She raises a self-conscious hand to her helmet of platinum blonde. 'No.'

'Is that new?' He points at her blouse.

'No.' She makes a small movement of impatience a touch to her eyebrow with the side of her finger and Ted recognises that. 'When are you expecting Elina back?'

He still stares at her. He can't put his finger on what it is. The mole on her neck, the line of her jaw, the rings on her fingers: it's as if he's never seen them before.

'She's taken the baby with her, I suppose?' his mother is saying.

'Uh-huh.'

'Darling, could you possibly phone her and tell her I'm here? Because I have to be back by six tonight. Your father needs his-'

'She hasn't taken her phone.' Ted gestures towards the living room. 'It's in there.'

His mother lets out a small, irritated sigh. 'Well, that is a shame. I did so want to have-'

'I don't know where she is, Mum.'

She looks at him sharply. She hasn't missed the tremor in his voice. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean she's gone. I don't know where.'

'With the baby?'

'Yeah.'

'Well, she's probably taken him for a walk. She'll be back soon. We'll have a cup of tea in the garden and-'

'Mum, she can barely even make it up the stairs.'

She frowns. 'What are you talking about?'

'Since what happened. The birth. You know. She's very . . . weak. She's very ill. She nearly died, Mum. Remember? And I come back from the shops and she's not here and I've no idea where she's gone or how she'd get there because-' Ted stops. 'I don't know what to do.'

His mother walks into the living room, walks out again, walks into the kitchen. 'Are you sure she's not here?'

Ted rolls his eyes. 'Yes.'

His mother goes to the sink, turns on the tap and starts filling the kettle.

'Mum, what are you doing?' he says, aghast. 'How can you make tea when-' He stops again. He has suddenly seen that the key is in the back door. It's not hanging on its hook. It's in the door. Ted darts towards it. He pushes the door open and the smell of the garden rushes to meet him. He steps out on to the decking and he sees that the studio door also has a key in it and his heart seems to pound with joy as he runs over the grass to the studio window.

Through it, he sees something incredible. Elina, in profile, standing at the sink. She is wearing her overalls and she is doing something, mixing a colour, perhaps, or washing a brush, Ted can't see exactly what. But her movements are deft, practised, and the look on her face is one of absorbed serenity. She looks, Ted sees, like she used to. Like she did when he first met her, when she arrived at his house in some battered van she'd borrowed, all alone, perfectly prepared to lug astonishingly heavy boxes and equipment up two flights of stairs to the attic. He'd watched this slight, pixie-like woman with cropped, bleached hair calmly labouring under the weight of an enormous lightbox and he'd gone out and offered to help. She'd seemed surprised. 'I can manage,' she'd said, and he'd wanted to laugh because she clearly could not. He'd watched her come and go during the weeks that followed out in the evenings, he didn't know where, up and down to the attic, coming into the kitchen to eat at odd hours. He'd hear her walking about above his head in the middle of the night and would wonder what she was doing, had felt oddly privileged to be able to witness the private workings of this unusual life. Often, after one of those walking-about nights, she'd had that look the next day: a woman preoccupied, a woman with a satisfying secret, and he'd wanted to ask her, what is it, what is it you're doing up there?'

He loves that look. He's missed it. It was what made him realise what had to happen, what he must do. After a while, he began to see that Elina reminded him of nothing so much as one of those balloons children have the bright ones, filled with helium, that bob and tug at the end of their string. One moment of inattention and off they go, skywards, away, never to be seen again. He saw that Elina had lived everywhere, all over the world, that she arrived and left and moved on. That secret thing she had, what she did up there in the attic when no one was looking, with her paints and her turpentine and her canvases she only needed that, she didn't lack anything else, any anchor, any gravity. And he saw that if he didn't take hold of her, if he didn't tether her down, if he didn't bind her to him, she would be off again. And so he did it. He laid hold of her and he held on tight; he sometimes pictures this as him tying the string of a balloon to his wrist and getting on with his life while it floats there, just above his head. He has been holding on tight ever since. In their early days, it took him a while to get used to waking sometimes in the night and finding that she'd gone, that the bed was empty. At first, it had made him start awake and run about the house in a panic. But then he had learnt that she sometimes slipped away in the night, to work, to lead her other life. He always checked, always looked out of the back windows of the house, to see the light on in the studio and then he would return to bed, alone.

The look is back! He has to suppress the urge to clap his hands as he watches her through her studio window. She will be all right again, he sees, she has survived. None of this the carnage at the hospital, his whisper of let's not bother has vanquished her. She will be all right. He can see the special look on her face, in the workings of the muscles of her shoulders, in the set of her mouth. She's working. He feels the excitement radiating from her. She's working.

