Oxygen

1

Inside the house his father’s clocks were striking the hour. Faintly, the chimes carried to where he stood in the garden, a lank young man in a summer sweater and shapeless blue trousers, wiping the lenses of his glasses with the corner of a crumpled handkerchief. He had spent the last hour with the hose watering the flower-beds and giving the ground around the younger trees a good soaking, as he had been instructed to. Now, having carefully coiled the hose, he made his way back towards the house, his progress shadowed by a cat that pushed through the stems of delphiniums and peonies and oriental poppies. At the top of the house, the light in Alice’s room shone dully from between half-open curtains.

It was the dusk of his third day back at Brooklands, the house in the West Country with its grey stone walls, brown-tiled roof and rotting summerhouse, where he had spent the first eighteen years of his life. His own small flat in London was shut and locked, and his neighbour, Mr Bequa, whose clothes carried their own atmosphere of black tobacco and failed cooking, had agreed to forward the mail, though there would not be much. Bequa had even come down into the street to wave him off, and knowing where he was going and why, had done so with gestures of extravagant melancholy, ‘Goodbye, Alec friend! Good heart! Goodbye!’

Wandsworth Bridge, Parsons Green, Hammersmith. Then west along the M4 past out-of-town superstores and fields of rape. A journey he had made so many times since Alice was first diagnosed he often completed the entire trip in a daze of inattention, startled to find himself rounding the last corner by the poultry farm, the sky ahead of him falling in luminous sheets towards the estuary and Wales. But this time, as each familiar landmark had dwindled in the rear-view mirror, then passed out of sight, it had seemed irretrievable, and carrying his suitcase into the hallway at Brooklands he had known with utter certainty that it was his last true homecoming, and that one half of his life was about to slough off like tons of earth in a landslide. For fifteen minutes he stood there surrounded by the soft weight of coats and hats, old boots, old tennis pumps, staring at the over-vivid snap on the wall by the door into the house – himself, Larry and Alice; Stephen must have taken it – arm in arm in the snowy orchard twenty years ago. And he had bowed his head, hearing from upstairs the chatter of his mother’s radio and the rasping of her cough, and had wondered to himself what could possibly comfort him. Where on earth he might look for consolation or ease.

Coming from the garden, the house was entered by descending a short flight of mossy steps from the lawn to the terrace, and opening the glass doors into the kitchen. Here, by the worn mat, Alec slipped off his shoes and went through the house to the stairs, hoping that Alice would already have fallen asleep and would not need him. She had refused to have a room made up for her on the ground floor, despite everyone – Dr Brando, the visiting nurse Una O’Connell, and even Mrs Samson, the woman who for as long as Alec could remember had come in one morning a week to clean the house – saying how much better it would be, how much easier on good days to get into the garden. Wasn’t there a perfectly suitable room downstairs, undisturbed for years other than by the daily swipe of sunlight across the mirror? But Alice had smiled at them all like a child made special and irreproachable by illness, and said that she was too used to the view, to the potato field, the church, the line of hills in the distance (like a boy, she once said, lying on his belly in the grass). And anyway, her bedroom had always been upstairs. It was too late to start ‘rearranging the entire house’. So the subject was dropped, though for an angry moment Alec had wanted to tell her what it was like to watch her, that twenty-minute ordeal, hauling herself a step at a time towards the landing, her fingers clutching at the banister like talons.

Some measures she had agreed to. She took sit-down showers instead of baths, had a raised plastic seat on the toilet, and on Alec’s last visit he had rigged up a bell, running the wire down the stairs from the bedroom and screwing the bell-housing to a beam by the kitchen door. There had even been some laughter when they tested it, Alice pressing the white knob by her bed (complaining that it sounded like the dive klaxon on a submarine) while Alec moved around the house to check the bell’s range, and then went out to the garden, giving the thumbs-up to Una, who leaned dashingly from the bedroom window. But by evening, Alice had decided that the bell was ‘a silly thing’, and ‘quite unnecessary’, and she had looked at Alec as if its installation had been tactless, yet another item among the paraphernalia of her sickness. More inescapable proof of her inescapable condition.

She was not asleep when he went in. She lay propped against the pillows in her nightgown and quilted robe, reading a book. The room was very warm. The heat of the sun was in the timbers of the roof, and the radiator was on high, so that everything sweated its particular smell, a stuffiness half intimate, half medical, that hung in the air like a sediment. Vases of cut flowers, some from the garden, some from friends, added a note of hothouse sweetness, and there was a perfume she sprayed as a kind of luxurious air-freshener, which masked very little, but which Alec could always taste in his mouth for an hour after leaving the room.

Cleanliness – even the illusion of it – was an obsession with her now, as though the sickness were something, some lapse in hygiene, that might be hidden behind veils of scent. For an hour each morning and evening she washed herself with catlike attention in the en-suite bathroom, the only real physical work she still did. But no soaps or night creams or lavender shower gel could entirely hide what filtered out from the disasters inside of her, though nothing would ever be quite as disturbing as that first course of chemotherapy the winter of two years ago, when she had sat wrapped in picnic rugs on the sofa in the living room, alien and wretched and smelling like a child’s chemistry set. When her hair had grown again, it had sprouted brilliant white, and was now a weight of frost-coloured locks that reached to the mid-point of her back. This, she said – the one thing remaining to her she could still be vain about – was the reason she had refused more treatment when she came out of remission, and of all the people who attended on her now, it was her long-time hairdresser, Toni Cuskic, who had the greatest power to soothe. They had a new arrangement: there was no question of Alice making the twenty-minute trip into Nailsea, so once a week Toni drove out from the salon to pull her heavy brush the length of Alice’s hair, while Alice tilted her face to the light, eyes shut, smiling as she listened to the gossip from the shop. Sometimes Toni brought her poodle, Miss Sissy, a show bitch with tight black curls, and Alice would stroke the animal’s narrow skull and let it lick her wrists, until it grew bored of her and wondered off to sniff at some stain or savoury relic around the fringes of the bed.

‘Everything all right, Mum?’ He was standing just inside the door, hands in pockets, very slightly rocking on the balls of his feet.

‘Fine, dear.’

‘Need anything?’

She shook her head.

‘Sure?’

‘Thank you, dear.’

‘Cup of tea?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘I’ve done the garden.’

‘Good.’

‘How about some hot milk?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘You haven’t forgotten your Zopiclone?’

‘No, dear, I haven’t. Do try not to fuss.’

She frowned at him, the old headmistress again, bothered by some wittering pupil. A go-away look.

‘I’ll let you read,’ he said. ‘Look in later.’

She nodded, the movement triggering off a fit of coughing, but as he moved towards her (what was he going to do?) she waved him away and he went out, listening from the landing until she was quiet, then going slowly down the stairs, blushing from an emotion he could not quite identify.

On the wall at the bottom of the stairs, where it could not be avoided, hung the Perspex-framed double-page profile of Larry, from the US celebrity magazine PLEASE!. Made up mostly of photographs, the feature was entitled ‘America’s Favorite Valentine’ (heart-shaped point over the final i), and showed, on the first page, an old Press Association shot of the nineteen-year-old Larry holding up his racquet to the stands after beating world number seven Eric Moberg at the French Open in 1980. Below appeared a heavier, browner Larry, leaning against a silver Jaguar in front of the Manhattan Flatiron building, dressed in the type of clothes a successful young bonds dealer might wear to the golf club, this from the time he worked for Nathan Slater’s advertising circus in New York. Then there was the inevitable still from an episode of Sun Valley, in which Larry, white-coated and waxy-faced, was plunging defibrillators on to the chest of an attractive cardiac victim. But the largest of the photographs – filling the greater part of the right-hand page – was a family portrait of Larry and Kirsty and the three-year-old Ella gathered on a couch in their ‘beautiful home in San Francisco’s North Beach district’. Larry has his arm around Kirsty, who looks cute and excited, the lucky girl who landed Sun Valley's ‘perfect gentleman’, while Ella is wedged between them, though with an expression so determinedly mournful it was not difficult to hear the pleas of the photographer (bylined as Bob Medici) – ‘Can we get the little lady to smile too? How about it, huh?’ But even at three, Ella had been a tough child to plead with, and ever since the picture had gone up, Mrs Samson, adjusting the angle of the frame or wiping the Perspex with her yellow duster, could not keep herself from muttering, ‘Bless…’ or ‘Shame…’, and furrowing her brow, as though the child’s displeasure somehow amounted to a judgment on them all.

In the kitchen Alec took from his back pocket the piece of folded paper with columns in Una’s handwriting that detailed the drugs Alice was to take, together with the times and the dosages. Antidepressants, anti-emetics, analgesics, laxatives, steroids. She had a plastic box beside the bed, its inside divided into segments – blue for the morning, orange for the afternoon and evening – but illness, fatigue, the pills themselves perhaps, had begun to create lapses, lacunae in her concentration, and on Alec’s first day down, Una, sitting beside him on the not-quite-even bench outside the summerhouse, had suggested that he discreetly oversee the filling and emptying of the box, and he had agreed immediately, eager for a chore that would not make him feel incompetent. Now he made a small tick on the list, picked up his leather satchel from the kitchen table, and went on to the terrace.

A pale half-moon hung in the blue of the twilight, and in some quarter of the sky the comet Hale-Bop, that vast event of ice and dust, was making its passage back towards the celestial equator. In the early spring he had often watched it from among the TV aerials on the roof of his flat, and had found it hard to believe that its great ellipse would not provoke some happening in the world, or many happenings – countless individual fates falling in an astral rain from the comet’s wake – but for the moment at least the sky was unexceptional, the usual faultless machine with nothing extraordinary or dangerous happening in it.

He lit the storm lantern and looped the wire handle over a metal bracket beside the kitchen doors, for though it would not be quite dark for another hour, he liked the tang of the paraffin and the companionable hiss of the filament. He intended to work. Alcohol did not agree with him and he had never learned how to smoke. Work was his refuge, and sitting in one of the old canvas chairs he tugged the manuscript, dictionaries and marker pens from the satchel and began to read, holding the script close to his glasses, struggling at first to concentrate, his mind still snared in the room above his head where his mother lay. But at last the work drew him down into the orderly double-spaced world of the text, and under his breath he sounded the words of a language he had made half his own.

2

In the narrow kitchen of his fourth-floor apartment on rue Delambre, László Lázár was preparing a dinner of veal escalopes ‘en papillote’. It was a recipe that called both for delicacy and good timing, so he was more irritated than alarmed when one of his dinner guests, Laurence Wylie, informed him that her husband, the painter Franklin Wylie, had brought a gun with him and was waving it about in the dining room. The escalopes, tender pink, almost translucent, were laid out on the slab of the chopping board. He was about to hit them with a mallet.

‘A gun? Where the hell does he get a gun from?’

‘From some cop he drinks with at Le Robinet. For God’s sake, László, tell him to put it away before there’s an accident. He’ll listen to you.’

She was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, wide-eyed, straight as a dancer, her hair held back from her face by a silver clasp. She was smoking: one of those cigarettes that come in white or almost white packets, and which to László seemed completely pointless.

‘Franklin listens to nobody,’ he said.

‘But what if it goes off?’

‘It won’t.’ He began to beat the first escalope. ‘It’s a fake. Or one of those old guns they neutralize and sell to collectors and nuts. There’s a place by the Bourse that has a windowful.’

‘It looks real,’ she said. ‘It’s black.’

‘Black?’ He smiled. ‘He’s just showing off, Laurence. Trying to impress Kurt. Do you want to help me in here? I need the mushrooms sliced. And four of those shallots.’

She came into the kitchen, shrugging and pouting, then lined up her rings on the worktop and took one of the big black-handled Sabatier knives, topping and tailing the first shallot with two clean strokes.

‘He’s impossible now,’ she said, beginning the familiar lament. ‘Sits in the studio all day. Does nothing. Takes tablets but won’t show me what they are. Lies to me. I don’t even know if he loves me.’

‘Of course he loves you. He couldn’t get through a single day without you. And what do you mean he’s impossible now? He was impossible before.’

She shook her head; a teardrop broke from her skin and splashed among the onion rings. ‘I keep thinking something terrible’s going to happen. Really terrible.’

László stopped his work and hugged her, the mallet in his hand still, the knife in hers.

‘It’s so tiring,’ she said, speaking into the side of his neck. ‘I always thought that when we got older things would be easier. Clearer. But it just gets more confusing.’

‘Mother of Christ!’ cried Franklin, shuffling into the kitchen so that the room was suddenly crowded. ‘My wife is being seduced by a Hungarian invert. Unhand her, you bastard.’

László glanced at the American’s hands. ‘What have you done with it?’ he asked.

‘The Gat? Gave it to that beautiful young Aryan of yours. Any danger of a decent drink, you pinch-ass?’

‘A decent drink comes with conditions,’ said László, attempting to sound stern. ‘You know that Karol is coming tonight. Let’s just have a nice, quiet evening.’

‘Karol likes me,’ said Franklin. He opened the freezer compartment of the fridge and pulled out a bottle of Zytnia vodka. In the warm air of the kitchen the glass quickly frosted. ‘Russian hooch!’

‘Polish,’ said László. ‘Russians drink gasoline. Diesel oil.’

‘Nothing wrong with diesel oil,’ said Franklin, stowing the bottle in one of the pockets of his jacket. ‘You can go on with my wife now. I’ll shoot you later.’

‘You’d miss,’ said László, turning back to the chopping board. ‘You’d miss for sure.’

