At first he doesn’t miss Alexa. One minute she is there, standing at the door in her school uniform, and the next she is gone, non-existent, just as she used to be when Thomas was at work. He barely thinks of her when she is at school. There are two realities, one where she exists and another, unrelated, that he occupies alone. Then, at four o'clock, she reappears at the door, slightly scuffed, estrangement filming her features, and their life together resumes.
One day, in the middle of the morning, Thomas finds himself searching his mind for the moment of her departure. At breakfast she had complained that her stomach hurt. He dimly recalls her face, wan and drooping, but after that all he can remember is his own determination to send her to school. It is as though his will were a loud sound that has drowned out everything else. Why did he want her to go so much? He doesn’t exactly know. He wonders now what the trouble was. He wishes to reconstruct it, Alexa’s stomach ache, her experience of the hour they spent together, her reluctant passage out of the house, but there is only himself, crashing above everything like a symphony. At half past three he doesn’t wait for Georgina to bring her home. He goes and collects her himself.
Sometimes, standing in the tarmacked playground, he is enveloped in vague feelings of beneficence and sympathy, almost of sadness. Usually he is early: the children have not yet come out. The bright geometric climbing frames, the empty sandpit, the neat, indestructible shrubs in the flower beds seem so familiar to him. He appears to be remembering them, and yet here they are before his eyes. It is as though he is observing them from a strange afterlife. This, he realises, is where Alexa spends the majority of her waking hours.
Other people arrive; he begins to hear the mutter of conversation, babies’ cries, the shouts of small children. He has noticed that the levels of ambient noise in the playground make a virtually unimpeded ascent from piano to fortissimo in the half-hour that he is there. There is always a moment at which he is no longer able to distinguish one sound from another. It is this loss of the power of individuation that makes him feel unreal. He needs Alexa to come out; he needs something he can identify, in order to exist again. Little benches stand around the perimeter and he sits on one. He hums the adagio. He taps his fingers on his thighs.