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Alicia is, in many ways, the still centre of the novel. Everything moves around her. Doctors, journalists, lawyers, Theo, who is the psychotherapist fixated on her case, all attempt to interpret her, and to translate her silence into something they can understand. But the more the novel unfolds, the clearer it becomes that Alicia isn't as passive as she appears. Her paintings, particularly Alcestis, hold more truth than any spoken explanation could.

Grief doesn’t arrive cleanly in Intermezzo. Nor does it announce itself or demand attention in the way we expect it to. It seeps, it rearranges and it sits quietly inside conversations that seem to be about something else entirely, like sex, money, timing, responsibility, up until you realise every choice being made is orbiting a loss no one quite knows how to hold.

Agnes is the axis on which the novel turns. She is not written as a passive historical wife but as a force in her own right—rooted in the natural world, attuned to bodies, rhythms, and patterns others overlook. Her form of knowledge is intuitive, physical, almost wordless, which sets her in quiet opposition to the structured, literate world her husband eventually inhabits. This tension between ways of knowing—embodied versus intellectual—runs beneath nearly every scene.