Long-time resident of the sixth arrondissement, author of Saying Yes, Saying No (1962), of Flicker (1966), of Sisyphus Rex (1969, his first play in French), and thirteen other productions all well received other than by those critics of the far left or far right who found his work maddeningly uncommitted; one-time artistic director of the Théâtre Artaud in San Francisco, now part-time lecturer in Dramaturgy and Eastern European literature at the Sorbonne (Monday and Thursday afternoons), László Lázár struck the veal and recalled his first encounter with the Wylies, a night in ’61 in a jazz cellar on rue St Benoît, when the woman who now sliced vegetables at his side, telling him about her insomnia and her trouble with doctors, emerged from a cloud of tobacco smoke, her hair cut short like Jean Seberg’s in A Bout de Souffle, smiling at him as he sat at a table with a half-dozen other émigrés, pale young men with bad teeth smoking maize-paper cigarettes and drinking slowly in a doomed attempt to save money. Her smile then had told him everything important he needed to know about her: that she was kind, and as much without darkness as any human being he would ever encounter. István invited her to sit and found a chair for her, but it was László she talked to, leaning forward under the bray of the saxophones to laugh with him and listen to his thickly accented French. Fate, of course, if you believed in such things – kismet. And later that evening came a second such moment when she introduced him to a crop-haired American, a tall, loose-limbed athletic type with the steady blue stare of a Hollywood farm boy. Franklin Sherman Wylie – only five years older than László, and yet as he stood behind Laurence, his hand across the shoulder strap of her dress, his old GI shirt spattered with paint stains that he wore like medals, he seemed gifted with that same glamorous and manly confidence Péter had possessed, and which László found so lamentably absent in his own life.

As they came out into the starlit oxygen of St Germain and said their goodbyes in the narrow street, László’s heart, always inflammable, ignited; but though he desired them both, it was Franklin he kissed in his dreams, a truth that Franklin soon discerned and then tolerated with an amused grace. The following week they went together to see Krapp’s Last Tape sung by Michael Dooley at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre, then sealed the friendship, always a delicate thing of three, in an epic night walk to Sacré Coeur, ending at first light in a bar beside Les Halles, breakfasting on pig’s trotters and Alsace beer.

Such was the template. He had no idea how many other nights there had been. A hundred? Five hundred? But of all the things that happened to László in those years – and much else did happen: lovers of both sexes, trips to Italy, Spain and America, winters in ateliers dangerously heated with paraffin stoves, working on draft after draft of play script – those rambles with Franklin and Laurence, the mood a mix of high seriousness and high foolery, were the reason why ’61 to ’69, the Algerian crises to the Apollo moon landing, had for him now, looking down from the height of his fifty-ninth summer, an almost intolerable glow of nostalgia. The years before belonged to another world entirely. Cold schoolrooms. Youth parades. Speeches on the radio. His grandparents’ stories of Admiral Horthy on his white horse. The seamed and weary faces of his parents, both of them doctors at the Peterffy Sandor hospital. And the revolution, of course. Sweet Budapest.

Then, as though they had been swimming farther out than they had realized, the three friends were caught up in the grim business of success. Franklin’s big aerosoled canvases were bought by image-conscious banks and dealers in New York like the Wildenstein family, while László’s plays, with their insistence on the futility of action, began to seem prophetic, and drew first-night crowds of the chic and famous. Laurence became a darling of the lifestyle magazines on both sides of the Atlantic (‘AT HOME WITH MRS FRANKLIN WYLIE’, ‘LA BELLE MUSE FRANÇAISE DE FRANKLIN WYLIE’), but she exited her thirties childless and with many anxious lines on her face. That charm which had made men of all ages want to be her friend, but also to put a hand on her thigh, showed itself more fitfully as each of her husband’s feebly concealed infidelities left its mark. Franklin became a specialist in rage. On his fortieth birthday, inspired by demons whose names László could only guess at, he rammed his car into the side of a tour coach full of startled though miraculously unhurt elderly Americans on the rue des Ecoles, and was only saved from the consequences by the US ambassador, who persuaded the police to view the incident as essentially artistic rather than essentially criminal. Two years later, he beat up, with no obvious provocation, the owner of a Lebanese restaurant in Belleville with whom he had long been on friendly terms. Most recently he had been fined five thousand francs for throwing his chair at a waiter in the Brasserie Lipp (a fellow with a moustache like a hussar). But for László, nothing in this catalogue had been more dismaying, more sad and perplexing, than the day he called at the apartment on rue du Deguerry to find Laurence carefully scraping dried food off the wall of the studio, the floor brilliant with smashed glass and china. It was the moment he had given up trying to understand them, for unless you had grown up beside a person from the beginning, had breathed the same air, there was too much about that life you would never be able to explain. You had to love, if you loved at all, as an act of faith, uncomprehendingly.

He seasoned the escalopes with salt and pepper and lemon juice. The big Creuset frying pan was on the gas. The butter, a creamy demi-sel from the butcher’s where he had bought the meat, was beginning to bubble. He fried the escalopes lightly on both sides then took them out and placed them on a side dish of thick white china that had fine blue lines like little veins running beneath the glaze. He took the chopping board from Laurence, kissing her hair lightly, then sautéed the shallots and mushrooms and threw in a handful of chopped parsley. Finally, he wrapped the veal, mushrooms, parsley and onions, together with slices of ham and thinly cut Parmesan, in heart-shaped pieces of greaseproof paper that he had carefully buttered with his fingertips. When he opened the oven door the heat broke over his face in a gentle wave. He placed the parcels on the middle shelf and shut the door, leaving butter prints on the steel handle.

‘Twenty minutes,’ he said.

‘I’m OK now,’ said Laurence, brushing a lock of hair from her brow with the heel of her palm.

‘Good,’ said László. ‘We’re too old to be miserable.’

Just then, the gun went off.

3

Alice lay with her head propped on a nest of pillows, dabbing at her eyes with a little ball of pink tissue paper. She did not know why she was crying, why now, specifically, though she had felt obscurely upset after her little conversation with Alec. He had been interfering, of course, standing at the end of her bed, peering through his glasses, his ‘specs’, pretending to be some kind of doctor perhaps. But she had been rude to him and now she was sorry. Unless the drugs were to blame. How could she tell? How could she know what was her, the old Alice, and what was some kind of toxic side effect? Is this me? she thought. What am I now?

She pushed the tissue into the sleeve of her nightgown and felt around on the eiderdown for her book, an old ‘Library of Classics’ edition of The Black Tulip. It was hard now to find something that didn’t immediately wear her out or just seem too frivolous to spend time on. Livre: quel qu’il soit, toujours trop long. And people were forever giving her books, as though cancer were a sort of dull cruise for which she needed some distraction. A pastime. She chose the short books and the books she knew from years ago, and they helped a bit, if only because they made her tired in a more interesting way than most things did.

Una had offered to get some of those talking books. Derek Jacobi reading Great Expectations, that sort of thing. But listening wasn’t the same as reading. Not as intimate. And there was nothing wrong with her eyes. Her eyes were among the few things left to her that worked perfectly. Like her hair, which went on growing as if it hadn’t the slightest suspicion of what was happening in the rest of her body. She needed to speak to Una about the medication. The painkillers were not killing any more, and the stuff she was on now just constipated her, something she detested. She wanted the next level. Nepenthe? Or there was Oromorph, which she had been told tasted like whisky. That might do. But perhaps it would be wiser to speak directly to Brando. He was the power and the glory, the last word in it all. And he had promised to look in before the end of the week. Sit on the bed and chat. Then an odd minute or two of staring at the ceiling while he touched her chest and neck, saying how he hoped his hands weren’t cold, which they never were. Secret confab with Una downstairs. Milligrams of this, millilitres of that. Update the prognosis. Leave.

How had they managed it in the old days? In Dumas’ time? A maid tiptoeing out of the door with a chamber pot. Pomanders to cover the stinks. The doctors and apothecaries bringing their rubbish. Numbing people was an art form now. There were pain specialists in pain laboratories, and the World Health people had created an analgesic ‘ladder’ so that you were never just in pain, plain and simple. She had to keep a record for Una in a little red ‘Silverstone’ notebook. Sharp. A dull ache. Jabs. Waves. She had awarded herself seven once. Ten meant the worst you could imagine. You had to keep ten in reserve. Then, if you were lucky, they did for you, like Cousin Rose at Bransgore, a tumour the size of a football in her stomach, taking a syrup called Brompton’s cocktail and dying like a seventeen-year-old dope fiend, Lord knows what gurning at her from the shadows. But that was years ago. It would be much neater now. Some harmless-looking tablet you could swallow with a sip of tea. Something they kept in a special container, like a monstrance, in a cupboard to which Brando had the key.

Or would they force her to go on? Make her live until she was an utter stranger to herself? She glanced across at the pillbox on the bedside table, its segments like the chambers of a gun. If she were to take a whole week’s pills in one go, with, say, a large Scotch, would that do for her? Could she be sure of it? Nights were the worst, of course. Days she could still endure, despite the occasional snap of temper, those moments when she thought why bother, why go on if going on just meant more of this. She knew now what turning your face to the wall meant, and it tempted her, saying no to the fag-end of life, yes to oblivion. If that’s what it was. Oblivion. But not quite yet. There were still good times. Little unexpected pleasures. A card from an old friend. The greenness of grass. Some nonsense on the radio that made her laugh. Even the sound of Mrs Samson singing to herself in the kitchen, a fifty-year-old woman singing like a girl. You couldn’t explain it to people without sounding gaga. But when the light began to fail, however lovely the evening, she became nervous and plucked at herself. Drawing the curtains didn’t help. Night thickened behind them, pressing at the glass like floodwater.

She opened the book, wondering if another page might tempt her to sleep. It was such a delicate little book, hardly bigger than her hand. Dark blue binding coming unstuck at the spine. Very fine paper – wartime paper – that tore if you turned the page too quickly. Her father had given it to her. Desmond Wilcox. Captain. And because he had not written an inscription she had done it herself, in black ink, on the page opposite a picture of Rosa showing Cornelius the precious tulip at his prison door.

For Alice from Daddy. April 29 1953.

He had bought it on one of his business trips. In Bath perhaps, or Wells, or Salisbury. There were businesses once. Gravel. Irrigation pumps. Even some scheme to do with growing mushrooms in an old barracks near Chard. But she was not very old before she understood that ‘business’ was mostly a euphemism for taking off on the motorbike, a machine like the skeleton of a greyhound, oily black, impossibly loud, pouring smoke like a bonfire when he started it. She had a memory of him – though in fact it was the memory of a photograph – sitting astride the motorbike on the drive, leather jacket, old parachute boots, goggles that made him look like the Baron von Richthofen. Never said when he was coming back. Hours. Days. Just her and her mother in the house, listening. On a still day you could hear the engine all the way to West Lavington.

Had he ever come home without something for her? Some little parcel thrust into one of the pockets of his jacket, a peek of brown paper, the loop of a white string bow? Then handing it to her as though it were worthless, something picked up on the way. Never waited to be thanked. Hated fussing. Just gave her the present and went out to pull weeds, or mend the seed boxes, or put creosote on the fencing, or any of those numberless, endless little jobs that went on, painstakingly, year after year, until suddenly, one day, they didn’t.

‘Well, then, on the 20^th of August, 1672, as we have already stated at the beginning of this chapter, the whole town was crowding towards the Buitenhof, to witness the departure of Cornelius De Witte from prison, as he was going to exile…’

She was four when he went to the war and she saw him twice before it was over. A man in khaki who gave her bars of Cadbury’s chocolate in wax-paper wrappers. When he came back for good he was a hero. Tunisia, Sicily, Arnhem. Especially Arnhem. Above all, Arnhem. Second Battalion the Parachute Regiment. One of the sixteen who got out. Won his DSO there rescuing his sergeant. Desmond Wilcox, Captain. DSO. The one who stepped forward when the others were too frightened or weary or confused. Wouldn’t that be enough? Knowing it was you? Remembering it? But when the street parties were over and the flags were back in the attics, he didn’t seem to believe in much. Not in God or King George or the Welfare State. Something had been lost. In the Rhine perhaps. All that gallant slaughter. And truly, she had tried to understand, but how could she, girl that she was? Though now that she was older, much older than he’d ever been, she thought she did understand. The blankness. The way sense can unravel so completely you never quite recover it. What was the word for when nothing made sense any more? The one time she asked him about the war he’d made a face as though tasting something unpleasant on his tongue, and said, ‘Oh, that.’ Didn’t have the language for it, any more than she had the words now to tell the others what it was like, every night a stepping-stone and always wondering if there would be another, or if the next step would take her into the water.

The last summer of his life he sat hours together on the old chintz-covered swing-bed in front of the willow tree, chain-smoking Woodbines and watching the shadows flood the lawn until they swallowed him and only the tip of his cigarette still showed, a faint red pulse. How she had longed to bring him in, to rescue him as he had rescued his sergeant. Her mother wasn’t up to it, sitting all day in the kitchen listening to Alma Cogan and Ronnie Hilton on the wireless, biting her nails until they bled. So it was she who had gone, crossing the lawn at dusk to stand in front of him, waiting for the right words to come into her head, for a dove that would bring her the gift of speech. But nothing came, and he had gazed up at her through the smoke of his cigarette as though from the far side of a pane of glass. He felt sorry for her perhaps, knowing why she had come out, knowing the impossibility of it. But instead of saying sit down beside me Alice, sit down, daughter, and we will try to understand together the unbearable truth that love is not always enough, that people cannot always be brought back in, he had said, very conversationally, as though in reference to a discussion he had been having with her in his head for weeks, ‘They used flame-throwers, you know.’ And she had nodded, yes, Daddy, and left him, and gone to her room, and pushed her face into the pillow and bawled. Because she should have done it, should have, and she had failed.

