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nervous energy I had never come across in London, as though the annoyances of city life conspired to create a general sense of purpose.
    I dragged Beth to one event after another, ignoring her pleas for a quiet night in. After her initial reluctance subsided, she displayed a boundless energy which, exceeding even mine, left me bemused. I never even considered her age a factor – something she sensed and which, she once told me, set me apart from everyone else she knew. A condition of our jaunts was that she be allowed to dress me, forcing me to parade back and forth across her sitting room in sample garments brought back from the office until she found something she was satisfied with.
    The weekends were my favourite time. I spent the week mapping out our pleasures, gratified by the look of wonder onher face as I guided her into Delacroix’s studio, off the lovely place Furstenberg, hidden behind St Germain des Prés. ‘How did you know about this place?’ she would ask. ‘I must have walked past here a thousand times without even knowing it existed.’ In a Saturday ritual she claimed to look forward to all week, I would text her a house number, street name and a time, like an old-fashioned telegram, punctuated only with full stops. Like lonely heart assignations we would meet, without any prior phone calls, but with the certitude that hours of enjoyment lay before us. Sunday afternoons were spent sitting by the fountain in the Jardin du Luxembourg reading, with barely a sentence exchanged between us.
    Once (on Beth’s insistence) we even joined the little children at the puppet show. I liked to buy French gossip magazines, peopled with characters I neither cared about nor could identify. I would thrust their sleek pages under Beth’s nose, pointing out the celebrities. Bemused by my interest in such trivia she would glance from the page to me, shake her head with a half-smile, and return to her book. We had built up a sense of complicity which relied for its intimacy on us being utterly different. Beth was the kind of woman who, when she asked someone a question cared about the answer. She was gentler than I, wiser and less impulsive, which made it easier for her to tolerate my bouts of egoism. Only rarely did she ask for something in return.
    Her father’s health, I soon discovered, was a serious source of concern.
    â€˜He has his sister there with him, but I can’t help thinking that I should be there too.’ She looked at me entreatingly. ‘The thing is that I spent years with him,
years,
and in lots of ways they were just a complete waste of time. He didn’t evenknow I was there, you see. I do pay my aunt – she used to be a ward sister in Dublin – to look after him, and Ruth pops in on him most weekends, so he is well catered for. And, well, I can’t just leave all this, can I?’
    There was nothing I could say to assuage her sense of guilt. I would appease her as best I could, tell her that – unlike her siblings – she had already devoted years to him, done what she could and should, and that she only had one life to live. But I could see she was only voicing an ever-present fear about his precarious health, and that many of her nights were troubled by the decision not to sacrifice what remained of her life, her work and her youth to his illness. One of the most chilling aspects of the disease, she had explained, was that it was so alienating to loved ones.
    â€˜I remember seeing the world from the top of his great strong shoulders as a child. Now he looks like an old woman, and when I try to have a conversation with him all I want to do is scream, “Stop pretending not to understand!” It’s as if he’s acting a part, deliberately, to annoy me.’
    But Beth’s father was old, and as anyone with elderly relatives can testify, it is not so much laziness or lack of feeling that resists contact but rather the reverse.