"Don't knock your talents."

"I really love painting. I find it very uplifting."

"I used to paint walls myself."

Nicole stops suddenly. "No, I mean, I paint pictures."

"Do you use rollers?"

More confusion. "No, I mean, I paint paintings paintings, Julianne."

"Paintings?" I just stare, like it's incredible she's chosen such a designation.

"You thought I meant painting walls?" She laughs. "I never paint walls. Harry does that. I paint paintings. Up in the attic."

"The madwoman in the attic."

"In my spare time."

I move past the mantelpiece, above which I notice something different: a new mirror.

"So," I drawl, "you're an artist."

"I wouldn't say that. Maybe I'll show them to you some time?"

I remember the nudes in her sketch pad. "That won't be necessary."

I inspect the rest of the room. The dinner table is covered with a new white tablecloth. I'm tempted to look underneath for any dents. On the table lies the book I saw her purchase yesterday: Feng Shui and Sacred Space Feng Shui and Sacred Space.

Sacred space. I love it.

There's a new glass coffee table in place of the old oneonly less elaborate. On top of this there lies the same plethora of books and junk magazines I breezed through on Thursday evening last.

And the aquarium? It's disappeared completely. Pedestal and all. In the front right corner now stands a large chrysanthemum in a white square box.

You would never know I was here just two days ago. How did they manage to clear it up and paint everything so quickly? Two days: that's marathon cosmetics. The room is perfect. There may still be a slight odour of alcohol from the monsoon I created around the stone fireplace, but that piercing wine-vat smell has totally disappeared.

"There were bloodstains on the couch. I tried to remove them, but there are still traces left."

"Did you stab Harry or something?"

She laughs, shaking her head, then quietly informs me that the room was ransacked last Thursday evening by intruders.

"You're joking."

Me the great big innocent.

Sighing, she tells me she walked in the front door and everything lay in ruins before her eyes. I can just see it: Hannibal returning to a devastated Carthage.

"I was really upset," she mourns. "I mean, they didn't even steal anything. The only thing they took was a manual about babies and a small book on Feng Shui Feng Shui."

I turn to admire the view of the front garden.

"They smashed our lovely coffee table and especially our antique drinks cabinet. There was glass and alcohol everywhere."

"Flying cocktails?"

But there's no response from behind me.

She just doesn't get it, does she? She thinks her Bagua Bagua mirror and her mirror and her Fu Fu dogs will protect her. dogs will protect her.

There's one born every minute.

"Break-ins are a regular feature of modern life, Nicole," I observe, concentrating on the robin redbreast poking about on top of the bird stand. "One must take precautions. You need to double-lock your doors and bolt your windows...and of course, fortified glass is to be recommended."

"I suppose so."

"You keep a lovely garden."

"They were probably just young gurriers."

Suddenly, despite the depression weighing me down like leaden cannonballs, I want to burst out laughing. I very nearly do, as well. The poor gurriers have come in for quite a knocking recently. It's sheer prejudice, straight out of Ronan's mouth. It's like the vibe that goes: if you are, say, a travelling person then you're automatically a congenital kleptomaniac knifing rapist. It's so bizarre.

"Really, though, you have a lovely garden."

"It's based on a Japanese design," she says quietly.

"Tell me more."

"Did you know that the Japanese were the first people in the world to cultivate a garden for aesthetic reasons alone?"

Aesthetic: where have I heard that word before?

"I wasn't aware of that."

"They thought gardens were sacred places where you meditated and destressed. So when we first moved in I was careful to get the vibrations right, I made sure to have something from the element of firethe lantern outside. And waterin the fountain. And metalin the statue, and there's plenty of wood. I had it all done myselfHarry's not great on gardens. I made sure to have lots of curved shapes. Don't you love the bird house? Our hedges were evergreen, which was lucky. Deciduous hedges are inauspicious."

"That's a point."

