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was rich and not riddled by suspicion, they welcomed neighbours and wanted to show off; if they were not, they wanted to moan. Midweek the place was virtually empty during the day. Few had been obdurate in the face of herknocking on the door, except for the Chinese, who rented the biggest flat, the penthouse flat, which straddled the whole of the top floor and was enviable for being light and bright. The Chinese paid the most, had the most power, trailed in and out with mobile phones, remained aloof and impervious to smiles, repelled any advances, and nobody knew what they did. Still, Sarah had reckoned, you couldn’t win them all. Undeterred, and with the pretence of delivering a flyer, she had knocked on the Beaumonts’ door and invited herself in the year before, just at a point when Lilian was dying to show someone what she was doing with the place, and in what colour. Sarah’s charm was entirely natural and based on the fact that she liked everybody and assumed they were likeable themselves until they proved otherwise. Her manners were honed by long use; she was unfazed by rejection and more or less proof against shock or surprise, which was useful on that first occasion when she saw Richard come out of the kitchen with a glass in his hand.
    Dear me, an old lover. An older, stouter Richard than the one she had comforted years before in the wake of his first wife’s death; a jollier version of that grief-stricken, sex-starved man she had known for six months five years ago and parted from as amicably as she always did from any of them. She watched him standing in that long corridor, blinking, until she shook his hand firmly and said how pleased she was to meet him. Had they bought the place or was it rented, what a pretty lamp! A dim memory of the only lessons she had learned from her mother, viz: whenever you go into anyone else’s house always say, What a lovely room! And mean it. And also forget that you had met the man of the house in an art gallery, staring at a picture with tears streaming down his face, and simply taken him home. Richard was no fool, returned the handshake, said yes, we’re very pleased, let me get you a glass of wine, and she knew it might not be very exciting wine, but the glass would be marvellous. In that other flathe’d had there had been that terrific collection of glass, which had, she remembered irrelevantly, left her cold.
    And then the wife . . . shimmeringly lovely and adoring of him and delighted to have company. Sarah was sincerely pleased for him. And he knew her well enough to understand that discretion about sexual relations in between marriages, or during marriages for that matter, was entirely assured. She had once told him she admired men who had the sense to find a sympathetic, semiprofessional bed mate when recently bereaved or divorced because it certainly beat the shit out of the sort of baggage-laden, life-wrecking relationship which usually followed grief and foundered, messily, on the rocks of too much need and too many comparisons. I’m your interlude, she said; you’ll move on when you’re ready, and he had.
    As for any suggestion that the presence of this overfriendly single woman on the floor below would cause a smidgeon of envy or suspicion in Mrs Beaumont’s heart, nothing could have been further from reality. When Sarah had knocked on their door eighteen months ago, Lilian had been utterly confident in her own outstanding beauty, the patent love of her man and her own unlined immortality. To Lilian, stunning at twenty-eight, Miss Fortune, aged almost forty, with specs round her neck, could have been any old bag with awful red hair and the potential to be an agony aunt. Naturally, when visiting neighbours, Miss Fortune looked untidy and clean in her own favourite colours, but that was all. She had never been a sexy dresser, anyway, except when it came to her passion for belts. Big tan leather belts, cloth belts with tassels, tapestry belts cinching in