Then he hears a voice to his left: 'In here, is she?' and Ted is so caught up in what he has been seeing through the window that he fails to catch on quickly enough to prevent his mother pushing open the studio door and stepping inside.

Several things happen at once. The studio door, always a bit loose on its hinges, slams back against the wooden wall with a crash. Ted sees Elina whirl round from the sink, knocking a china saucer to the floor, which smashes. The baby, somewhere in the room with her, wakes with a start and lets out a piercing screech.

'Oh,' Elina cries, a blue-stained hand clutched to her chest, 'what are you doing here?'

Ted is through the door in seconds, talking over his mother, trying to explain, but Elina is rushing to pick up the baby and she steps on the pieces of broken china in her bare feet so Ted picks up the baby, but the baby is furious, woken from his nap, and Elina is sitting on a chair, trying to pull the bits of china out of her foot with her blue hands and she is saying, I can't believe you woke him up, I'd just got him off, and her foot is bleeding and she sounds as if she might cry. She lets out a Finnish word that sounds to Ted like a curse, as she pulls a shard of saucer from her heel.

'You go back to work,' Ted says unconvincingly, above the noise, trying not to look at the blood dripping out of her wounds, 'if you like. We'll take the baby and-'

Elina mutters a different Finnish curse and hurls a piece of china into the bin. 'How can I go back to work?' she cries, gesturing at the screaming baby. 'Are you going to feed him? Is your mother?'

Ted bounces his son up and down. 'It's not our fault,' he says, over the noise. 'We didn't know where you were. I got back and you were gone. I was really worried about you. I looked everywhere and-'

'Everywhere?' Elina repeats.

'I thought . . . I thought . . .'

'You thought what?' They stare at each other for a moment, then both drop their eyes. 'Give me the baby,' she says quietly, and begins to unbutton her overalls.

'Elina, come into the house. You need to put a plaster on that and-'

'Give me the baby.'

'Feed him in the house. My mother's come to see us. Come into the house and-'

'I will not!' she shouts again. 'I'm staying here. Now give me the baby!'

Out of the corner of his eye Ted sees his mother, standing near the door. She is shaking her head. 'Goodness,' she says, 'what a noise.' Ted sees Elina flinch at the sound of her voice and he feels guilty because he knows that she doesn't like anyone in her studio, anyone at all, not even him, not even her dealer. But Ted's mother isn't looking at the work, she isn't looking at the rough sketches and stretched canvases and the photographs and the transparencies on the lightbox and the tools on the walls, she's only looking at the baby, in that hungry, needful way she has.

'What's wrong?' his mother croons to the baby. 'What's wrong, little man?' She lifts him out of Ted's hands; he feels the rasp of her frosted fingernails against his palms as she takes hold. 'Are you upset because Mummy and Daddy are shouting? Are you? Don't you worry. You come along with Grandma and everything will be all right.'

She disappears out of the door with him. Ted and Elina look at each other across the empty studio. Elina's face is chalk white, her mouth slightly open, as if she's about to say something.

'I was worried about you,' Ted says again, scuffing his shoe against the lip of the rug.

Elina springs from the chair and comes right up to him. 'Do you know what, Ted?' She takes hold of his face in her hands. 'I'm fine. I really am. I wasn't for a while but now I'm doing OK. You're the one we need to worry about.'

He gazes into her eyes, mute. He sees the familiar slate blue of them, the left one slightly darker than the right, he sees a miniature version of himself looking back out at him. They stand like that for a long moment. From the open door, they can hear the baby's screams redoubling, sharpening.

Ted pulls away from Elina's grasp. He drops his gaze. He half turns. Elina, he knows, is still looking at him. He steps out of the studio. 'Baby's hungry,' he mutters, as he goes. 'I'll get him back for you.'

Lexie had been working at Elsewhere for a few months, and living with Innes for a few weeks. They arrived together each morning, roaring down Wardour Street, turning into Bayton Street, in the MG; Lexie would always associate these morning rides with a pleasantly sore ache in her groin, her upper thighs Innes liked to make love at night and again in the morning. He said it cleared his head. 'Otherwise,' he said, 'I'd be thinking about sex all day, instead of work.' It was, he said, particularly difficult since Lexie, the object of his lust, worked with him. 'There you are, you see, walking about, taunting me, all day long, naked under your clothes,' he'd complain.

'Just park the car, Innes,' she would say, 'and stop whining.' One afternoon, the usually busy office was quiet Laurence had gone out to the printer's, Daphne was off on an assignment, Amelia had gone to supervise a photographer. Lexie and Innes were working alone. They were not speaking. Or, rather, Lexie was not speaking to Innes. She was bashing crossly at a typewriter, not looking in his direction. He, she knew, was sitting at his desk, reading through a newspaper, an infuriating half-smile on his face.