The summer ended, the doctors came, the first frosts. Suez. The day he passed over she was in the parlour with Samuel and heard from the bedroom overhead a noise like something dropped, an ornament, a small vase or something, and then her mother calling, ‘Desmond! Desmond! Desmond!’

After dark, Miss Bernard came to lay him out. BerNARD, dear, not BERnad. Put her umbrella in the elephant’s foot by the door. Shook hands like a man. Got Daddy’s parting wrong. The old people were afraid of her because she seemed to know where she would be needed next. To have an instinct for it. Samuel paid her – a guinea? – and all night they sat up listening to the water spill off the gutters because no one had cleared out the dead leaves. What a muddle it was! The hissing of the rain. Her father in his astonishing stillness. Samuel’s breath like feathers on her cheek.

Ting!

The mahogany balloon clock in the living room chimed the half-hour; always five minutes fast, just as the grandmother clock in the hall was five minutes slow and would strike with a soft double note, and the little silver moon with the dreamy face that Stephen had worked on for days would slide a quarter-inch higher on its rail. Tick tock tick tock tick tock. Like drops of water through the sieve of her bones.

It was lunch-time in America. Larry and Kirsty and Ella would be sitting round the table eating one of Kirsty’s curious ‘health’ meals, though there was nothing wrong with any of them other than Ella’s asthma, and the less fuss made over that the better. Wasn’t Kirsty some manner of Buddhist now? Before that it was veganism, Scientology, God knows. Restless people, the Americans. Everyone wanting to be Peter Pan or Tinkerbell. Foolish to found a country for the pursuit of happiness. People just got into a panic when they hadn’t got it. But good-hearted people. Generous. And Larry had been very happy there, though she had never stopped hoping he would come home. She had every episode of Sun Valley General on videocassettes in the living room. Still didn’t understand why it all had to stop. Artistic differences, he said. But what did that mean? It wasn’t a particularly artistic show. And last Christmas, when she was in San Francisco, he had spent hours sprawled on the big couch watching television and drinking (‘It’s just beer, Mum. Relax!’), which had immediately brought back horrible memories of Stephen.

She closed the book, a feather for a bookmark, and turned off the reading light. For a moment the room disappeared, then returned, slowly, in familiar grey outlines. It was like being sent to bed as a child before it was properly dark, lying there wondering what the grown-ups were doing, somewhat amazed that the world went on without you, that after all you were not necessary to it.

Below her window she heard Alec moving one of the chairs on the terrace. She knew that he liked to work out there, losing himself in work as though stopping his ears with paper. Poor love. And now that he had the play – some gloomy Russian who wrote in French – he had the perfect excuse. She hadn’t asked him to come back! Mooching around the place like a reproach. It wore her out. What did he want from her? And why didn’t he have any proper clothes? At thirty-four he was still dressing like a student. Why didn’t he buy some nice shirts?

In her chest, high on the left side, the pain dug drowsily with a single claw and she shut her eyes. Around her, the boards of the house, the old beams and joists, cooling now, creaked and whispered. It made the air seem talkative. Well inhabited. Full of presences not quite apparent.

4

In San Francisco, the late morning southbound traffic moved at walking speed towards Market Street. Larry Valentine drummed his fingers on the steering wheel of his dark green Thunderbird ‘Town Landau’, and watched, through green-tinted windows, a huddle of elderly Chinese playing mah-jong in the park, using a bench as a table. Tomorrow evening he would take Ella up to Chinatown for her piano lesson with Mr Yip. The lessons had been Professor Hoffmann’s idea and were intended to help the girl express herself, to bring her out of her shell. Hoffmann had recommended Yip, who was almost as expensive as Hoffmann, but after eight months of classes, during which Ella had learned the first fifteen bars of ‘Clair de Lune’ and a piece called ‘Mr Xao’s Magic Garden’, she remained the same determinedly introverted child she had always been. The thought of flying to England with her was not comfortable. Ten hours in the cigar tube and who knew what they might find at the other end.

On 4th the traffic eased, and by the time he was on 101 he was travelling south at a steady 60 mph (a good speed for an old car), the sun breaking off the waters of the bay to his left. He felt for a cigarette from the pack on the passenger seat, lit it, and turned the radio from the talk on KPFA to KYCY in search of some country-and-western, a type of music he had once thought risible but now found soothing and honest. From here it was a twenty-minute drive to the airport, long enough to preview the day ahead of him and to think seriously of turning the car around and going back into the city. There was a bar below Broadway with a cool, woody interior, and two or three tables outside for the smokers. Or Mario’s, where he could eat focaccia and resume his nodding acquaintanceship with Francis Coppola. He could even go home. After all, he would have the place to himself (two six-packs of Red Tail in the fridge), while Kirsty was at the zendo in Japantown, cross-legged on a mat, solving riddles and learning to breathe.

On KYCY Charlie Rich began to sing ‘The Most Beautiful Girl’. Larry turned up the volume and sang along at the top of his voice, somewhat frenziedly, so that a woman glancing across as she overtook him in her gun-metal coupe frowned at him – this large man at the wheel apparently in a rage with himself – before leaving him in her wake, dismissing him, no doubt, as one of that shifting population, that five or ten or fifty per cent who, at any give time, were not, mentally speaking, making ends meet. He ground his cigarette out on the butts in the dashboard ashtray. He was thirty-six years old, and though the weepy strains of the slide guitar seemed to invite it, he would not cry. All morning, since waking alone, gasping as though he had spent the last five hours swimming under a surface of thick ice, he had felt the imminence of another episode, one of those ugly downward lurches he had been experiencing since the last days of Sun Valley, and which came with their own rich panoply of symptoms. He had, for example, become neurotically conscious of his own heartbeat, the muffled ticking of his life, and the organ itself, a muscle that had encoded among the tangle of its DNA the hour, minute, second when the teasing pause between one beat and the next would extend itself to infinity. In Barnes and Noble he had scanned the home-doctor books (the busiest section of the store) in the hope of identifying the condition, but the books, with their colour plates and flow charts – Is the coughing accompanied by bleeding? Is there discolouration of the stool? – had only invited him to diagnose himself with a fresh selection of maladies, until it had seemed incredible he could walk out of the store unaided. Quite what he had done to deserve all this, other than to ride his luck too long, to imagine that what began well would go on in the same way without any special effort on his part, was not apparent to him. Something had failed; the reasons hardly mattered now. What counted was hanging on, toughing it out as though he were two sets down and had just been broken, and as he passed the final exit before the airport he held his breath and gripped the wheel more tightly, leaning forward a little, as though watching the man at the other end of the court toss up the ball for that thunderous first serve.

At SFO he stopped by the British Airways desk to collect the tickets for London. Two tickets for 3 June and one, for Kirsty, on the 10th. Alice’s birthday was on the 18th.

The girl at the desk, a honey blonde with a fine peach down on the skin of her face which glowed golden in the light of the hall, enquired whether there were any special dietary requirements.

My wife,’ said Larry, ‘is presently a Buddhist, so some kind of high-fibre sushi might be suitable. My daughter won’t eat anything that looks like food. I eat whatever you can send out for at two in the morning.’

She smiled at him with what seemed her entire being. All the food was prepared by a team of nutritionists. There were vegetarian meals and special children’s meals. Everybody’s needs were catered for. Larry smiled back and said that he appreciated it. He wondered if she had recognized him: Americans were not usually shy of saying so. ‘Hey, aren’t you…?’ Being on TV here meant being injected into the bloodstream of the democracy, but in the eighteen months since he had ‘parted’ from the show – he, incandescent with rage and badly cut cocaine; L. Liverwitz Jnr, the new director, their fourteenth, incandescent with rage and too many exotic vitamins – he had begun to look less like Dr Barry, that suave and effective man who had brought a touch of English class to the high-tech corridors of Sun Valley, and more like the doctor’s uncle, a heavier man, more florid than tanned.

‘How d’ya like California?’ she asked.

‘I live here,’ he said.

‘I guess you like it, then.’

She passed over the wallet containing the tickets, her look of professional rapture beginning to fade as their business concluded. Larry wished her a nice day and pocketed the tickets. There were fifteen minutes before the shuttle left. He swallowed, dry, a tab of pink Xanax, and hurried past disciplined queues of elderly tourists (Taiwanese? Korean?), wondering to himself how the BA girl might have reacted if, in some confessional outburst, he had told her the truth about himself, about where he was going and why. He imagined her pressing some secret panic button under her desk and his being led away by airport security, raving as they handcuffed him in some back office with two-way mirrors. Or perhaps he underestimated her. Who was to say what her own private life was like, what dramas she went home to at night? At her age, a face betrayed so little. How were you supposed to tell?

The shuttle was on time: a crowded lunch-time flight. Businessmen and businesswomen filed into their seats and switched off their cellphones. Some began impromptu conferences with colleagues, talking what to Larry’s ears was a kind of corporate super-babble, a strange fusion of figures and gossip and euphemisms of a vaguely military character. The younger ones looked extremely fit, as if they were all members of expensive gyms, which they probably were. Some wore elegant spectacles; most had laptops. Above all, they were people tense with purpose, decision-makers, movers and shakers, compared with whom he – ex-sportsman and soap star manqué – was a kind of decoration, a baroque squiggle.

The seat next to him, which he had hoped might remain unoccupied, was taken at the last moment by a woman and her infant daughter. The woman wore a large shapeless black dress decorated with various ethnic trimmings, and a kind of cloth bonnet from beneath which a pair of thick chestnut curls straggled over her forehead. Regarding her with sidelong glances as the plane taxied to its place in the queue for take-off, Larry realized she was much younger than he had first thought – mid-twenties perhaps – though dressed as if to make herself appear older and less attractive, bulked out by mysterious pouches and padding, designed perhaps to insulate her from too much direct contact with the world. The child on her lap, three or four years of age, thin, listless, rather sickly looking, possessed the darkest and saddest eyes he had ever seen. He smiled companionably at the mother, who did not smile back but said, ‘She’s nauseous,’ in such a strong New York Jewish accent Larry thought at first it must be the child’s name, and was trying to puzzle out which feisty Old Testament heroine she was named after, when the woman snatched the air sickness bag from its slot behind the in-flight magazines.

‘Hope’s she’s not sick on you,’ she said, in a voice that suggested it would be his fault if she were. The child wriggled on her lap. ‘You wanna chuck up?’ asked the mother, and placing a firm hand on the back of the girl’s head she thrust the little face into the mouth of the sack, where it remained for some minutes before reappearing, comically distressed, her cheeks puckering with disgust, her great eyes returning Larry’s anxious stare with a mixture of hostility and weariness and sly appeal. He felt for her, imagining that he understood her, the character of her disenchantment with the world, and as they flew over the scuffed California desert, the coast to the right of them fringed with blue and pearl, he dedicated himself to making the child smile, a game he had often played with Ella, who shared with this little pale Jewish girl a heaviness, an elfin knowledge of things, which he found disturbing.

All the photographs of himself as a boy, most of them at Brooklands still, displayed him in Kodachrome gardens, or the vivid green of the sports field, or shoulder to shoulder with Alec on a beach in Brittany or Ireland, the same trademark grin on his face. Even in adolescence, when now and then he had slammed doors, and the skin around his mouth had turned raw for a year, his features had never failed to exude the good-tempered optimism of a boy entirely at ease in the world. Unhappy children, even children who seemed unhappy, roused in his increasingly suggestible mind the spectre of a darkness from which even innocence gave no immunity, and against this he continued, doggedly, a little desperately even, to do battle.

The child observed him, peeking from behind her mother’s black-cloaked bosom, then staring more openly as her mother harried the air hostess to find a packet of crisps on the trolley bearing the little K for Kosher. Larry wrinkled his nose, winked, crossed his eyes, frowned in mimicry of her own expression, all without the least effect. If anything she became more severe, more regally disapproving of him, his antics, and he began again, this time discreetly including his pulling-off-the-thumb routine, one of Ella’s favourites, but it was not until they banked over the coast above LA and flew in over acres of neat houses, over freeways and brilliant wires of sunlit traffic, that she consented to be amused, her face lighting up with a smile of such radiance he had to turn away from her. He stared down at his hands (the wedding band on the left; his right hand, his former racquet hand, still puffed with muscle) and spoke to himself, spoke behind the curtain of his face, easing himself away from the fear that he was about to commit, in this cramped and public place, some lavish inappropriacy. Laugh like a hyena, or curl up in the aisle, or caress one of the chestnut loops on the mother’s brow – an act that would certainly have startling repercussions. It was part of the new intensity, of course, the new waywardness that forced him to keep checking on himself, taking bearings on normal. But what troubled him most was the sense that something in him was colluding with it all, this unravelling, some impulse whose true character was still hidden from him, but which he suspected might, like his father’s, be merely destructive.

From her jump-seat by the emergency exit door, one of the air hostesses, her face stiff with cosmetics and fatigue, was watching him without much sympathy, and seemed on the verge of putting some procedure into operation, but now they were descending sharply, the plane suddenly on a level with the roofs of the airport buildings, and there was no longer time to do anything but mutter the garbled end of a prayer (Christ, don’t let us crash and die here…).

The businessmen sat very straight, braced, their fingers on the switches of their phones, ready to power up. Something fell in the galley; someone laughed, grimly. As they touched down, the child had her face in the bag again.

