, with short blond hair and lightly tanned skin. She introduces herself as Debbie.
    “We’re standing in what was the kitchen, in Emily’s day.”
    The room is now part ticket booth, part shop, the walls covered with shelves of books and greeting cards, decorated mugs, wall hangings, maps of old Amherst. Evidently there’s a thriving Emily Dickinson industry.
    From the outside the house looks like the photographs from Emily’s day. The hemlock hedge has been replanted. The square yellow front with its green-shuttered windows and its welcoming porch hasn’t changed. Emily’s conservatory has gone, but the surrounding trees still stand. A path still runs through the trees to the Evergreens, no more than fifty paces away, where Austin lived.
    But inside, the illusion fails. Emily’s ghost is long gone, driven away by information displays, white walls, the intrusive flood of daylight.
    “We are now entering what was the dining room,” says Debbie, leading the group into a space paneled with enlarged photographs. Here is Emily in the only known picture of her, at the age of sixteen: not at all what she looked like later, her sister, Lavinia, is said to have said. Too soulful, too pretty. The real Emily was not and never had been pretty, never expected to be admired, which is one reason why Alice loves her.
They might not need me—yet they might—
I’ll let my heart be just in sight—
A smile so small as mine might be
Precisely their necessity—
    Alice realizes that this must be the room in which Austin and Mabel conducted their love affair. How? Or to be brutally practical, on what? The floor? The dining room table?
    “Do we know how this room was furnished?” she asks.
    “Not exactly,” says the guide. “It was called the dining room, so we assume there were a table and chairs. But it was also used as a supplementary sitting room in the winter, when the parlors were closed off. There was a black horsehair sofa that stood here, we think.”
    Alice makes a mental note. Sex on a sofa. But she doesn’t raise the matter aloud.
    The group passes down the passage, across a hall, into the two parlors. There’s nothing in these bright, well-kept rooms that evokes the half-lit Victorian world. There’s a box piano that’s similar to the one believed to have stood where it stands. Somewhere in this blank space Mabel Todd played and sang, while Emily