Lexie slammed back the carriage on the typewriter, then leant her head in her hands, staring down at the pleats of her green wool dress.

'A journalist was not made in a day, Lex,' Innes observed, from across the room.

She let out a sound halfway between a growl and a scream, yanked the page out of the machine, scrumpled it in her hands and hurled it at him. 'Shut up!' she shouted. 'I hate you!'

The ball of paper fell in a pathetic arc to the carpet, nowhere near its destination. Innes turned a page with a flamboyant rustle. 'No, you don't. You love me.'

'I don't, I don't. I loathe the very sight of you.'

He smiled, folded the newspaper and laid it on his desk. 'You know, if you can't take the criticism the constructive criticism of your editor, you'll never make it. You'll be an overqualified typist for the rest of your life.'

Lexie glared at him. 'Constructive? You call that constructive? It was mean and hateful and-'

'All I said was that you were still in undergraduate gear, that-'

'Stop it!' She held her hands over her ears. 'Don't say it! Don't speak to me!'

He laughed again, got up from his desk and walked across the office to the little back room. 'Well, I'll stay out of your way. I'll be in here, if you need me, but I want two hundred words by lunchtime.'

She let out another growl at his back. Then she looked again at the typescript she'd shown Innes last night. He'd said it was time for her to 'try her hand' at writing something. He'd sent her along to a small show at a gallery and told her to produce a two-hundred-word review. She'd arrived early, circled the space, looked at each painting carefully and noted down what she saw on her pad. She overheard someone asking who that was and when she heard the reply from the gallery owner 'Kent's new girlie' turned and flashed a furious look on him. Girlie, indeed. She had returned to scribbling on her pad, as if she didn't care, and had ended up with pages and pages of indecipherable scribbles. She'd spent a week writing and rewriting it. Then Innes had spent perhaps five minutes reading it before returning it to her, covered with blue pen.

What did he mean, anyway, 'undergraduate gear'? And what was wrong with the phrase 'vibrant hue'? What did he mean by 'a more arresting opening'?

She sighed, rolling another sheet of paper into the typewriter. As she did so, the door to the office opened and in stepped a woman. Or perhaps 'lady' was more the word. She had on a red pillbox hat with a net veil covering half of her face, a navy coat with a nipped-in waist, navy shoes. She clasped a shiny bag in her gloved hands. Her face was pale, flawlessly powdered, her lipsticked mouth parted, as if she would speak if only she might find the words.

'Good morning,' Lexie said. The woman, surely, any second now, would realise she was in the wrong place. 'May I help you?'

The woman gave her a quick, narrow look. 'Are you Lexie?'

'I am.'

With one hand on her hip, the woman proceeded to examine her as if Lexie were a store mannequin and she the discerning buyer. 'Well,' she exclaimed, when she'd finished, letting out a peal of brittle laughter, 'all I can say is that they get younger every time. Wouldn't you agree, darling?' At this the woman turned, and Lexie was astonished to see that behind her was a girl of twelve or thirteen. She was pale, with hair that had been coaxed into ringlets Lexie imagined she would have had to sleep in rags all night to achieve the effect and had her mouth open, as if nasally afflicted.

'Yes, Mother,' she muttered.

Lexie drew herself up to her full height, which was, she was pleased to notice, a great deal more than the woman's. 'I beg your pardon, but may I enquire what is your business here?'

'I say,' the woman said, with another burst of laughter, 'you are a cut above the rest, aren't you? He's done rather well for himself, this time, to bag a chit so youthful and well-spoken. "What is your business here?"' she mimicked, glancing back at her daughter, who continued to glare, open-mouthed, at Lexie. 'Wherever did he find you? Not in some seedy drinking-hole, like all the others, I'll warrant. Have a good look, my darling,' she said, turning again to the daughter. 'This is whom your father has left us for.' With the final words, her perfectly made-up face began to crumple. Lexie watched, appalled, as Gloria for it had to be her bowed her head and searched for something in her handbag, bringing out a handkerchief and crushing it to her face.

There was the sound of a door slamming behind them and feet pounding across the floor. Innes had appeared from the back room and was bearing down on them, his face rigid with fury.

He came to a stop beside Lexie. He surveyed his wife for a moment, taking in the hat, the handkerchief, the tears. He took the cigarette from his mouth. 'What are you doing here, Gloria?' he said, through gritted teeth.

'I had to come,' Gloria whispered, reaching under her veil to dab at her eyes. 'Call me foolish but a woman has to know. I had to see her. Margot had to see her.' She cast her gaze imploringly up to Innes's face but he looked over her shoulder.

He nodded at the girl. 'Hello, Margot,' he said quietly. 'How are you?'