I can hear her footsteps behind me and the doors of the drinks cabinet opening. She offers me a drink and I turn round. A black cat streaks across the floor, eyeing me with knowing menace. It's almost as if he spied me last Thursday evening, and it's making me nervous.

"Max, say hello to Julianne."

"He wouldn't know me," says I.

The cat glares at me accusingly.

Nicole pours herself a Cointreau. I tell her to pour me one of those. Handing me my drink, she shakes her head and sighs.

"Poor Max. He was affected, too. His box of cat biccies got soaked from all the bottles of alcohol thrown at the fireplace."

"Don't tell me you fed him alcohol-soaked biscuits? No wonder he's behaving strangely."

She laughs at this point. "They destroyed your dinner, Max, pet. Aren't they animals?"

He should know.

Nicole bends down to feel him but he evades her long thin fingers, slinking back out of the room, leaving deadly vibes hanging in the ether.

I swing round to the garden again. Gardens. What can I ask her about gardens? I trawl for a relevant topic of conversation, but she beats me to it.

"We had an aquarium over there beside you."

"A fish tank?"

"It was beautiful. They totally destroyed it. There was glass everywhere."

"How could anyone do such a thing?"

"I know."

"People have no respect any more."

"We had a clownfish..."

A skunk-striped clownfish, she means.

"...and an oriental sweetlips, and a few yellow-bellied devils and"

"What strange names."

"When I came in they were lying all over the floor."

She falls silent. I turn round again. A reverent, sad expression has overcome her. I can see that despite everything Nicole is essentially a good person.

"Do you know what Harry did?"

"No. What?"

"He stood on two of them. They were squashed like pancakes."

"Fish cakes?"

Bad joke. Still, I can see her point. Although my personal record with fish would hardly qualify me as Honorary Secretary of the ISPCA, nevertheless I am not so cruel that I would actually stamp on the poor things. This was Harry losing his temper at beings a hundredth his size. I mean, how would you feel being trampled upon by King Kong's huge sweaty foot in the middle of Fifth Avenue? What an awful bully.

"Do you know what he did to the clownfish and the oriental sweetlips, after he stamped on them?"

"No."

"I didn't want to say this, because every time I think of it it makes me so angry, but I will. He dropped them in boiling water."

She looks furious.

I burst out laughing; I simply cannot help myself. I immediately apologize to her and try to explain that I'm only laughing because what she said reminded me of something I once did as a naughty child many years ago.

She looks like she thinks I'm making fun of her. "Don't laugh, Julianne," she pleads. "They were in the pot, all puffed up like jelly. It was horrible. His excuse was that it saved him a trip to the fishmongers."

"Some people seem to get a kick out of hurting poor defenceless creatures."

"Harry refuses to buy another aquarium. He acted like it was my fault."

Mournfully, she fetches a cloth from the fireplace. "Basically'she sighs, dusting the mantelpiece lethargically'he likes to make out I'm stupid."

Nicole? Stupid?

"I wish you could meet him. You'd see what I mean."

The idea that if I met Harry I would see what she meant irks me. Okay, she's proved her point that Harry is a bastard, but there are life alternatives open to her other than attempting to net Ronan for marriage: she could try moving out and getting her own place, and doing what many normal women domeet single, unmarried men, for example.

"Will he be back soon?"

She consults her watch and nods. Then she throws her cloth back into the fireplace and slumps down on the edge of the couch next to the bloodstain. "Ronan's great with fish," she says mournfully, clasping her hands together in front of her.

"Excuse me?"

"He loves tropical fish."

That's what she thinks. I know Ronan. Tropical fish bore him to tears. It's a typical strategy of his: he simply figured that flattering her fish was the Ml motorway into her knickers.

"I gave some of the surviving fish to Ronan," she says.

"You think that's fair?"

Pause.

"It's the best chance they'll get," she replies.

"I don't mean fair on the fish, Nicole. I mean fair on his wife."

"But she loves tropical fish."

"How do you know that?" I laugh.

"He said so."

"I hope he's right. For the fishes' sake."

"Oh God, don't say that."