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It is the horror of seeing the face you know best afflicted by the whimsical deformations of senility.
    â€˜It’s funny,’ she once said, ‘because even when my mother was alive, I somehow always felt closer to my father, you know? I suppose most people find that odd.’
    â€˜I don’t,’ I had replied. ‘My mother …’ and suddenly I couldn’t think what to say about her. ‘Well, she’s very busy, and when she’s not, she’s tired, so … It’s been that way as long as I can remember. Still, Dad always says that if itweren’t for her job I wouldn’t have gone to such a good school – or be here now, I suppose.’
    â€˜Or met me,’ Beth added with a calm smile.
    Our discussions about heartbreak were similarly lopsided. I had never lost anyone, always lived in a womb of comfort sheltered from pain and loss. Of course I’d split up with boyfriends; most of them were an obvious reaction to the one before: if one had been wild and jealous, the next would be understanding and quiet. But to date no one experience had given my character the roundness and depth I admired in Beth: I had not once cried over another human being.
    I didn’t hanker for suffering, but I was impressed by the effects it could have. And there was something else. I had noticed the physical change such experience can bring. Nothing as brutal and disfiguring as scoring lines across a face, but a certain sharpness about the eyes that my face lacked. It was there in Beth’s eyes, and in the resigned expression on Berthe Morisot’s face. Its absence in my own made me scowl at the mirror with perverse frustration.
    That Saturday Stephen was unable to convince me to join him at Queen, a vast gay club reminiscent of a sado-masochistic multi-levelled car park, with oily-skinned men in overhead cages undergoing live nipple-piercing, their pupils avid and dry with drugs they’d taken. Beth was easily won-over, impatient to fully embrace the Parisian nightlife she had shunned for so long, but I declined, spending the evening reading the first chapter of a novel on my university syllabus and waiting for the call my mother had promised me before falling asleep with the phone still in my hand.
    When Stephen answered the door to their flat late thefollowing afternoon, damson thumb-prints pressed into the grooves beneath his eyes, I was surprised to find Beth still in bed. Wearing only one of Stephen’s old T-shirts, the cotton rendered almost transparent with age, and in that quietly voluptuous state that too much alcohol and too little sleep can induce, she recounted, squirming girlishly beneath the duvet, the events of the night before. Queen had been so packed at first that she had wanted to leave. But Stephen, with the mixture of petulance and voracity Beth and I had often noted whenever there were possibilities of new sexual encounters, had persuaded her to stay on for an hour, buying her a drink to cement the deal. She caught the first words of an eighties song that she loved (discussing music, I had realised, always made Beth’s age shockingly apparent) and the next time she looked at her watch it was two in the morning. The dance floor was thinning out. Making her way towards the bar to get a glass of water she had walked past two men: an Arab with long black hair that curled around the nape of his neck and a scar under his eye, and a serious-faced thirty-something man in a short-sleeved grey shirt and low-slung jeans.
    â€˜I just couldn’t stop staring at him,’ she said, laughing at the blandness of her forthcoming description. ‘He had one of those faces that I could just look at for ever – sort of weirdly perfect, with something a bit sad in his expression.’ The fact that the evening had ended well was becoming increasingly evident. The preamble and upwardly twitching corner of Beth’s mouth conspired to create an itch of