The window is open a little at the bottom, she left it that way when she set off for work this morning, and the room is chilly and damp. She’s looking at the bedside clock, wondering whether it’s worth the effort to get up, get dressed and go back to the office for an hour or so. Probably not. Resting on her left arm is a head. William’s head. William’s head is on her arm because they’ve just made love. Before that they had lunch, a lingering, expensive lunch at the Courtyard Café, with cucumber soup and sweetbreads and undertones. And two bottles of wine, which may have accounted for the undertones. William sighed a lot and shrugged several times, as if practicing subdued melancholy. He told her about a recent study on the effects of an uncooked all-meat diet as practiced by the Inuit, but his heart wasn’t in it. Though they alluded to their shared problem, they didn’t discuss it directly. Defection is painful. Elizabeth said (but only once) that she was glad Nate finally seemed to be working out some of his conflicts and that she herself was finding it less of a strain to have him not so much, well, underfoot.