5

Above certain words and in the margins, Alec made notes with the fine point of his pencil. Slowly, under the light of the storm lantern (this least stormy of nights), he was learning the music of the new piece, and how to sing, in a head quieted at last of all other thoughts, the approximate, imitative song of the translation.

He had never met László Lázár, and knew what he looked like only from a photograph he had cut out of the Sunday Telegraph magazine which showed a delicately built man with cropped grey hair and large eyes, the pupils unusually prominent and dark. It was winter, and Lázár had been posed beside the boating pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg, a place Alec had often visited on solitary walks during his year abroad at the Cité Universitaire. But what gave the picture its particular character was the package Lázár was carrying, hugged against his grey overcoat. A book perhaps, or something from a local patisserie, a cake for Sunday, but it lent him a vaguely conspiratorial air, like a nineteenth-century anarchist on his way to plant a bomb in the foyer of a reactionary newspaper office. That, together with the somewhat silly caption ‘As a young man Lázár knew how to handle a tommy-gun’, had helped confirm in Alec’s mind the idea of the playwright as a romantic figure with a mysterious and violent past, owner of the kind of history he himself would never have.

Millions had died to produce the world Alec had grown up in. This he had been told at school on every Remembrance Sunday before the bugle sounded and silence fell over the ranks of schoolboys who would not be asked to play their part because others had done it for them, had laid down their lives like so many garments of tissue and silk, so that in England at least, cars did not arrive in the middle of the night to take dissidents to basement torture chambers, and democracy, ‘the dear old dog’, could go on slumbering in its long after-dinner sleep. And this was a great success, of course, a triumph, because everyone knew, or had been told, that war was hell. He had watched the World at War series twice – once on television, once on video – Laurence Olivier reciting the horrors of the Russian front, Hiroshima, the Camps. And there was no shortage of more contemporary evidence. Iran and Iraq. Afghanistan. Chechnya. Endless wars in East and Central Africa. Wars like ‘Desert Storm’, carried out with textbook brutality, with press briefings and generals from Central Casting. Wars full of astonishing neighbourly murderousness, such as those that had ended uneasily in Croatia and Bosnia. Fighting was still a consuming occupation for large parts of the planet. But Alec was in England, and had only ever witnessed, from a safe distance, the kind of flailing, closing-time violence that all British cities vomited up at the weekend. For this he knew he should be grateful. Road kills upset him. The sight of a fishmonger ‘cleaning’ a fish made him queasy. He was delicate, prone to colds. His own front line had been four years teaching French at a South London state school, at the end of which (one pitiless Tuesday lunch-time after the Christmas break), he had simply run away. But still, he could not quite free himself from certain naive and powerful daydreams in which he fought at the barricades with a man like Lázár, or ran under a fiery sky with Grandpa Wilcox to haul some bleeding comrade to safety. It was comically depressing, the realization that there would never be a picture of him standing gravely on Tooting Common with the legend, ‘As a young man Valentine knew how to handle a tommy-gun’. That wasn’t his kind of life.

Since his appointment as Lázár’s translator, there had been a to and fro of e-mails between Paris and Alec’s flat in London, queries arising from the text, and replies – precise and businesslike – signed not by Lázár but by a certain ‘K. Engelbrecht’, presumably Lázár’s PA (Katrina? Katya?). Alec was scheduled to meet Lázár at a reception in London in September, together with the director from the Royal Court, and various actors, designers, technicians and management, who would be part of the production. Barring the unforeseen, there would be a first night at the end of January.

For Alec, this was, without question, the most important piece of work he had ever undertaken. Marcie Stoltz, the Court’s literary manager, had seen his new translation of Le Médecin malgré lui at the Rathaus in Hackney when she was looking for a replacement for Chris Eliard, Lázár’s regular translator, who had disappeared from his yacht in mysterious circumstances while sailing single-handed across the Golfo di Genova. Stoltz had called Alec and invited him to lunch at Orso’s in Covent Garden, a class of restaurant he had never been into in his life, and after plates of asparagus, and lobster ravioli, she offered him the contract, explaining that the new play was something of a departure for Lázár, not exactly upbeat, but not gloomy. ‘Certain actions innately graced, etc.’, she said, fork in one hand, a Marlboro Light in the other, studying Alec with an amused and soulful gaze. There was, as usual, very little money in it – ‘would love to offer you tons more’ – but enough, with careful budgeting, to mean he could give up the detested ‘technical’ work (the latest was a document on braking systems for SNCF). After two large glasses of house white and saying goodbye to Stoltz, almost bowing to her as she squeezed into a taxi on Wellington Street, he had spent the remainder of the afternoon walking around Regent’s Park, smiling at dog-walkers and tourists, even at the police, who nodded back warily, suspicious of being liked. At last he was a man of prospects! And though he had long since given up competing with his brother – the futility of which had been apparent to him since primary school – he would not now, with Lázár at his side, be utterly overshadowed. He called Alice from a pay-phone somewhere in Marylebone, stumbling over his words, embarrassed at how much he wanted her approval, how relieved he was to hear her full-blooded ‘Well done, Alec!’ But as he made his way home, his feet starting to ache, his head thickening from the drink, a new restlessness and dissatisfaction had replaced the euphoria, as though someone had twitched back the curtain and let light into a room that had been tolerable only in the dark.

The play was called Oxygène: sixty-seven pages of card-bound typescript that told, in a clipped, elliptic language, the story of a mining disaster in eastern Europe. It was to be shown on a revolving stage, with two sets, ‘above ground’ and ‘below ground’, alternately on view. The action commences with the explosion that traps the miners at the end of a narrow shaft. Above ground, a rescue team and a chorus of relatives attempt to force a way through to them. Hope endures to the end of the first act, but by the beginning of the next it is apparent to everyone that the rescue can only have a single outcome. Underground, the miners struggle to come to terms with their fate. For one, it is nothing but the crude majesty of facts – too much rock, too little force. Another finds peace in a religious quietism, wedding himself to the will of his Creator. A third rages at the mine-owners who have forced them to go on drilling despite warnings about the safety of the tunnel. In the middle of the act a fight breaks out between two men so starved of air they can do no more than slow-dance like drunken lovers. Despair seeps in like a gas. Even those above ground succumb to it, gasping as if they too were under threat of asphyxiation. But at the moment when all further effort seems futile, one of the trapped men, György, a veteran of the mines, rouses himself, rallies the last of his strength, and renews his assault on the rock, while on the surface a young woman, unhinged by grief perhaps, takes one of the abandoned picks and clumsily wields it at the earth. As the house lights are dimmed and the audience sits on in the dark, the air rings with the steady percussion of the tools, a noise that the text insists should be ‘a triumphant sound but also a mocking one’.

The force of the play was apparent to Alec on his first hurried reading of it in the hour after the motorcycle courier – whose presence in the flats had deeply impressed Mr Bequa - delivered it at the beginning of April. The following day he had taken it with him to Brooklands, where Alice, still officially in remission, had invited him to enjoy the good weather, and he had read it a second and a third time sitting in the orchard under a canopy of apple blossom.

Stoltz was right. The play did not share the bleakness or scepticism of Lázár’s earlier work, and much of the reason lay with the character of György, a man who in his youth might have served as a model for a classic Soviet worker-hero, and seen himself sculpted in monumental brass for a public square, but forty years on, unillusioned, free of all dogma, he is merely decent, with the kind of gut courage and gut morality Camus endorsed. With the young woman to keep faith with him above ground, who was to say they did not in the end escape? It was unlikely, of course – highly unlikely – but there was nothing in the text forbidding such a thought.

In the midst of its spring boost, the garden at Brooklands was untrimmed, straggling, almost luxuriant. Bees were at work in the blossom; the earth ticked like a warm car. Alice abandoned the last proscriptions of her elaborate diet and they went shopping at the deli in Coverton to buy her old favourites – Parma ham, apple strudel, Vienetta ice cream, brandy snaps – foods from a golden age before biopsies and staging tests.

As Alec worked, he was aware of his mother glancing up at him from her book, and he had enjoyed that watching, had felt the weight and warmth of it, that regard never quite uncritical but of a quality and intensity he was quite certain no other person would ever have for him, or could have. Three days, three warm days in April which, in retrospect, seemed an entire season, and it amazed him that he had not been more conscious of his happiness then, that it had not somehow impressed itself upon him like a mark, whatever the opposite of a scar was.

The following week she called him at the flat early in the morning while he was still in bed. She had sounded slurred and depressed, also angry, and he had travelled down full of dark presentiments. Even the good weather had gone, and on the way to the hospital for the new tests they drove through sopping air on roads silvered with rain. He waited for her in the hospital carpark, listening to the radio and looking out at a landscape of Portakabins and scruffy trees and barrack-like buildings through whose doors harassed people scurried with coats over their heads, or stood outside battling to angle their umbrellas into the wind. There were scans and blood tests, then a ten-day wait to collect the results from her consultant. Even in so brief a time, the change in Alice was observable, measurable. The navy blue dress she put on for her appointment with Brando looked two sizes too big for her, and her make-up, applied more thickly than usual, seemed a clumsy attempt at concealing what was happening to her face, the deflation of her features, the rings beneath her eyes as though sleeplessness had bruised her. He parked the Renault as close to the doors of the oncology department as he could, but when he had hurried around to her side of the car and taken her arm she had shaken him off and walked away on her own, even managing a cheery ‘Afternoon!’ to a nurse she thought she recognized. She was gone for forty minutes. When she came out, pausing at the step to get her breath, to collect herself, it was as if, somewhere in the recesses of that ugly building, she had been disassembled, then put together again in a hurry, unsuccessfully. Even getting into the car was suddenly an action fraught with difficulty, a pantomime of decrepitude. He saw that her eyes were bloodshot, and one of her cheeks was red, as though she had been pressing something against her face.

She gave him the news as they drove, talking to the windscreen and using many of the technical expressions she had learned over the last years from the doctors. When she had finished, Alec felt like a child who in some bizarre anxiety dream has been given his father’s place in the car. How would they get around the next corner? How would they stop? Frantically, he had tried to think of what he could say to her (surely the situation could not be as hopeless as she suggested?) but the moment when he needed to speak, when nothing more was required from him than the kind of sincerity peddled by American soap operas five nights a week, the words would not come. And though he had visions of himself pulling over into a lay-by to hug her, making some show of his own pain, he did nothing, for fear that whatever he could say or show would be grossly inadequate. For fear too, perhaps, of what might happen if he did manage to express what he felt.

At Brooklands she had politely thanked him for driving her. The rain was over, the clouds had dispersed, and the evening was unexpectedly serene and blue and mild. He went into the house to make tea (he found the cups still full the next day), then spied on Alice from the window on the upstairs landing, watching her in the garden moving from flower-bed to flower-bed, in what, with a great sinking of his heart, he imagined to be an act of leave-taking.

By eight o’clock she was in bed. At the kitchen table he wrote to Larry, a stiff, garbled, furious, self-pitying letter (Remember us? Your family?) which he immediately tore into pieces, hiding the pieces in an old yoghurt pot and hiding the pot deep in the kitchen bin. Later, he spoke to Larry on the telephone, and hearing the shock in his brother’s voice, his anger had evaporated, replaced by a desire to put himself entirely into his brother’s care, to be carried by him. For half an hour they talked until Larry had said, so tenderly Alec did not trust himself to reply, ‘I’ll get over there, bro. Can you hold out a bit longer?’

Settling the papers on his lap, Alec took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and massaged the bridge of his nose. He was working now entirely by the imperfect light of the lamp and had strained his sight and given himself a slight headache. When he opened his eyes again his gaze fell upon the tangle of small cream and raspberry roses that hung over the remains of a brick wall that had once divided the terrace from the rest of the garden, but which, in his father’s time, had been demolished, leaving just this short section for the flowers. These were Alice’s roses, and when he looked at them he saw her – an image, a superimposition, already starting to lose its vividness – dead-heading the discoloured blooms with quick, neat movements of her wrist. Insects hid in the moist hearts of the flowers, and perhaps destroyed them. Sometimes they would crawl under the cuff of her blouse and she shook them out, not quite indifferent to them, but not someone to indulge herself in squeamishness. She had no time for the kind of women who would shriek at the sight of a spider or a mouse. More than once he had seen her face down dogs, mongrel Doberman types that sprang from the end of farm tracks, or appeared suddenly at the bend of a quiet lane. And the story of her squaring up to the drunk who waved a broken wine bottle in her face in a multistorey carpark in Bath was part of family folklore. It was, of course, what one would expect from the daughter of the hero of Arnhem, whose photograph, looking remarkably like a 1940s version of Larry, gazed out from its silver frame among the ancestors on the walnut sideboard in the dining room.

Thus far, her courage had sustained her. From the beginning she had talked of ‘getting on with it’, which meant behaving properly, not making a fuss. But who could resist the assault of a disease that seemed to possess its own malicious intelligence? That hated life, but fed on it ravenously? The day would come, or the night, a night like this, when she was no longer ‘getting on with it’, and someone else would have to take the strain. Then what? He glanced down at the manuscript. ‘Hammer blows, steel on rock, a triumphant sound but also a mocking one.’

6

László Lázár stood on the landing outside his apartment looking down over the banisters to where his neighbour, Monsieur Garbarg, was standing outside his own apartment, looking up. Garbarg held a red-and-white chequered napkin in his hand, the little banner of his interrupted dinner. At his shoulder, in the opening of the door, stood Garbarg senior, who was blind, and wore on his face his customary expression of cautious astonishment.

