‘Enjoy!’

Tom said, ‘Tell me about those paintings.’

‘How well do you know your Ernst?’

‘Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale. It was one of Nelly’s sources, obviously.’

Esther said drily, ‘How very clever you are.’ Then, as she scrutinised him over mushroom soup, her tone changed. ‘You know, I couldn’t stop thinking about them for ages. You could see where that Nelly’s Nasties tag came from. There were these day-glo colours and a sense of pure evil. The bright day is done, / And we are for the dark. Isn’t that how it goes? Only the darkness was already there, inseparable from the bright day. But only implied. In one sense, it was all in your mind,’ said Esther. ‘That was the worst thing, in a way. It made you part of it.’

When they said goodbye, she kissed Tom; on both cheeks, with a little pause in between to convert affection into irony. ‘Good luck with Nelly Zhang.’ Another beat. ‘I’m so pleased you’re pursuing a non-academic line there.’

Nelly, the least intimidating of creatures, could summon great aloofness at will. Her marriage, the events surrounding Atwood’s disappearance: these remained virgin stretches in the map of their friendship. Once, when speaking of Karen, lightly sketching the ways he had failed with her, Tom mentioned Atwood. Nelly went on with whatever she was doing. The subject dropped between them like a stone.

Sometimes Tom suspected that she understood the fascination of taboo. That her silence was a way of ensuring his ongoing interest. Or they might be talking about anything at all-politics, TV, the perennial weather-and slowly there would grow in him the certainty that the real subject of the conversation was Felix Atwood. The very fullness of their dialogue was shaped by his absence. A string of banal observations seemed to contain him, in every sense. Tom’s consciousness of the man would swell until it seemed that Atwood’s name must burst from his tongue. Once or twice, at these moments, he thought Nelly was looking at him with something like dismay. He would make an effort, would force himself to say something entirely trivial. The danger was skirted. Once more, there would be nothing but ease between them.

Now and then a fragment of information came Tom’s way, maddening in its incompleteness and particularity. When proposing that he rent her house, Nelly warned him of its inconveniences: hurricane lamps, tank water, a stone fi replace for warmth. Then she said, ‘Felix didn’t want somewhere cosified. It was before everyone went postmodern. People were still big on authenticity.’

‘It can’t have been easy, weekends in a place like that when Rory was a baby.’ Tom was thinking, The selfish prick, no running water for his wife and kid so he could feel authentic.

Across the road from the bar in which they sat, a window displayed bra and knicker sets in shell pink, vanilla, peppermint. Tiny satin bows signalled the gift-wrapping of female flesh. A few doors away, a chandelier-hung lighting shop that specialised in Never To Be Repeated Bargains went on closing down.

Nelly remained silent for so long, staring into her glass, that Tom’s mind drifted to a DVD he had rented. Then she said, ‘I didn’t go up there so much. It was really Felix’s place. His retreat where the city couldn’t get in.’

Tom waited.

She lit a cigarette. ‘But it’s beautiful. You’ll see, if you go. I think about living there one day.’

His heart dipped. That she might speak so lightly of a future in which he had no part.

He always pictured her framed by the city, he said. Seeing, in his mind, her red parka blocky and vivid against a blur of traffic, or suspended in a plate-glass door.

She exhaled clove-scented smoke in his face. ‘The Chinese is a creature of alleys.’

But afterwards, in the street, she spoke of watching shooting stars over the paddocks. Of the daffodils a woman long dead had planted around the house, golden and cream and orange-centred, hundreds of flowers quaking in cold August. She said she nurtured a dream of planting trees all over the property. ‘All the different trees that belong there, blackwoods, gums, wattles. I’d like to see it start to turn back into bush.’

People were coming out of restaurants; a woman lifted her hair over the collar of her jacket. There was the scrape of metal on concrete as waiters began packing up the pavement seating.

A voice said, ‘Remind me again who you are?’ Nelly and Tom made their way through a stream of stills, a beef-pink face mounted on a pearl choker, two girls in studded denim turning away from each other on a corner, a taxi flashing its lights at a man with his arm raised.

‘A perfect city is one you can walk out of,’ said Nelly.

Tom pictured the pair of them on a road striped by tree shadows: towers at their back, a mountain in the space between their bodies.

Nelly often sought his advice on what to read. She would quiz Tom about literary history, borrow his course readers. She studied his bookshelves like museum cases, hands behind her back. She squatted to peer at shelves where neglected volumes gathered, and fished out treasures: Kafka’s diaries, an anthology of Victorian poems, The Man Who Loved Children.

‘I only read about five books when I was growing up.’ But one day a chance remark revealed that having come across Crime and Punishment at the age of seventeen, Nelly had read her way through the nineteenth-century Russians. What she found there had stayed with her as a series of images. She might speak of a man striking a woman at a window with his riding crop as if describing a page in an illuminated missal. In Nelly’s distillation of a famous story there was a woman dressed in grey and an inkstand grey with dust; one day the woman’s lover looked in the mirror and saw, from the colour of his hair, that he had grown old.

Tom would have spoken of the formal qualities of Chekhov’s tale, its understated, almost offhand treatment of love, and evasive resolution. All this Nelly omitted or missed in favour of detail and implication. But years later, when Tom himself was old, he would discover that what remained, when the sifting was done, was a dress, an inkstand, a man whose hair was the colour of ashes.

What he missed in images, said Tom, was the passage of time. ‘Stories are about time. But looking’s a present-tense activity. We live in an age where everything’s got to be now, because consumerism’s based on change. Images seem complicit with that somehow.’

Then he said, ‘Sometimes I think I’ll never really get what’s going on in a painting.’

He had never admitted this before. It required an effort.

‘Is it so different from what you do?’ Nelly said, ‘Reading a book, looking at a painting-they’re both things that might change you.’

Tom noticed that where he spoke of knowledge, Nelly talked of transformation. It confirmed his sense that pictures exceed analysis. Art was ghostly in a way, he thought, something magical that he recognised rather than understood.

He said as much to Nelly. Who argued, ‘But you can see a painting, touch it. Fiction’s the spooky thing. The thing that’s not there.’

She stirred in her ugly vinyl armchair as she spoke. The movement caused her shirt to ride up; there was the glimmer of a bare hip. It was an intensely erotic apparition. Tom looked away. He thought there was nothing more present, more material, than her flesh; and nothing he found more disturbing.

When he told Nelly that he was thinking of writing about her work, she looked doubtful. ‘Yeah, right, that’s good, I guess.’

Next thing there was Posner, lying in wait for Tom at the Preserve. ‘Dear boy, this is tremendously exciting. The serious attention Nelly’s attracted so far has been rather outweighed by sensationalist dross. The hour is ripe, ripe, for a scholar.’ He brought out his version of a smile; cautiously, like a man exercising an alligator. ‘Oh, I know you’re not an art historian. But as I’ve been saying to Nelly, one must think over and through mere categories. The specialist is a contemptible modern creation. I consider the fact that you come to us from literature a veritable atout. Art and text: an illustrious association.’ A shirtfront loomed vast as a snowfield. ‘If I could help,’ said Posner, ‘I would be honoured. Resources, contacts, suggestions… We could start with dinner.’