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it.”
    “You don’t approve.”
    “I do not.” Maureen brandished her watch; from her motion she might have been about to slap Alma. “I can’t discuss it with you. I’ll be late.” She buttoned herself into her coat on the landing. “I suppose I’ll see Peter later,” she said and clumped downstairs.
    With the slam Alma was alone. Her hot water bottle chilled her toes; she thrust it to the foot of the bed. The room was darker; rain patted the pane. The metronome stood stolid in the shadow as if stilled forever. Maureen might well see Peter later; they both worked at Brichester Central Library. What if Maureen should attempt to heal the breach, to lend Peter her key? It was the sort of thing Maureen might well do, particularly as she liked Peter. Alma recalled suggesting once that they take Maureen out—“she does seem lonely, Peter”—only to find the two of them ideologically united against her; the most difficult two hours she’d spent with either of them, listening to their agreement on Vietnam and the rest across the cocktail bar table: horrid. Later she’d go down and bolt the door. But now—she turned restlessly and Victimes de Devoir toppled to the floor. She felt guilty not to be reading on—but she yearned to fill herself with music.
    The shadows weighed on her eyes; she pulled the cord for light. Spray laced the window like cobwebs on a misty morning; outside the world was slate. The needle on her record-player was dulled, but she selected the first record, Britten’s Nocturne (“Finnegan’s Half-Awake” Peter had commented; she’d never understood what he meant). She placed the needle and let the music expand through her, flowing into troubled crevices. The beauty of Peter Pears’ voice. Peter. Suddenly she was listening to the words: sickly light, huge seaworms— She picked off the needle; she didn’t want it to wear away the beauty. Usually Britten could transmute all to beauty. Had Peter’s pitiless vision thrown the horrid part into such relief? Once she’d taken him to a performance of the War Requiem and in the interval he’d commented “I agree with you—Britten succeeds completely in beautifying war, which is precisely my objection.” And later he’d admitted that for the last half hour he’d been pitying the poor cymbal player, bobbing up and down on cue as if in church. That was his trouble: he couldn’t achieve peace.
    Suppose he came to the house? she thought again. Her gaze flew to the bedroom door, the massed dark on the landing. For a moment she was sure that Peter was out there; wasn’t someone watching from the stairs? She coughed jaggedly; it recalled her. Deliberately she lifted her flute from its case and rippled a scale before the next cough came. Later she’d practice, no matter how she coughed; her breathing exercises might cure her lungs. “I find all these exercises a little terrifying,” said Peter, “a little robotic.” She frowned miserably; he seemed to wait wherever she sought peace. But thoughts of him carried her to the dressing-table drawer, to her ring; she didn’t have to remember, the diamond itself crystallised beauty. She turned the jewel but it refused to sparkle beneath the heavy sky. Had he been uneducated? Well, he’d known nothing about music, he’d never known what a cadenza was—“what’s the point of your academic analysis, where does it touch life?” Enough. She snapped the lid on the ring and restored it to its drawer. From now on she’d allow herself no time for disturbing memories: downstairs for soup—she must eat—then her flute exercises followed by Victimes de Devoir until she needed sleep.
    The staircase merged into the hall, vaguely defined beneath her drowsiness; the Victorian valentines seemed dusty in the dusk, neglected in the depths of an antique shop. As Alma passed the living-room a stray light was caught in the mirror and a memory was trapped: herself and Peter on the couch, separating instantly,