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tongues retreating guiltily into mouths, each time the opening door flashed in the mirror: towards the end Peter would clutch her rebelliously, but she couldn’t let her parents come on them embracing, not after their own marriage had been drained of love. “We’ll be each other’s peace,” she’d once told Peter, secretly aware as she spoke that she was terrified of sex. Once they were engaged she’d felt a duty to give in—but she’d panted uncontrollably, her mouth gulping over his, shaming her. One dreadful night Peter had rested his head on her shoulder and she’d known that he was consulting his watch behind her back. And suddenly, weeks later, it had come right; she was at peace, soothed, her fears almost engulfed—which was precisely when her parents had shattered the calm, the door thrown open, jarring the mirror: “Peter, this is a respectable house, I won’t have you keeping us all up like this until God knows what hour, even if you are used to that sort of thing—” and then that final confrontation— Quickly, Alma told herself, onwards. She thrust the memories back into the darkness of the two dead rooms to be crushed by her father’s desk, choked by her mother’s flowers.
    On the kitchen windowsill the medicine was black against the back garden, the grey grass plastered down by rain: it loomed like a poison bottle in a Hitchcock film. What was Peter doing at this moment? Where would he be tonight? She fumbled sleepily with the tin of tomato soup and watched it gush into the pan. Where would he be tonight? With someone else? If only he would try to contact her, to show her he still cared— Nonsense. She turned up the gas. No doubt he’d be at the cinema; he’d tried to force films on her, past her music. Such as the film they’d seen on the afternoon of their parting, the afternoon they’d taken off work together, Hurry Sundown; it hadn’t been the theme of racism which had seemed so horrid, but those scenes with Michael Caine sublimating his sex drive through his saxophone—she’d brushed her hair against Peter’s cheek, hopefully, desperately, but he was intent on the screen, and she could only guess his thoughts, too accurately. Perhaps he and Maureen would find each other: Alma hoped so—then she could forget about them both. The soup bubbled, and she poured it into a dish. Gas sweetened the air; she checked the control, but it seemed turned tight. The dresser—there he had stood, pugnaciously apart, watching her. She set the medicine before her on the table; she’d take it upstairs with her—she didn’t want to come downstairs again. In her mind she overcame the suffocating shadow of the rooms, thick with years of tobacco smoke in one, with lavender water in another, by her shining flute, the sheets of music brightly turning.
    A dim thin figure moved down the hall towards the kitchen; it hadn’t entered by the front door—rather it had emerged from the twin vista in the hail mirror. Alma sipped her soup, not tasting it but warmed. The figure fingered the twined flowers, sat at her father’s desk. Alma bent her head over the plate. The figure stood outside the kitchen door, one hand on the doorknob. Alma stood; her chair screeched; she saw herself pulled erect by panic in the familiar kitchen like a child in darkness, and willed herself to sit. The figure climbed the stairs, entered her room, padded through the shadows, examining her music, breathing on her flute. Alma’s spoon tipped and the soup drained back into its disc. Then, determinedly, she dipped again.
    She had to fasten her thoughts on something as she mounted the stairs, medicine in hand; she thought of the Camside orchestral concert next week—thank God she wouldn’t be faced with Peter chewing gum amid the ranks of placid tufted eggs. She felt for her bedroom light-switch. Behind the bookcase shadows sprang back into hiding and were defined. She smiled at the room and at herself; then carefully she closed the