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To EJ

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At the kitchen table he’d turned a page of Time Out and there was her face. He’d been so shocked that he’d started to laugh. She was still beautiful—though squinting slightly as if she’d just removed a pair of glasses. Did she need glasses now too? He snipped out the inch-long update with nail scissors, folded it and filed it in his wallet. The exhibition, ‘Us and the US’, featured several British and American female artists, and it opened in three days.

When he reached the drinks table and lifted a plastic tumbler of wine, he noticed, with unexpected anger, how the suits had real champagne glasses. Money grants its owners a kind of armour, and this crowd shone with it. They were delighted and loud, and somewhere among them was Ruth. He headed towards her work and hovered.

There.

She did look good; older, of course, and the hair now unnaturally blonde. Her nose was still a little pointed, oddly fleshless, and its bridge as straight and thin as the ridge of a sand dune; one lit slope, the other shaded.

‘Hello, oh excuse me, I’m sorry, Ruth, hi. ’

David used one elbow to open a gap between the speaker and Ruth, and then slotted himself neatly into it.

‘Hello. ’ The voice was lower than David would have guessed but instantly familiar. She still dressed in black but the materials had been upgraded. A pilous cashmere wrap, a fitted silk blouse.