‘Something in the oven, messieurs,’ called László, cheerfully. ‘A little explosion.’ He shrugged, hoping to suggest that such happenings were a tiresome but amusing part of the human condition. The younger Garbarg nodded, though without returning László’s smile. They had been neighbours for fifteen years, and while knowing almost nothing of the hard facts of each other’s lives – László had no idea what Garbarg junior did for a living – they had somehow come to know each other very well, as if by a process of mutual osmosis. As soon as László had heard the shot, so bizarrely loud and like nothing in the world but a pistol shot, he had known that Garbarg would be pushing back his chair and striding to the door to await an explanation. László suspected his neighbours of harbouring dark misgivings about émigrés, even ones who had lived in the country for forty years and knew and loved the country and spoke the language as fluently as their mother tongue, more so perhaps. Of course, the Garbargs may have had other reasons to dislike him. It was hard to tell how much of his life was visible to them.

‘I am sorry, messieurs, to have disturbed your meal. Bon appétit!’’

The neighbours retired to their respective apartments. Lâszlô shut his door discreetly, careful not to make any noise that sounded like a bang, an explosion, a shot, then walked quickly down the parquet corridor, the spine of his apartment, to the dining room at the far end. Before going out to placate the Garbargs he had established that no one in the dining room was hurt. Now, uncertain whether to be amused or appalled, he entered the room like the detective in a country-house murder mystery, the kind of story, in tatty Hungarian editions, he had sometimes read as a boy.

His secretary, Kurt Engelbrecht, corn-blond hair shaved on to his elegant skull, was loosening Franklin Wylie’s collar, while Laurence stood on the other side of the table, tearful again, and dropping ash on to the carpet. Franklin, grey and aghast, but already starting to look pleased with himself, was sprawled along the divan. On the linen, next to a bowl of fresh figs, the gun lay like a piece of expensive tableware.

‘What did you hit?’ demanded László. Franklin pointed a weebling finger at the bookshelf at the end of the room, and László went to examine the damage. The bullet was embedded in the spine of a book of poetry, head height on the bookshelf. He drew the volume out and showed it to them.

‘You have shot Rilke,’ he announced. ‘The act of a fascist.’

‘Didn’t think the damn thing was loaded,’ said Franklin, lamely. Kurt was on his knees now, fanning the American with the programme notes to Madame Butterfly.

‘Some fake!’ said Laurence.

László shrugged, and carefully filled four small glasses with the Zytnia. ‘Idiot,’ he said, gently, giving Franklin his glass.

Once they had drunk, then wiped their lips with the backs of their hands – something that seemed unavoidable when drinking vodka – László asked: ‘Does anyone know how to take the bullets out?’

But it seemed that no one wished to touch the weapon now, as though it were merely resting, curled on the table next to the figs, a thing with mayhem in it. At last, muttering to himself and feeling that he was the only adult in a room of difficult children, László dropped a napkin over the gun, wrapped it carefully, and crossed the corridor to his study, a room twenty metres square that looked south towards the boulevard Edgar Quinet, and the cemetery where Sartre and de Beauvoir and the glorious Beckett lay. There were two desks in the room: the one nearer to the window was heaped with papers and scrawled-over index cards and a dozen of the black ink fibre-tip Pentels László preferred for writing. The other, a larger desk bought second-hand at a bankruptcy sale, was equipped with a computer, a fax-telephone, and a green-shaded lamp with a solid brass base. On this desk the papers were neatly stacked, and on the corner of the desk a vase of yellow freesias perfumed the room. This was where Kurt worked – typing letters, organizing the diary, fielding the telephone – ensuring the playwright could spend his time on art rather than life.

László switched on the lamp and uncovered the gun. It was a small black Beretta .32 with a snub barrel of the type designed for more covert use, a gun for spies and undercover cops and nervous housewives. He lifted it from its nest in the white damask. It was a long time since he had held a gun – a lifetime – and the thing’s mysterious energy intrigued him. It could not have weighed more than an old-fashioned silver cigarette case, or one of the bulkier Livres de Poche – Les Misérables, say – but there was no doubting the purity of its purpose, nor the power it conferred on him as he closed his fist around the cross-hatching on the grip. He could go downstairs with it now and shoot the Garbargs, the neat tap-tap of death’s index finger on the back of their necks, so that they fell face first into their soup plates. Or if his dinner party should not be a success, if the veal were spoiled or the conversation dull, it would take only a moment to massacre his guests. Then again, if the world offended him so, it might be simpler to shoot himself, as some years ago a friend of his father’s had done, a fellow doctor, leaning out of the window so as not to splash his brains on the carpet, and leaving behind no note, no statement other than his own corpse draped over the windowsill. Was it possible that anyone went through life without, for an hour or two, contemplating the thick blue line of suicide? Se donner la mort. To give oneself death. And what was the distance you had to travel between the idea and the act? Not far perhaps, not far at all when you had a machine like the Beretta and nothing more wearying to do than squeeze the trigger. As a young man, when, for obvious reasons, the idea had come to him more than once, come in its most seductive guise, as the resolution to an exhausting and insoluble inner debate, he had known he could never go through with it while his mother was still alive. But she had been dead since ’89, buried in Vienna where she had spent her final years with Uncle Ernö, and he remembered how it had indeed entered his head as he travelled to Vienna on the train for the last time, that vestigial death wish which suddenly he was free to enact, for there was no one other than her who would not survive it, who could not recover. He raised the gun and brushed his temple with the satiny blunt of the barrel, imagining (with a certain pleasure) the conversations after the funeral, when friends would stare at each other, shake their heads and say: ‘He had so much to live for! Do you know why he did it?’

The phone rang, twice, stopped, bleeped, and an edge of paper began to slide from the mouth of the fax. László rewrapped the Beretta in the napkin, hurriedly, as though he had been caught striking poses in front of the mirror. In heavy black type the words Serbian Justice were curling into view, and then – blurred but quite graphic enough – pictures he did not wish to look at but could not at first look away from. A human back, black and swollen from a beating. A man’s body sprawled in a ditch. And the inevitable corollary: a woman in a headscarf, bewildered, terrified, her hands outstretched in wretched supplication – an image that seemed emblematic of the entire century. It was not the first such material he’d received. Since the beginning of March there had been maps, photographs, statistics, horrors. He knew more or less where they came from, and felt again a flare of resentment at being solicited in this way. Political junk mail! Kurt could deal with it in the morning, file it somewhere. Had he known how to, he would have turned the fax off, sabotaged it, perhaps by pulling at the skeins of wire that led to the wall socket, but he had remained fabulously ignorant of what he still called the ‘new’ technology, and he did not want to run the risk of Kurt sulking for half a day.

On the shelf above his desk the digits of the radio alarm flicked from 8:59 to 9:00. Karol was due at any moment and there were still a dozen jobs to be done in the kitchen before they could eat. But as he left the study he imagined the fax continuing all night, the paper spreading over the desktop, over the floor, then rising in rustling loops to the ceiling. An inexhaustible complaint. An oracle. A relentless call to arms.

7

With his jacket slung over his shoulder, Larry negotiated the shuttle satellite at LA airport. Ahead of him the young Jewish mother carried the child on her hip until the two of them were met by a party of Jewish men in Streml and skullcaps, one of whom, a magnificently built young man, his beard as soft and glossy as a girl’s pubic hair, was evidently the child’s father, and she climbed into his arms, all nausea forgotten, proud and giggly, reunited with her hero, rescued.

Larry watched them for a while, furtively, from between the gathered suits under the flight information screens. How sweet if he could somehow be included in that little group and share in their happiness! He imagined himself in a crisp white shirt, Uncle Reuben perhaps, with the type of excellent pale skin that comes with certain kinds of righteousness. He would own a dry-goods store downtown, or a kosher delicatessen so that his fingers smelt faintly of pickles. Vi gay’st du, Reuben? Come into the circle!

He moved on, entered one of the concourse bars, and ordered a Budweiser, taking it to a stool by the wooden Indian. It was only his third beer of the day – the first two in the kitchen at home before setting out – and this he still considered an acceptable level of consumption. He knew that there were those among his Californian acquaintances who considered him an alcoholic because it was nothing to him to drink a bottle, a bottle and a half of Napa Valley wine at a sitting, or half a dozen cans during a TV show, but they had not seen a real alcoholic at work, and he had and he knew the difference.

His father, Stephen Valentine, for the last six months of his life, had lived uninhibitedly as a drunkard, no longer troubling to top up his morning tumbler of vodka with an inch of orange juice, or have a spoonful of coffee with his whisky at eleven. He had drunk the stuff raw and with a certain sad bravado, revealing at last the full measure and tyranny of his thirst. And there had been a certain slewed dignity to it that had made things easier, freeing them from that wearying and shaming pretence, the sorry fiction that ‘Daddy’s just a bit tired’. Though, of course, in a sense it was true; he had been tired, fatigued to the point of madness from trying to live a life he considered, with that secret insider view no wife or therapist could ever share, an irreversible failure.

Early on, the brothers had learned how to survive his rages, those evenings when he moved around the house like an electric storm, bawling accusations and hunting down the lost first cause of it all, the wrong turning that had led to his ruin. More difficult than the anger were those moods of gross sentimentality when he would appear in the playroom wanting to be with his boys and join in and do as other dads did. But he stank of the drink, and the brothers had not wanted him there – too loud, too forceful, too grimly jolly. When Alice saw it getting out of hand she would sometimes turn on him – sheer mother instinct, which was a power beyond them all, fierce and pure – and Stephen would shut himself away in the workroom or the old summerhouse, where Larry one afternoon looked in at him, his back, his boneless shoulders, as he sat among the sacking and old apples, tending a bottle, working it, and then, alerted by some shift in the light, turning to the window to see his son and exchange with him a long glance through the cobwebbed glass, a look that had taught Larry – those lessons that pass through the eye like a virus – that it wasn’t the toxicity of alcohol which killed a drunkard, but the unsheddable burden of self-consciousness.

Alec had looked to Larry. Larry had looked to Alice. But who had she looked to? Whose strength or example had she called on the night a policeman stood on the doorstep, his fluorescent jacket brilliant with rain, asking if her husband had been driving a sky-blue Rover? The boys, woken by the chimes, had huddled at the top of the stairs, peering through the open hall door. They knew there must have been an accident – why else did policemen call at midnight? – but the details, the soaked road, the speed, the unlit corner, the car’s flight beyond the verge, these emerged only slowly, from several sources, over months or even years. Some things Larry had never learned: the particulars of his father’s wounds, whether he had been killed outright or had survived the impact, lying for a time with his face pressed against the wheel, hearing the hollow patter of the rain on the car roof. What manner of thoughts did a person have then, before the neurons started to fire at random? Would he have felt saved when at last Death crossed the wet ground to find him? Had there been time to forgive himself? To feel pleased?

He spent a moment reorientating himself, subsiding into the now by contemplating the crowd in the concourse, marvelling at how few people actually walked into each other. He was longing for a smoke, but like most of the State of California the bar was a smoke-free zone and to have lit a cigarette there would have been like Kirsty walking through downtown Tehran in her bikini. He finished his beer and went out to the taxi rank where the taxi marshal waved up a large shambolic Ford with a sticker on the bumper that read: ‘If I cut you off don’t shoot!’ The interior of the car smelled powerfully of exotic food recently consumed. Larry asked if it would be OK to light up.

‘No can do!’ said the driver, a squat and impeccably mannered black man who hailed, so it turned out, from the town of Ogbomosho in Nigeria, and who, from his tone of voice, was evidently caught between sympathy for Larry’s need and pride in the extravagant prohibitions of his adopted country. Larry nodded and tried to settle back on the puffed and shiny seat, gazing out at a wasteland of motels, billboards, minimalls and ‘nude’ diners. He had been to the city many times. Most of Sun Valley General had been shot at the studios on North Las Palmas, and when Doctor B figured large in the storyline Larry had been delivered to the studio in a white stretch limousine. But the place he now entered as they turned off the freeway on to Santa Monica, this megalopolis purpling under its canopy of smog, remained essentially undisclosed to him. Too bright, too big, too dirty, too foreign, Los Angeles had perhaps always been the end of his American odyssey, a last America he could never quite enter.

For ten years, ever since doing his first ads in New York when the tennis career began to fold and he had slipped into three figures on the world ratings, he had carried on his love affair with this country. His first view of New York, of Manhattan, had been through the windows of Nathan Slater’s Lincoln Town Car as they drove, one October dusk, to Slater’s seventeenth-floor offices overlooking Madison Square. Later that evening, with two or three other Slater ‘discoveries’, they had gone to the Palm on the East Side to eat lobsters. Larry was twenty-six, seduced by Slater’s attentiveness, by the baseball summary on the radio (it was World Series time), by the wraiths of steam that rose from the cracks and gratings in the road, and most of all, most breathlessly, by the filigreed beauty of the towers, whose beaconed crowns he bent his neck to get a glimpse of as they passed.