'I am well, thank you, Father.'

He seemed to wince slightly at this but he stepped sideways to see the girl better. 'I hear you're at a new school. How is everything there?'

Gloria swirled round, her navy skirts swishing against Innes's trouser-legs. 'As if you care,' she spat and, without looking at her daughter, said, 'Don't answer him, Margot.' She and Innes glared at each other from their new proximity. 'Don't tell him anything. Why should you, when he treats us like this?'

'Gloria-' Innes began.

'Ask him, my darling,' Gloria said, and Lexie watched, horrified, as Gloria reached behind her, seized her daughter by the arm and propelled her forward. 'Ask him what we came here to find out.'

Margot could not meet her father's eyes, her lids cast down, her face like stone.

'Ask him!' Gloria urged. 'Because I cannot.' More fluttering and dabbing with the handkerchief.

Margot cleared her throat. 'Father,' she began, in a monotone, 'will you please come home?'

Innes made a small movement with his hand, as if he were about to take a draw on his cigarette but had then changed his mind. He looked for a long moment at the girl. He then rested his cigarette in an ashtray on Lexie's desk. He folded his arms about himself. 'Gloria,' he spoke in a low, tight voice, 'this display is most ill-judged. And involving Margot like this. It is really too-'

'Display?' Gloria shrieked, thrusting the girl behind her again. 'Do you think I'm made of clay? Do you think I have no feelings? The others I could overlook and God knows there have been enough of them but this! This is too much. It's all over town, you know.'

Innes sighed, pressed his fingers to his brow. 'What is?'

'That she's living with you! That you've left us to set yourself up with a mistress. A girl half your age. In the flat that by rights should belong to us, to me and Margot. And when you should be with us, with your wife and child-'

'First,' Innes began, in an even tone, 'half of thirty-four, as I'm sure you're aware, is seventeen.' He gestured towards Lexie. 'Does she look seventeen to you? Second, I have not left you to set myself up with her, as you well know. You and I have been living separately for some time now. Let's not pretend otherwise. Third, the flat is in no sense your property. You got the house my mother's house, need I add? while I took a flat. That was our agreement. Fourth, Gloria, I fail to see what business all this is of yours. I let you live your life. You must return me that favour.'

During this speech, Lexie had stolen a covert glance at Margot. She felt an odd sense of alignment between them both observers to what seemed to be a well-trodden argument. When her eyes met Margot's, the girl didn't look away. She didn't flinch, she didn't move a muscle. She just kept Lexie fixed with a chillingly still, open-mouthed gaze. After a second or two, Lexie was forced to look away, back to Gloria, whose hat was now slightly askew; she was screeching about decency and propriety.

'Gloria,' Innes spoke across her, with a deathly, low tone, 'if Margot weren't present, there are many rejoinders I could make to your accusations of moral turpitude. It is for her sake and her sake alone that I restrain myself.'

There was a short silence. Gloria looked up at her husband, panting lightly. It was a peculiar tableau, Lexie reflected. Minus sound, minus speech, minus the child standing behind them, it might have looked like the height of passion instead of its inverse. It looked as if Innes and Gloria were about to lock each other in a frenzied embrace.

Innes broke away first. He took two strides to the door and yanked it open. 'I think perhaps you should leave,' he said, addressing the floor.

Gloria swirled again, her skirts rustling, towards Lexie, as if for a last look. She surveyed her, up and down, patting her hair, righting her hat, clearing her throat. Then she swirled back and, taking her daughter's arm, swept out of the door Innes was holding open.

He nodded, almost bowed, to the girl. 'Goodbye, Margot. It's been nice to see you.' There was no reply. Margot Kent walked after her mother with her head bent.

Innes pushed the door to. He inhaled deeply, then sighed out the breath. He took several quick steps into the room, then drew back a foot and kicked a wastepaper bin. The bin and its contents went skittering over the floor.

'That,' he said, apparently to no one, 'was my wife. My dearly beloved. What a sight, eh?' Arriving at a wall, he proceeded to slam his hand against it, once, twice. Lexie watched, unsure what to do.

Innes shook his hand, flexing the fingers. 'Ow,' he said, and his voice was surprised. 'Damn.'

Lexie walked over to him. She took the hand in hers and began to rub it. 'You idiot,' she said.

He pulled her towards him and wrapped his good arm around her. 'For hitting the wall?' he mumbled into her hair. 'Or for marrying that maenad?'

'Either,' she said. 'Both.'

He embraced her tightly, then pulled away. 'Christ,' he said, 'I need a drink after that. How about you?'

'Um,' Lexie frowned, 'isn't it a bit early for-'

'You're right! Damn it. Will anywhere be open?'