Housework had become important, a time-filling ritual, and Ann moved dutifully through the apartment, vacuuming carpets already vacuumed, tidying things already tidied and dusting where no dust had had time to collect, from the previous day. She tried to concentrate upon what she was doing but by now the ritual had become mechanical as well as dutiful, like so much else. She’d expected the uncertainty, of course: the doubts even. For there to have been any other reaction, after what had happened and where they were, would have been more unsettling than the feelings she now had, because it would have been unnatural. But it should have gone by now. Lessened at least. Not got worse. She stopped the vacuum abruptly, the movement a physical correction. Only some things seemed to have got worse. To think everything had would be to exaggerate and it would be wrong – dangerous – to exaggerate: certainly not the way to settle and adjust, imagining things to be worse than they really were. The hostility had definitely gone, from the other wives. Eddie insisted that it had never existed in the first place, dismissing the impression as her confused response to the trauma of the divorce and the reaction of her family and the abruptness of the Moscow posting, but Ann knew she wasn’t confused. They had been hostile. She’d rationalised the attitude, even understood it, now she’d lived in Moscow. The Western diplomatic community in the Soviet capital was an enclosed, insular and – her strong opinion – claustrophobic existence, the same faces at the same receptions and parties with the same small-talk and the same gossip.