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tightly. A throatful of burrs. ‘Sylvia . . . I’m afraid I have some really bad news.’
    He heard himself telling Sylvia in a clogged-up voice that Celia was dead. He heard Sylvia denying it. He heard himself say that it was true. He was desperately sorry, but it was true. He didn’t even know whether he believed it himself. Maybe he was making some kind of surrealistic mistake, like one of those films where you pick up the wrong suitcase and open it up and voila! no pyjamas, no dirty rolled-up socks, no shaver, only four million dollars’ worth of pure heroin, in plastic bags.
    â€˜Sylvia . . . I’ve been trying to find out who might have seen Celia last . . . before she left San Francisco.’
    A hesitant pause. ‘San Francisco? What do you mean?’
    â€˜She was lecturing for the opera in San Francisco, wasn’t she? A two-week engagement at the Performing Arts Center.’
    â€˜Well, she may have been lecturing, Lloyd, but it wasn’t for us. She never told me anything about it.’
    â€˜When did you last talk to her?’ asked Lloyd.
    â€˜Why, just yesterday morning. She told me she was calling from home.’
    â€˜You mean from here? From La Jolla? What did she say to you?’
    â€˜I don’t know . . .’ Sylvia confessed. ‘Nothing much, really. She gave me her recipe for veal tarantino, the one I was always nagging her about. Then she said something about how excited she was, looking forward to the future. Then she hung up.’
    â€˜She didn’t say anything unusual? Anything that struck you as weird?’
    Sylvia thought about it for a while. ‘I’m not sure. I suppose the whole phone call was weird, in a way—just suddenly calling me out of the blue to give me that recipe. And the way she said, at the end, “Well, goodbye, Sylvia. It was so final. I said, “You sound as if you’re going on a trip.” But she didn’t answer.’
    Lloyd slowly replaced the receiver. The more he discovered about Celia’s last moments, the more mysterious and unsettling they appeared to be. He had imagined that he and Celia had shared everything. Their friendship, their passion, their ambitions, their most inconsequential thoughts. Now he felt that a mask was slipping, and that a different Celia was coming into view, a Celia who had kept herself secret. A Celia who had told him lies, and lied to her best friend, too.
    Through the open door to the bedroom, he could just see Celia’s photograph laughing at him, the photograph he had taken in the courtyard at the Rancho Santa Fe. What are you laughing at, my lady? he thought. What were you doing in that car-park today, dowsing yourself with petrol and setting yourself on fire?
    He walked through to the bedroom, picked up the photograph and stared at it closely, trying to see if her face gave anything away. Most of all, Celia, why didn’t you tell me what was worrying you? Why didn’t you ask me to help?
    Maybe she had, he thought, but maybe he hadn’t understood. The pain of that was almost more than he could bear, and he uttered a sob of grief that hurt his throat.
    He drained the last of the Wild Turkey, holding the decanter upside-down until the last drop had fallen into his glass. Plip, the last drop. Then he struggled awkwardly out of his trousers, and bundled the Danish duck-down quilt around himself, and huffed and puffed, and made a determined effort to sleep.
    She’s dead, she’s gone, but you have to sleep. If you don’t sleep, you won’t be able to cope with the restaurant, and Waldo, and everybody else who’s depending on you.
    Soon the quilt grew impossibly hot, so he untwisted himself, and lay spread-eagled across the bed, feeling drunker than he had ever felt in his life. The mattress tilted and swam as if it were adrift off Point Loma. His whole head seemed to be filled with potentially explosive whisky