All three men were attentive to her, turning their bodies subtly toward her as we stood on the half-built patio and drank champagne. She knew how pretty she was too. She kept lowering her lashes and giving secretive smiles. Her laugh was a little silvery peal, like a delicate bell.

“Nice tie,” she said to Clive, giving him that smile. It made me want to spill wine on her dress.

They had obviously met before; well, I suppose they would have, given their jobs. She and Sebastian and Clive and Jonathan stood in a group and talked about the Footsie and the futures market, while Emma and I stood by like gooseberries.

“I always think the Footsie index is such a comical name,” I said loudly, determined not to be ignored.

Gloria turned politely toward me.

“Do you work in the City too?” she asked, although I knew she knew I didn’t.

“Me? Goodness, no.” I laughed loudly and took a gulp of champagne. “I can’t even add up my bridge hand. No, Clive and I decided that when we had children I would stop working outside the home. Do you have children?”

“No. What did you do before?”

“I was a model.”

“A hand model,” said Emma. My friend, Emma.

“They are nice hands,” said Sebastian, rather stiffly.

I waved them in front of everyone. “These were my fortune,” I said. “I used to wear gloves all the time, even during mealtimes. Sometimes I even wore them in bed. Mad, eh?” Jonathan poured more champagne in our glasses. Gloria was saying something softly to Clive, who was smiling down at her. Upstairs Chris started crying. I poured the champagne down my throat.

“Excuse me, everybody. Carry on. Duty calls. I’ll tell you when dinner’s ready. Please have some more canapés.”

I turned over the tape for Chris and kissed him again, and told him if he called downstairs again I’d be annoyed. Then I went into our room. I put on more lipstick and brushed my hair and splashed perfume down my cleavage. I felt the teeniest bit tipsy. I wanted to be lying in bed, between clean, ironed sheets. Alone, thank you very much.

I drank fizzy water with the soup, but then I had some lovely Chardonnay with the fish, a glass of claret with the Brie, a rather nice dessert wine with the apricot pudding, and the coffee was like a little jolt of clarity in between the alcohol fuzz.

“What a manipulative girl,” I said to Clive, afterward, when I was wiping off my makeup with a cotton pad and he was cleaning his teeth.

He rinsed his mouth carefully. He looked at me, with my one eye on and one eye off. “You’re drunk,” he said.

I had a sudden, utterly disconcerting fantasy of slapping him, plunging my nail scissors into his stomach. “Nonsense.” I laughed. “I’m just tipsy, darling. I think it all went quite well, don’t you?”

SEVEN

My big vice is catalogs, mail order. That’s mad in a way because it’s not me at all. If there’s one thing I believe in it’s that the objects in your home have to be exactly right. The thought of having the second-best object, that you chose because it was a little bit-or a lot-cheaper, and having it squatting there in the corner of the room year after year, accusing you, well, that’s my idea of torture. You need to touch things before you buy them, walk around them, get a feeling of how they would look in the particular space you’ve envisaged.

So I shouldn’t bother with catalogs. The towels that look fluffy in the picture may feel synthetic when they arrive and be just a different enough shade to clash with the wooden frame of the wonderful mirror you found in that market last summer. The salad spoons may look heavy but feel tackily light when they arrive. And I know that theoretically you can return them and get your money back, but somehow you never get around to that. It’s indefensible and Clive is pretty contemptuous of it, if he happens to notice it, but then he’s got his wretched wine catalogs, which he pores over late into the night.

So when catalogs arrive I can’t resist flicking through them, and there’ll always be something that catches my eye: trainers or a baseball jacket for the boys, or a clever pencil holder or a slotted spoon or an amusing alarm clock or a wastepaper basket that might look good up in the den. As often as not they’ll end up stuffed in the loft or the back of a cupboard, but sometimes they’ll turn up trumps. In any case, it’s such fun when they arrive, brought by special delivery that you have to sign for. It’s like an extra birthday. Better in some ways. If I were being sarcastic, I might say that while boys-and certain men who shall remain nameless-might forget a birthday, at least overnight delivery doesn’t fail to deliver the lampshade you ordered, even if you don’t care for it quite as much as you expected to.

Slightly naughtily, these mail-order companies then pass your name on to other companies, especially when their computers have probably cottoned on to the fact that you’re pathetically likely to buy things you don’t really need. It’s a bit like being the most popular girl in the school. Everybody wants to be your friend and you don’t always want to be theirs. I mean honestly, sometimes I get advertisements from the most extraordinary people. Just last week I got a brochure from a company that makes ponchos out of llama hair. Twenty-nine pounds ninety-nine, and you could get two for thirty-nine ninety-nine, as if anybody who wasn’t living in the Andes would even want one. I didn’t consider it for a second.

All of which is a prelude to what happened on the Monday when I came downstairs in the middle of the morning and saw the normal dross on the mat. Not real mail, of course. Just the usual bunch of silly colored flyers offering to deliver pizza with a free Coke and clean our windows and give a valuation for a house and pull out our original window frames and replace them with metal and double glazing. And among them was one that said “Special Offer Victorian Interiors.” So I opened it.

I bet you don’t know how you open a letter. You do it every day but you never think about it. I know because I’ve been forced to dwell on it. You pick up the letter, turn the front of it, the address side, away from you. If it’s stuck firmly down, you pry away one corner of the stuck-down flap and tear it slightly. The point is to make space so you can insert your second finger and push it along the fold, tearing it all the way along. That’s what I did and the curious thing was that I didn’t feel any pain. I opened the envelope and saw a dull glitter of metal and that the envelope seemed to be wet in places, wet and spotted with red.

It was only then that I felt not pain exactly but a dull ache in my left hand. I looked down and it took a strangely long time for me to take in what I was seeing. There seemed to be blood everywhere, splashes across my fawn trousers, drip-dripping on the floor; my fingers were wet with it. I still didn’t properly understand, so I looked stupidly into the envelope as if it might have been spilling warm red paint onto the floor. I saw the dull metal. Flat pieces stapled in a line along a piece of card. I didn’t see at first what they were and then suddenly I thought of my father, sitting on the edge of the bath when I was a little girl watching him with white foam on his face like Father Christmas. Old-fashioned razor blades.

I looked at my fingers. A steady stream of blood was trickling down onto the bare board. I lifted up my hand and inspected it. There was a deep livid cut in the second finger. I could feel it pulsing, oozing out blood. That was when it began to hurt and I felt dizzy and cold and hot all at once. I didn’t scream or cry. I wasn’t sick. Instead my legs gave way and I slipped down onto the blood and half-lay there. I don’t know how long I was like that. Just a few minutes, probably, before Lena came down and ran to get help, and Lynne appeared with her mouth in the shape of a perfect O.