For Alice – for Alec too perhaps – Culture and Beauty and Style were European phenomena, or, more specifically, French. America was Hollywood and Vegas and rednecks. It was razzmatazz and bad food. It was helplessly vulgar. But for Larry and his friends, America had felt like the last place on the planet where things actually happened, a country where a man’s life could still have a mythic weight to it. After school they would hang out in Wimpy bars or Little Chefs, half a dozen teenage boys sat three by three either side of the plastic ketchup tomato, puffing on Craven As or Lucky Strike, smoking half the cigarette at a go, then carefully tapping out the embers, saving the last half for the following day. They read Louis L’Amour and Jack Kerouac and Hemingway. Some, not Larry, graduated on to Mailer and Updike and Roth. On Saturday afternoons they met up at Gaumonts and Odeons wearing American college football jackets from secondhand import stores in Bristol, and lied about their age to watch Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson step from ever-faster cars to pull ever-bigger guns from their coats. On parents’ chrome-fronted music centres they played Dylan and Hendrix, Motown, Lou Reed, Tom Petty, Zappa, Patti Smith. Their language was marbled with Americanisms: ‘cool’, ‘peachy’, ‘neat’, ‘far out’, the ubiquitous ‘man’. And between them it was understood that sooner or later they would go there, go West and drive a Mustang and say ‘easy over’ to the girl in the diner who asked how they wanted their eggs, though as far as Larry knew he was the only one to have actually made it there, the lone survivor of all that teenage yearning.

Halfway through his first martini at the Palm – his first martini anywhere – England had appeared as a remote and underlit island he need never return to, other than on the occasional visit to Brooklands. Jet in, jet out. He had entered the future, and was half dazed with gratitude and the wildest optimism. The following night, in Slater’s Greenwich Village apartment, a party had begun with tall women and cocaine, a party that lasted all through the advertising campaign for luxury cars – British, or apparently so – and then crossed the country with him to California; a pearly necklace of late and later nights as the small acting parts came in and he reached his apotheosis as Dr Barry Catchpole, becoming almost famous and almost rich, though curiously less and less content, as though, in a fatal hour he would never afterwards be able to recall or identify, he had fallen foul of some law of inverse returns, so that the more he drank the less drunk he was, and the more he partied the less pleasure he had, until the morning he had stumbled out into a San Francisco fog to discover himself, a reckless man, married to a woman who cried in her sleep and father to a little girl who had already seen more doctors than most sane and healthy people see in a lifetime.

One got weary trying to work it all out. His life resisted his attempts to comprehend it. He didn’t seem to have the language, or whatever it was you needed – the books, the time, the medication. He had lost count of the number of people who had suggested therapy, who had given him the names of their own therapists, saying ‘Definitely the best Jungian in town’, or ‘This guy guarantees closure’. He thought sometimes the solution would be to get back on the show, but Catchpole was gone (with ghastly irony the show had ‘sent’ him to England to nurse an ailing parent), and the row with Liverwitz had not been of the kind where you could go back the next week and eat humble pie. It had been savage and terminal, and in truth he was glad to be free of the programme’s grinding inanity, its relentless pursuit of the trite. Why, he had bawled at Liverwitz, why were the only patients ever admitted to the hospital friends and relatives of the people who worked there? Was that usual? But there had been no serious money coming into the house for eight months. His last paid work had been a commercial for Wonder Bread in November. Since then there had been promises, a lot of talk over mint juleps and wheat-grass juice, but no firm offers. He had very slightly over ten and a half thousand dollars in the Bank of California, a few thousand sterling in London tied up in stocks and shares. He also had the cars – Kirsty drove a ’93 Cherokee – and the house, which was mostly paid for. Kirsty contributed a modest income from her part-time work in a day unit for people with learning difficulties, but her salary barely covered the phone bills, which, since Alice’s illness, had trebled. Cocaine wasn’t getting any cheaper. Neither were the bills for Ella’s asthma treatment, much of it not covered by the insurance. Then there were the school fees for KDBS, and Mr Yip’s piano classes. The flights to England. Party girls. The IRS. Booze. Hoffmann. Groceries. There was no end to it.

He had long since calculated what he might inherit when Alice died, the preliminary sums done, in the teeth of selfdisgust, shortly after she was first diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer in the winter of ’95. It would not be much. The house would be sold off, but an old place in poor repair on a stretch of waterlogged moorland would hardly raise a fortune, and half of it, of course, would go to Alec. The good furniture, which amounted to the dining table and silver candlesticks, a couple of decent paintings, also in the dining room, and some of Stephen’s collection of antique clocks, would bring in another three or four thousand. All in all he had reckoned – reckoning on despite a shame that made him sweat – he might clear forty or even fifty grand. But when? He had already started borrowing (Kirsty knew nothing of this) from men with pampered attack dogs, people who said ‘We understand each other, right?’ and ‘You’re a real nice guy’, but who would certainly have a thorough and instinctual way with slow payers.

Larry and the man from Ogbomosho entered Century City and the Avenue of the Stars, a zone of high-rises and underground shopping complexes between the LA Country Club and Rancho Park. A few moments later they swung into the half-moon drive of the Park Hotel, where a doorman, dressed in the red-and-gold livery of a Yeoman of the Guard, opened the cab door and examined Larry through mirror shades. Larry paid the driver, tipping him heavily. The man only had one ear; the other looked to have been removed, clumsily, with something blunt – teeth perhaps. He was, decided Larry, peeling himself from the varnished surface of the rear seat, a man who had passed through darkness, and who might, had Larry found a way into him, have proved wise on the subject. Help, like trouble, could come from anywhere. He was sorry he had missed his chance.

Out of the cab, he lit the cigarette he had been holding in his fist since the airport, and nodded at the Beefeater’s uniform. ‘You’re a long way from home,’ he said.

‘Pasadena,’ said the Beefeater. ‘You a dentist?’

‘No,’ said Larry, obscurely offended.

‘Fifty thousand in town. Convention.’

Larry gave a low whistle, and tried to conjure in his mind an image of so many thousand white-coated men marching like an army, ten abreast, through the great boulevards and byways of Los Angeles. Then, recalling a line from a poem he had read in a schoolboy elocution competition for which he had won an honourable mention, he muttered, ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’

‘What’s that?’ asked the doorman, frowning.

Larry shook his head. ‘Think it’s going to get hotter?’ he asked.

‘Bet your life,’ said the Beefeater. ‘Hot as hell.’

Larry took a last drag on the cigarette. He was one of those deep-lunged men who could get through a cigarette in four or five big pulls, the paper uncoiling beneath a long, sharp ember. The Beefeater relieved him of the butt and walked away with it towards some secret receptacle. Larry checked his watch. Two-fifteen Pacific Standard. Something after ten at night in England, at Brooklands. Home?

‘Good night, Mum,’ he said, and he went in to be among the dentists.

8

In her dream, Alice watched her elder son emerge theatrically from beneath the giant weeping willow in her parents’ garden and cross the lawn towards her, telling her in French that he would save her. ‘Je te sauverai, maman. Je te sauverai.’ But even while she slept, held just beneath the surface of consciousness by the ballast of her drugs, she knew that there was something clumsy and improbable in the image. Larry did not speak French, and had, at sixteen, despite her coaching, decisively failed his O-level in the subject. Alec was the linguist, but it was not Alec who smiled at her on the lawn. The dream was a fraud and she woke into the darkness, confused and agitated, feeling herself to have been tricked.

Slowly she brought herself to order, then made herself smile at the memory of a class of eight-year-olds singing the responses to her patient drilling of French verbs.

Je…?

‘SUIS!’

‘Tu…?

‘Es!’

The slower ones, the dreamier ones, mouthing whatever came into their heads, but carried along by the others. She hadn’t liked to force them. For some children that part of the brain just isn’t switched on at eight. It’s not laziness or stupidity. Really stupid children were a rarity, and she used to tell her young teachers, ‘Never write a child off. Never assume the problem is theirs rather than yours.’ There was no great mystery to it. Alec, for example, sitting at the front of the class like a baby owl, his eyes magnified by his glasses, his hair sticking up in tufts, had never had the slightest difficulty learning French. Partly, of course, because in the beginning she was his teacher and he so desperately wanted to please her, a trait charming and irksome by turns and which he had never really grown out of. She had heard the same tone in his voice telling her about the new play as he used to have when he brought her his homework, as though at any moment he might be squashed by an enormous thumb. Well done, Alec. Good boy. Go and find Larry. Je suis, tu es, il est. Larry’s kingdom was the sports field. Captain of cricket. Captain of football. And later, as a senior, captain of the tennis team. Such a manly little boy! And she had always been there, cheering herself hoarse on the touchline, or courtside at tournaments that grew ever grander, her heart in her mouth as he swayed at the baseline and the boy at the far end reached into the air for the ball. The day he beat the Swede, whose name she seemed to have completely forgotten, had been the proudest day of her life. She had wanted to shout out from the stands so that the whole world would hear: ‘I’m the mother! I’m the mother!’ It was difficult for Alec, of course. The inevitable comparisons. Always being introduced as ‘Larry’s brother’ as though he didn’t have a name of his own. But she had doled out her love as evenly as possible. There had been no obvious favourite.

What on earth was the Swedish boy’s name? She searched for a minute, but found nothing except a trace of darkness like a swipe of fresh black paint covering up the place in her head where the name should have been. Gone. Like the name of Mrs Samson’s eldest, who they were only talking about yesterday morning while Mrs S hoovered around the bed and ‘set things straight’. And the names of a dozen flowers, and… what was it, what was it she had forgotten the other day? Something else, the title of an opera she liked, or the name of the man who read the news on the radio which she knew perfectly well and had known for years. What she did remember often seemed quite random, as though her life were an old lumber room through which memory moved like a drunk with a torch, and she would find herself with a photographic recollection of the meat counter at Tesco’s, or remembering word for word a conversation with Toni about her poodle. She didn’t want to go with that in her mind, a last image of Toni’s poodle hovering transcendentally above her like the parrot in the Flaubert story.

Ding! Ding! Ding!…

The little blue-and-white jasper clock in the niche at the bottom of the stairs. Only ten o’clock! How epic the nights had become! And how she longed for someone to lay a hand on her brow, someone who would say, ‘All shall be well, all shall be well…’ Even poor Stephen would be welcome now, the youthful Stephen, the way he was at teacher training college in Bristol when they first met, puffing away at that silly pipe, cracking jokes, talking politics, twang of Manchester in his voice, Stalybridge. Of course, he was drinking even then, but they all did, it was part of being young, everyone talking too much and smoking their heads off. It was never a problem until Alec was born. Then, instead of getting merry on Friday and Saturday nights, he would stop off at the pub on his way home from the school and go on with it sitting in front of the television or down in the workroom. Brooding, drinking, dreaming up new enemies for himself, building his own elaborate hell. People said it got worse after he missed promotion to head of department at King Alfred’s. Others said it was because he wanted to be in higher education, not in a secondary school, that he didn’t really like children, but it wasn’t that. Something had gone wrong with Stephen before she had ever met him. God knows what. Talking personally he called ‘psychobabble’, and she got tired of looking in the end. Probably he didn’t know himself, because it wasn’t always neat. You can’t always give it a name. Like the cancer. What was the root of it? Stress? Cigarettes? Bad luck? Some secret weakness. A hairline fracture that one day brings the house down. None of us, she thought, none of us survives our imperfections.

He used to shout at her, which shocked her at first because she had never been shouted at in that way before, never seen how extraordinarily ugly a person can be when they shout like that. But he only hit her once, once being enough. A push in the back after some idiotic argument about Callaghan or the unions. It was in the kitchen. She had said something to him and was walking away when he lunged at her, shoving her so that she staggered and had to catch at the wall to stop herself from falling. She had been frightened for a moment, a little dizzy from the sheer unpleasantness of it all. Then she had turned to him, slowly and calmly, because she knew by then it was the same rule for drunks and dangerous dogs. Show no fear. And when their eyes met again, when he had the guts to look at her, there was a distance between them that neither would ever cross, and almost immediately she had felt a certain nostalgia, not for him, but for some idea she had had about her own life, some understanding she had suddenly outgrown. He was on a bottle a day by the time of the accident. Vodka mostly, but anything would do. The police said they’d found bottles in the car. In pieces, one imagines.

Months later, his mother called, quite late at night, and said a better woman would have saved him. You didn’t love him right, she said. You didn’t love him like you should, you didn’t, Alice. It’s a shame, she said. Shame on you. Bitch. What? Bitch, she said. And they had wept at each other down the telephone line for a long time, then sniffed and said goodbye, and that was that, apart from cards on the boys’ birthdays with a five-pound note inside.

Three men in a lifetime. It hardly made her Messalina. Rupert Langley, who had been her first beau, her tennis partner and escort, the boy she lost her virginity to. Then Samuel Pinedo. Then Stephen. A few more fumbled with at dances before she was married, or who had taken her out in the years after the accident to dinners or the theatre and kissed her goodnight in their cars.

She still sometimes played the ‘if’ game, wondering how her life would have been with Samuel. If he had asked her. If she had said yes. If. She was thirteen when he was introduced to her as someone ‘Daddy knew in the war’. A man with black brilliantined hair, lounging against the window frame in the front room. Thin, pale, a rather prominent Adam’s apple. Not a really handsome man. But something in his gaze had disturbed her. She didn’t know what it was, what to call it, but when she thought about it afterwards, she decided that he was the first man to have looked at her as a woman rather than as a child, and that there was a generosity in it, a chivalry, which even after nearly fifty years she had not quite recovered from.

His people had been in the diamond business in Amsterdam. Jews from old Spain. Seraphic? When the Nazis came they sent his parents, uncles, cousins and two sisters to the camps in Poland. Samuel had hidden like the little Frank girl, though he was luckier, of course. Got out. Came to England in a fishing boat. Six months later he went back. Helped to organize escape routes for aircrew until they caught him. After the liberation Queen Wilhelmina gave him a medal that he kept loose in the pocket of his suit jacket with his lighter and cigarettes.

