“Wen,” Phoebe said.

“What?”

“It’s a wen, not a wart.”

Jimmy had finished his cigarette, and now he lit a new one. No one smoked as much as Jimmy did; he had once told Phoebe that he often found himself wishing he could have a smoke while he was already smoking, and that indeed on more than one occasion he had caught himself lighting a cigarette even though the one he had going was there in the ashtray in front of him. He leaned back on the chair and crossed one of his sticklike little legs on the other and blew a bugle-shaped stream of smoke at the ceiling. “So what do you think?” he said.

Phoebe was stirring a spoon round and round in the cold dregs in her cup. “I think something has happened to her,” she said quietly.

He gave her a quick, sideways glance. “Are you really worried? I mean, really?”

She shrugged, not wanting to seem melodramatic, not giving him cause to laugh at her. He was still watching her sidelong, frowning. At a party one night in her flat he had told her he thought her friendship with April Latimer was funny, and added, “Funny peculiar, that’s to say, not funny ha ha.” He had been a little drunk and afterwards they had tacitly agreed to pretend to have forgotten this exchange, but the fact of what he had implied lingered between them uncomfortably. And laugh it off though she might, it had made Phoebe brood, and the memory of it still troubled her, a little.

“You’re probably right, of course,” she said now. “Probably it’s just April being April, skipping off and forgetting to tell anyone.”

But no, she did not believe it; she could not. What ever else April might be she was not thoughtless like that, not where her friends were concerned.