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her living room furniture, the settee and armchairs covered in hide, the mahogany dining table and chairs, the three or four antique pieces. It all looked incongruous in here, oversized, contrasting curiously with the tiles of the thirties fireplace, biscuitlike in shape and colour, the unpanelled doors, the wall lights of pink glass platelets. Curled up in the armchair, where he wasn’t supposed to be, Hardy lay asleep.
    Seeing Arnham’s car had at last shown him what he avoided facing. The man was home, had very likely been home for months. He had moved house without giving Christine his new phone number. He had ditched her—“jilted” her would probably be the term Christine’s own generation would use. The evenings were beginning to grow light, and it was possible to see from the french windows the birdbath and the patch of concrete where Flora had stood. Philip stood at the window, remembering Christine’s enthusiasm at the idea of bringing the statue to Arnham as a gift.
    She came into the room with the plates of potatoes and beans. Water had slopped onto the tray from overfilled glasses. He quickly took it from her. His mother did her best. It was only—dreadful accusation!—that she did nothing well except emotional things. She was good at loving a man and good at making children feel safe and happy. Those functions came naturally to her. She couldn’t help being expensive to keep, a waste-maker, one of those people who cost more by earning than they would by doing nothing.
    They watched television. This obviated for a while the need to talk. It was still only seven. He looked unseeing at the screen, where a dancer in lamé and feathers capered about. Christine, he noticed, her tray balanced on her lap, had surreptitiously opened her Brides magazine again and was looking longingly at ridiculous photographs of girls in white satin crinolines. Even Fee herself didn’t want that, was resigned to a homemade wedding dress and what the caterers called a “finger buffet.” They would all share the cost, but even so … And there was Christine still hankering after a thousand quid’s worth of bridal gown, a sit-down dinner, and a disco.
    She was looking at him. It occurred to him that in the whole of his twenty-two years of life he had never known her to be angry. And when she anticipated anger from others, her face wore that particular expression it wore now, the eyes afraid, the lips parted in the beginnings of a hopeful, mollifying smile. He said to her, “Is there any point in leaving that card there any longer?” It was a roundabout way of asking what he didn’t want to ask and knew the answer to, anyway.
    She turned pink, looked away. “You can take it down if you want to.”
    Would she have given him that terrible yet naive reason for her continued hope if Fee hadn’t come in at that moment? But Fee did come in, sweeping in swiftly like a human breeze, the front door banging first, then the living room one behind her. She looked at their trays, turned up the television, then turned it off, dropped into an armchair, her arms hanging down over its sides.
    “Have you had anything to eat, dear?” Christine said.
    If Fee had said no and what was there, Christine would have been hard put to it to produce even a sandwich. But she routinely enquired and Fee almost always gave an impatient shake of the head.
    “I can’t understand why people don’t do things. Why don’t they do what they say they’ll do? Can you believe it, Stephanie hasn’t even started on her dress yet and she’s supposed to be making Senta’s as well.”
    “Why can’t Senta make her own?” Philip asked, though he wasn’t much interested in the activities of his sister’s bridesmaids.
    “If you knew Senta, you wouldn’t have to ask that. It’s quite funny actually, the idea of her sewing anything.”
    “Is that the one that’s Darren’s cousin?”
    Fee nodded in the way she had that made you think your enquiry irritated