She was eighteen when they met again. Nineteen before they became lovers. He was at the embassy in London then, Hyde Park Gate, and came down at weekends on the train from Paddington, and she would go with her father to meet him, terrified in case he had got off at some quite different station with his coat over his arm and his little case, and smiled at some other girl. Her father called him ‘the best sort of Jew’. He must have guessed what was going on but he never said anything. People didn’t in those days.

Was Samuel still alive? If so he’d be almost eighty, which she found impossible to imagine. She’d seen his name in The Times once. Part of a UN delegation to somewhere, so he must have had some success. Become somebody.

Lord! They did it in the garden shed once, on the workbench. Torn stockings, bruised backside, the air stinking of petrol from the lawnmower. He had scars on his back. A dozen ridges of purple skin, and when she asked him about them he winked at her and said it was a girl in Amsterdam with long nails. But nails don’t make marks like that. She used to touch them, stroke them very lightly, as though his back were rucked velvet she could smooth with her fingertips. What had he done with his pain? Had it come out later? Did he take to drink too? Or had someone helped him when he needed it? Making love he called dancing. She’d known next to nothing about sex before Samuel, and after him hadn’t learned much that seemed worth knowing.

The year her father died he was posted back to Holland. He left her a ring – not a diamond ring, but a gold band that had belonged to his mother, and which had his mother’s name engraved in curly letters on the inside. Margot. It had been too small to wear and it wouldn’t have been right. It was a keepsake. A remnant. The little Jewess’s ring. The little Jewess they had turned into ashes.

How wonderful if she could believe she’d see him again ‘on the other side’; some celestial cocktail party where everyone was young and interesting and Nat King Cole was singing ‘When I Fall In Love’. But she didn’t believe it, didn’t believe in the other side at all. The last of her faith had ebbed away during the chemo. A night on her knees by the side of the bed vomiting into a bucket, and above her just miles of emptiness. No gentle Jesus. No saints or angels. Religion was a night-light for children – Stephen had been right about that. Eyewash. Osbourne was harmless. One of the old fashioned type. ‘Black cloth a little dusty, a little green with holy mildew.’ She could tease him, and he had always been nice to the boys. Rather fancied her once, when she was first a widow. Popping round for glasses of sherry, offering to do the lawn, carrying out the black bin-bags of Stephen’s things for the charity shop. Did he mean to try to catch her at the end? Run across the meadow with his box of tricks when he heard she was going? She would have to speak to him. No mumbo-jumbo, Dennis, dear, when I’m too weak to tell you to get lost. He could say what he liked when it was over. Whatever made it easier for the others.

But did nothing last? Was the ‘she’ who thought all this just a brain that would die when the last of the oxygen was used up? Surely there was something inside, some inward shadow, the part that loved Mozart or Samuel Pinedo. Didn’t that go on, somehow? Or was the afterlife just others remembering you, so that you died, truly died, when you were truly forgotten?

The children at school would remember her for a year or two. They had made a ‘Get Well’ card for her, with a picture of the school on the front, and each of them had written his or her name inside with great care, and some had put an X for a kiss. ‘DEAR MRS VALENTINE WE HOPE YOU GET WELL SOON.’ Row upon row of scrubbed faces gazing up at her at morning assembly. Mr Price thundering away at the upright. All good gifts. Morning has broken. The extraordinary thing was that Brando’s son had been one of them. She would have been a form mistress then but she thought she remembered him, a good-looking boy about Alec’s age. A doctor like his father now. Another doctor! In the end they were the only people you knew, though at least Brando was human. She could vouch for that. And what a relief when he took over from Playfair, that pompous little man who talked down to her because she was a woman. Thought himself so clever, but he knew nothing.

On the visits she made to Brando before feeling ill again, the check-ups, they used to talk more about the children, or about themselves, than about the cancer. His father had been an Italian POW in a camp somewhere in Somerset, married a local girl, then opened a little restaurant in Bristol that some nephew still owned. He said that in dreams sometimes he could smell his father’s home-made polenta pie, and she’d told him, laughing, that sometimes she dreamed of her mother’s chutneys, and of chutney-making day, when the kitchen was full of steam, a little sweet, a little savoury, that hung about the house for days.

Of course, she had seen that he was upset when she went to collect the results of her tests. The way he met her at the door and led her to the chair by his desk, then sort of perched on the corner, leaning towards her. She had said something like, it’s not good news, is it, and he said no, he was afraid not. The tumours in her chest had come back, and there were mets, secondaries in the brain. The brain, not hers. Not your brain, Alice. The brain. He asked her whether she wanted to see the images but she said she would take his word for it. After all, there was nothing very surprising. She had known perfectly well that something was wrong, something serious. Headaches that lasted two or three days. Squiggly lights at the edge of vision. And she had read the literature, she could practically recite it. Small-cell cancer was ‘aggressive’. It did not rest. She was lucky to have had the last two years.

The books all recommended that the patient have a list of questions to ask, a written list so that you didn’t get in a muddle, but she didn’t have one, and all she could think to ask was what everyone asks. How long? Such a silly question because doctors are not fortune-tellers and cancer doesn’t run to a timetable, but Brando had nodded and paused as though doing calculations in his head, some sort of algebra, and then said she should enjoy the summer as fully as she could. Get out in the sun, he said. I know you have a lovely garden. It took her a moment to work out what he was saying, to realize that he meant there wouldn’t be any autumn, yet alone a winter. She went deaf for a minute and had the curious sensation that it was the words and not the tumours that would kill her. When she could hear again he was explaining the treatment she could have. Surgery was not an option, but they could start her on another course of chemo in combination with radiation therapy, retard the spread of the disease a little, reduce the swellings. Think it over, he said. No need to make up your mind today. He said he was very sorry and she knew that he meant it. She asked about his son and he asked about her boys. He knew all about Larry and the show, and how there had been artistic differences. She told him that Alec was outside in the carpark waiting for her in the car, his old Renault, and did he know the type with the gear-shift on the dashboard, a great hook of a thing, and she couldn’t imagine why they had it there when in every other car in the world the shift was on the floor, which was the obvious place, and how typically French it was, always wanting to be a little different. She was still talking, babbling on, when the tears started. She was powerless to stop them because no one can be ready for such a moment and there was a violence to it that took her unawares. What else do you have but your life? Where else can you go? And then to find yourself in someone’s office with the sun squinting through the blinds and everything theatrically normal and twenty things to get done that day, and it’s all over. Finished. Ground out. And so she had wept, intemperately, cried so that she felt the seams of her face would break open, and Brando had reached for her and hugged her. No awkwardness in it. Just pressing her face gently against the cloth of his suit as though he were taking into himself some portion of her grief. Playfair would rather have eaten his stethoscope. He would not have been physically capable of hugging. Plenty of people weren’t and that was the pity of the world. Larry could, Alec couldn’t. Samuel, but not Stephen.

There was a box of tissues on the desk. She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes, carefully, so as not to smudge her eyeliner. She was quite in control of herself by the time she reached the carpark. That’s that, she thought. She told Alec on the way home. Gave him the gist of it, very calmly, as though talking about someone they both vaguely knew, a neighbour. It was almost comical. He stalled the car three times at the traffic lights at the end of Commercial Road, and for a moment she was afraid he was going to have some sort of collapse, a ‘wobble’, like the one he had before, when the police found him wandering along the beach at Brighton in a perfect daze. But they got home somehow, teatime, six o’clock perhaps, and she went into the garden to find that the first of the lilac was out, and she had cried again, sitting on the bench by the summerhouse, fronds of honeysuckle round her head, crying for joy at so much beauty and wanting to float up over the potato fields like the heroine in one of those South American novels, Alec waving to her with a white handkerchief from an upstairs window. It hadn’t lasted, of course. A week later she was so low they started her on the Paroxetine.

At least the will was done, though she had wondered recently whether she might leave something to Una. She hadn’t been sure at first about Una O’Connell. A dreamy, rather self-contained sort of character. And it was hard not to resent the young. Their rude health. The feeling that one was being condescended to. But the girl had qualities. Good hands. A sweet, rather melancholy smile. And in her way she knew as much about the wretched cancer as Brando did. Alec could give the lawyers a call tomorrow (you had to be careful; she couldn’t stand the thought of disputes). Then when Larry came she must speak to them both about the funeral, which they wouldn’t have a clue about. Stephen’s had cost the best part of two thousand pounds, and that was twenty years ago. There were cardboard coffins now, biodegradable. She had even read that you could be composted, which might be amusing. Four parts vegetable waste to one part human. The boys would decide about the house. And what would they do with her clothes? Give them away? Burn them?

Last of all there were the goodbyes (numberless, they seemed, though that couldn’t be right). Goodbyes to the living and goodbyes to the dead – for the dead would go too, those she had been sheltering in her head, in memories. What made it so trying was not knowing how she would be from one day to the next, not being able to rely on herself, this slender stricken thing between the sheets, this body that Samuel Pinedo had once thought so lovely. Yet somehow she must do it, and as she slid back towards sleep she envisaged all those last thoughts and last acts like a line of delicate sun machines, those glass bulbs like the one Alec had had as a child with sails of light-sensitive paper on a pin which whirled beneath the glass when the sun shone on them.

‘Je te sauverai,’ they said. ‘Je te sauverai, maman.’ And she let herself be comforted.

9

Alec dimmed the light of the lantern, then went inside to call America. The telephone in the kitchen was the farthest from Alice’s room – the least likely to disturb her – and the ten-digit number he needed was written on the cracked paint of the wall beside the telephone. His own number was just below it, and at the top of the list were the hospital number and Una’s home number. For a few seconds the receiver hissed like a conch shell, then began to ring. He counted fifteen rings and was about to hang up when he heard Kirsty’s breathless ‘Hello?’

‘Hi,’ said Alec.

‘Larry?’

‘Alec.’

‘Alec! Is everything OK?’

‘Fine.’

‘I was in the shower,’ she said. ‘I just got back from the centre. Wow, what a day!’

‘Zen?’ asked Alec.

‘Yeah. We’ve got this roshi over from Kyoto. Mr Endo.’ She laughed. ‘I think I’m in love.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Alec, laughing too, though quietly. He imagined her, with her wet hair pushed behind her ears, the colour of it darkened a little by the water.

‘He gave us our koans,’ she said.

‘Koans?’

‘The riddles.’

‘Ah,’ said Alec. ‘The sound of one hand clapping.’

‘That kind of thing.’

‘What’s yours?’

‘Gosh,’ she said, ‘I don’t think we’re supposed to tell.’

‘What happens when you find the answer?’

‘Well, you get a Buddhist name, and it’s like the first stage.’

‘Enlightenment by instalments.’

‘Don’t be such a Brit, Alec. I know you think it’s the Moonies.’

‘No I don’t,’ he said. ‘I envy you.’

‘How’s Alice?’

‘She has to rest a lot.’

‘Is Brando still coming?’

‘He’ll be here tomorrow,’ said Alec. He didn’t share the general enthusiasm for Brando. All that charm and authority. He suspected Brando did not approve of him either. The translator. The ineffectual son.

‘Larry’s just sick with worry,’ said Kirsty. ‘And it’s not as if he has much to take his mind off it.’

‘He’s not working?’

‘If he could just get back on the show…’

‘Dr Barry.’

‘I know it wasn’t Shakespeare or anything.’

‘I never knocked it. Is he there?’

‘He’s in LA. Some “business” trip.’

‘He said he’d call,’ said Alec.

‘Well, that’s Larry. But I know he wants to speak to you. He talks about you more than anyone.’

‘Really?’

‘I guess he thinks he should be over there. Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, why would he tell me what he thinks?’ The telephone bleeped like sonar. Alec heard her sniff and sigh. ‘Poor Alice. I really love her.’

‘Come on,’ he said, afraid that she would start something in him. ‘Do some Zen breathing. How does it work?’

‘Ella,’ she said, ‘are you on the extension, honey?’

There was silence, then a tiny, hesitant, ‘Yes.’

‘It’s your Uncle Alec. Calling from England. Say hello, honey.’

Alec waited. At last, a faintly lisped hello crossed the six thousand miles between them.

‘It’s night here,’ he said, talking to the girl. ‘A little while ago I heard an owl hooting at the end of the garden. Maybe you’ll hear it when you come for Granny’s birthday.’

‘She’d love that,’ said Kirsty. ‘Now put the phone down, baby, and let me talk with Uncle Alec. Come on, Ella, put it down…’ There was a subtle click. ‘She does that all the time. I really want to get her more help but it’s so darned expensive.’

‘Is she still borrowing stuff?’

‘Larry found one of my earrings in her booty last night. At least he knows where to look for them. She likes you, Alec.’

‘I haven’t seen her for a year.’

‘She remembers you.’

‘Has Larry picked up the tickets?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Why don’t you all fly together?’

‘I want to finish this course. I know it’s selfish but Endo’s too good to miss.’

‘You’re right,’ said Alec. ‘Solve your riddle. Then come.’

‘Have you tried scalp massage?’ she asked. ‘You use your fingertips to move the scalp over the skull, like you’re washing hair.’

‘Is that a Zen thing?’

‘Not everything’s Zen, Alec.’ She paused, trying to recall what she had been taught earlier in the day. ‘Well, maybe it is. Anyway, you should do it for Alice. It’ll make her feel good.’

‘Not if I did it,’ he said. He found the idea absurd to the point of comedy.

‘You’re not such a klutz.’

‘Thanks.’

‘How’s your Romanian guy? Or was he Albanian or something?’

‘Hungarian.’

‘Right. Didn’t you say he was some kind of old freedom fighter? A sort of Che Guevara?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I know it’s a lousy time for you, Alec. Larry’ll be there soon.’

