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Secretary, things I’ve read, things I’ve done, but I can’t hold onto them. Like fish in a wide-meshed net they flicker and fade and dive away into darkness. Instead of sex, I’m thinking about this morning, when we’d run out of our usual mineral water, we only had Vittel, not Evian, and Daisy said she couldn’tdrink it because it tasted like milk. I left her in the house on her own, with strict instructions not to answer the door, drove to the nearest Waitrose through heavy traffic, and bought the kind of Evian she likes best, with a sports cap. It took me forty-five minutes.
    I gave her the bottle of water. She took a sip, frowned, pushed the bottle away.
    ‘Sorry, Mum,’ she said.
    I knelt beside her.
    ‘Daisy, you’ve got to drink something. You’ve got to drink halfway down this bottle by lunchtime or I shall call the doctor.’
    I put a mark on the bottle. Slowly, through the morning, she drank her way down to the mark.
    Richard’s cock in my hand is hard and full and his breathing is heavy; and he needs to sleep and he’s got that meeting today. I’m not being fair to him, making him wait like this. I lift his hand away from me.
    ‘I don’t think I can come tonight,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry.’
    I roll over on top of him.
    ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ he says.
    I kneel astride him and he slides into me. He reaches up lazily to touch my breasts. I don’t quite like this. Since the months of breastfeeding Daisy, I sometimes don’t like to have my breasts touched; the feeling seems to move from irritating to intense with nothing in between, as though there’s some short-circuit in me. I don’t let this show.
    He moves rapidly, comes with a sigh.
    I slide off him, turn over, with him tucked into myback. He sinks rapidly into sleep, his breath warm on my shoulder; I haven’t even turned off the light.
    I lie there for a while, but sleep feels far from me. The light of the lamp falls on the bedroom walls, which are ragrolled and opulently red; the hatstand and the hat with a plume that I bought in a junk shop cast extravagant shadows. I had a fantasy in mind when I planned and painted this room, as though it were an opera set, perhaps for La Traviata, which Richard once took me to see. We have a French cherrywood bed with a scrolled head and feet, the floor is darkly varnished, the red of the walls is rich by lamplight, though rather oppressive by day; and there are heavy curtains patterned with arum lilies, and a poster from an exhibition of designs for the Ballet Russe, that we went to see when Sinead was doing a ballet project. The poster shows a kind of erotic dance, and when I bought it, just glancing at it quickly and knowing I liked it, I thought there were two figures there, entwined in some sexual ritual; though when I got it home and took it out to frame it I saw it was really a solitary figure, neither male nor female, at once muscled and voluptuous, bejewelled and draped in lavish folds of cloth—and the other shape was a scarf red as flame that twisted and curved close, gauzy, without substance, yet moving like the body of a lover.
    I get up silently, and take Richard’s dressing gown from the foot of the bed and wrap it round me. Mine is silk, and in this weather putting it on just makes you feel colder.
    I go down to the kitchen. I make some toast, but thebutter is hard and won’t spread. There’s some wine left in the bottle we drank with dinner: Richard is keeping to his resolution to drink less whisky in the evening. I pour myself a glass; in the cold, it has no scent, but I feel a sudden easing as it glides into my veins.
    The room is untidy, the girls’ things scattered around—Sinead’s flower scrunchies and copies of Heat, and drawings Daisy has done, sketches of injured animals, and her box of magnetic fridge poetry. She hasn’t done a new poem for weeks; her pre-Christmas offering is still on the door of the fridge. ‘The gold witch crept to the top.’ In the