‘The cavalry!’

‘I hope you two aren’t going to fight.’

‘Why should we?’

‘Well, brothers do. Remember Cain and Abel? But maybe you’re the one who can help him.’

‘Help Larry?’

‘People change, Alec.’

‘Do they? I thought they just got more like themselves.’

She laughed but didn’t sound very amused. ‘I guess.’

‘Has something happened?’

‘Just the usual. Give hugs to Alice.’

‘Sure. Kiss Ella for me.’

‘Get some sleep,’ she said, ‘you sound tired.’

‘I’m on my way,’ he said.

‘Take care now.’

‘You too.’

‘I know things are going to work out somehow.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m glad you called.’

‘Bye-bye.’

‘Bye.’

She rang off and Alec slowly hung up the receiver. Help Larry? This was a novel suggestion. A disturbing one! What had she been hinting at? What type of trouble? He tried for a moment (staring at the wall as though at a screen) to do what he had not done in a long, long while: to have a view of his brother’s life, an objective take on it, but he realized he simply didn’t have the information any more – certainly not the kind of private information that might make sense of an expression like ‘the usual’. But then, how did a knowledge of a person’s circumstances weigh against a knowledge of his character? A character in Larry’s case that Alec still believed he knew better than Kirsty, if only because he had known it first and was himself written into it. He knew what Larry was made of. Perhaps she had meant ‘help Kirsty’. People were forever calling out in confusing ways.

He boiled the kettle for tea, brewed it in a cup, dropped the tea bag into the swing-bin and opened the fridge for the milk. On the shelves were the empty plastic tubs that had once contained the ingredients of Alice’s diet, souvenirs from the time when she had sought to guard herself against the cancer’s return, to make herself inviolate by consuming only the purest and most wholesome of foods. The search for these foods had been expensive and time consuming, and seemed largely useless now; all that vigilance and fibre, those trips to health-food co-ops for boxes of misshapen vegetables brought out to the car by people who looked in desperate need of a blood sausage. But nothing that might provoke the beast had been allowed into the kitchen, and the effort had perhaps rewarded her with a few extra months of comparative health, though in the end organic broccoli and alfalfa seeds would not save your life, and Alec swung shut the fridge door more firmly than he’d meant to, rattling half-empty bottles of flower remedy and vitamin C, of shark cartilage, emulsified linseed capsules, and a dozen others that had once teasingly suggested themselves as the necessary elixirs.

Sipping his tea, he crossed the living room and went the length of a short corridor of scuffed and torn lino into the ‘playroom’. In the twenty years since he and Larry had used it as a den the room had become a kind of depositary, a ramshackle museum of family history, the boards piled high with junk. He had visited the room on the previous two nights at about the same hour, each time on the pretext of starting to determine what from among this tidal wash of oddments might be kept, though the truth – which standing in the doorway he now admitted to himself – was that the room still retained for him something of its air of refuge. It soothed him, and among those stations of the night that were becoming increasingly apparent to him, it was an interlude of calm, a place where he could breathe the gentle anaesthetic of nostalgia.

Some of the objects in the room had reached their last declension, existing only in a stubborn limbo of silence and inutility. Others were immediately eloquent. A beige and purple oil heater of curious design, sitting where it had been placed perhaps fifteen years before, instantly revived a scene of winter evenings after school, a scent of oil mingling with the smell of sausages or fish-fingers, and the wafting all-pervasive smoke of Alice’s cigarettes. And from the box he had emptied the previous evening he had pulled out, as though lifting something precious and extraordinary from the pharaoh’s tomb, a single tan boxing glove, lone memento of his slogging matches with Larry, fights which, however temperately begun, often ended with a flurry of wild punches, and Alec on the floor bawling with frustration, while Larry stood over him, anger already cooling to remorse as he glanced nervously at the door.

Tonight’s box, which he dragged under the light of the ceiling bulb, was a large supermarket fruit carton with SPAR in green letters along the side. Here, with a rush of whatever chemical such recognitions released into the blood, he discovered the pieces of an elaborate toy that must have been given when he was about seven, and Larry nine or ten: a lunar landscape made of moulded plastic, and a little spidery landing craft of great simplicity and delicacy that had once had a balloon attached to it, and which was directed on to the sheet of moon by small battery-powered fans. It belonged to a period that now seemed bizarrely remote, when space travel was front-page news and children kept scrapbooks with pictures of astronauts. No self-respecting child would waste time on such a toy now. For a start, there was no screen.

Under the moon, though from the same era, was a brightly coloured tin with a picture on the lid of a man in a smoking jacket holding a magic wand. Inside were three red cups, each smaller than an eggcup, and half a dozen pea-sized balls. A booklet illustrated with sketchy and perplexing diagrams explained how, by sleight of hand, the balls could be made to disappear from beneath one cup and reappear beneath another. To do this it was necessary to obtain the knack of holding a ball pressed inconspicuously into the crease of your palm. Alec tried it a few times; it was surprisingly difficult, but it was, he thought, the kind of trick that any good uncle should be able to perform, and he determined to learn it, thoroughly, and entertain Ella with it when she came over.

Other stuff: a school gazette from King Alfred’s with a grainy still of boys on sport’s day – small, ghostly figures, bizarrely intent, strung out across an enormous grey field. The finishing line, which might have given the picture some context, was out of shot, and far from being redolent of a summer’s afternoon, of youthful athleticism, the boys seemed to have been posed there to illustrate some idea of human futility. Farther on, another Xeroxed photograph showed a group of adolescents standing about with stick-on moustaches and frock-coats for a production of the school play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in which Alec had played Algy Moncrieff, ‘creditably’, according to the gazette, though all he could remember of it was the angry crimson mottle on his throat brought about by first-night nerves; the urge to bolt.

A box of Cluedo.

A card game called Pit.

A ‘spud’ gun in the style of an automatic, the spring action still functioning.

A Frank Zappa album, warped.

A hardback copy of Struwwelpeter.

Finally, stashed at the very bottom of the box, was an American girlie magazine from June 1977, Miss Valley Forge on the cover in a stars-and-stripes bikini and Davy Crockett hat. Inside – the month’s theme was American revolutionary ardour – other models pouted beside cannon or reclined on couches wearing only tricorn hats, or leered obediently from the froth of a Jacuzzi with a provocatively handled flintlock. All sexual promise had leached away from the images, as though they were time sensitive. The models, with their huge roseate breasts, looked as if they belonged to a super-race of wet nurses. All that was missing were the babies themselves, who should have been glimpsed in the background, crawling blindly over the basques and boas. It was hard to believe that these women, now perhaps winning glamorous grandmother competitions in Amarillo or Grand Rapids, had been among the cast of his adolescent fantasies. Their nudity roused no appetite in him now, but they reminded him – as almost everything did – that he had not had sex for eleven months, and that the last occasion, with Tatania Osgood, a girl who had slept with almost everyone he knew, had been so wretched it could never be spoken of, too bleak even to be converted into one of those humorously self-deprecating narratives of sexual failure that might have seemed, in certain company, endearing and funny. Fragments of the evening, a series of tableaux, adhered in his memory with a kind of malicious clarity. Tatania at the street door of his flat in Streatham holding a supermarket carrier bag containing two bottles of a wine called Tiger Milk. Tatania on the sofa of his little book-strewn sitting room, braless in a tight black dress and exuding a wantonness that was genuinely sad. Himself at 2 a.m. kissing her and trapping his fingers in the gusseting of her tights. The pair of them on the bed, she in tears as he tried to comfort her for a succession of cheating boyfriends. Then the act itself, a pleasureless dry wrestling, Mr Bequa’s TV jabbering away in the next room. And when at last the soft hammer of drink had sent her reeling into sleep, he had lain beside her listening to the thick of her breath, and thinking how the evening’s meanness and failure were part of a much larger failure, and that this was the price of his timidity; that he had earned such a night and would earn others by never having the courage to ask for anything better. He had had the urge then – still associated in his mind with the dawn tinkling of milk floats – to commit some act that would close the road behind him for ever, some extravagance of love, or something violent perhaps, murderous.

He carried the cup-and-ball game into the living room, then moved softly up the stairs and peered into his mother’s room to where she lay in the quarter-light as if in a body of water whose currents moved her limbs and slowly turned her face from side to side on the pillows. Her inhalations were like moments of hushed surprise, and in each breath it seemed she lost more than she gained. The sickness was weaning her off air, and however many good days she had when she could sit in the garden with a rug and drink Darjeeling tea and talk to her visitors, the process, the day-to-day business of dying, ran on relentlessly, a ferocious, semi-public labour. What sense did it have, beyond the workings of a certain crude biology? What good lesson could be learned from watching someone die? Was it just to throw you back harder against your own life, to make you see the necessity of getting on with it? a memento mori like the old gravestones with their skulls and sand timers and glib reminders that ‘soon you shall be as I am’?

He had tried once, shortly after Stephen’s accident, to believe in God and the overarching purposefulness of things. He had set aside time every day to say his prayers: twenty minutes in the morning and twenty at night, kneeling down in the approved manner with his hands clasped by his lips. He told no one about it, and it had felt good at first, a source of consolation and power that did not depend on anybody else, teachers or parents, people who might suddenly not be there any more. Then the two sessions had became one and the twenty minutes shrank to ten. He talked to God but God did not talk back to him. There was only the sound of his own voice, the childish litany, the discomfort in his knees, until finally, with a sense of getting out into the air again, he had given it all up. His father had reserved a special venom for religion, the ‘God-botherers’. Alec didn’t know if Alice believed. He hoped she did, though the last time he had seen her with Osbourne she had been ragging him, saying that she had turned into a sun worshipper, ‘a bit of an Aztec’, something that the reverend, sitting beside her wearing a pair of green-shaded sunglasses, seemed to think entirely compatible with modern Anglicanism. It was a curious fact, however, that she did, in certain lights, certain hours, her face puffed up by the steroids, her gaze refined by suffering, look more like a tribal elder of some delicate mournful people in the great plains or rainforests than a middle-class English woman, a retired headmistress, his mother, Alice Valentine.

She opened her eyes, suddenly, as though she had not been asleep at all.

‘Larry?’ she said.

‘No, Mum, it’s me.’

A pause, then, ‘I was dreaming of you’.

10

Stylistically, the foyer of the Park Hotel was a marriage between an Italian bank and an English gentleman’s club, but in its scale, its air of having been built the previous afternoon, the not quite convincing efficiency of it all, it was entirely home grown.

Larry made for the drink station in the well of the room and ordered a large Jim Beam from a barman in a tight white pea jacket. The convention was in full swing, and among the fountains, the marble, the plump sofas and the scurrying bellhops, several hundred mostly middle-aged men milled about industriously, peering at each other’s identity tags. There were many fulsome greetings, and when they laughed they advertised their trade with mouths full of lustrous and symmetrical teeth. They were wholesome-looking men, by and large, and though they must have had their share of the world’s problems – errant kids, alimonies, mal-practice suits – they wore everywhere the same expression of intense boyish delight, so that Larry was tempted to suspect them of visiting their own medicine chests. Mainstream Americans. Taxpayers, baseball fans. Serious people with a certain chiselled gravitas. Veterans, some of them, of Korea and Vietnam. Patriots. Yet the more Larry looked at them the more he wondered how long his self-willed exile among such people, who had started to appear as exotic as Berbers or Malay fire-walkers, could possibly continue. It was as if the country were slipping away from him, or he was beginning at last to find unignorable the fine hard surface of its difference, of his difference. Vexing to have to see this now! To be forced to admit how much more there was to belonging somewhere than just being there. But where else could he go? Back to England? What would he do there? He would be a minor item in the evening paper – ‘Local Tennis Ace Comes Home’ – and then sink without trace, reduced, if he was lucky, to double-glazing ads on television, or perhaps a tennis instructorship at a local country club, where he would sit at the bar in his whites, a lush with solarium-tanned skin, making assignations with unhappily married women.

At the front desk he enquired whether a Mr Bone, a Mr T. Bone, had a room at the hotel. Anywhere but LA and he would have received the ‘wiseass’ look, but in a city where doormen were dressed like characters in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, the citizens were not given to displays of incredulity. The receptionist, Kimberly Ng, sporting an Employee of the Month badge on her lapel, checked her screen and said that they did indeed have a Mr Bone with them at the moment. Larry gave his name and she called up to the room, informing him that he was expected, and that he should take the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor of the Tower.

‘Room 2714, sir. Enjoy your visit with us today.’

A broad and velvety walkway connected the hotel to the adjoining Tower, the walls serving as a gallery for photographs of the luminaries who had graced the hotel in the past. Reagan’s image was prominent: a large picture of him on a spacious balcony looking relaxed under the California sun, a half-dozen smiling cronies around him. Then Reagan on the telephone to receive some historic message. Reagan with Nancy, a loving couple, tanned and innocent.

Farther along, there were images of the moonshot astronauts – Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins – and though he was now running late, Larry paused to look at these more closely. The astronauts had been honoured at a reception in the hotel entitled ‘Dinner of the Century’. It certainly looked grand enough. In the foreground there were uniformed trumpeters, then about a thousand dignitaries, and finally the astronauts themselves in dark suits, looking solemn and pleased and impossibly modest.

It was just before four o’clock on a summer’s morning in England when the Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquillity. The Valentines, like any other family in the country with a TV set, had sat in a breathless hush watching the crackly flag of history unfurl in front of them. Larry on the floor between his father’s knees; Alec snuggling up with Alice on the couch. The thrilling ellipses of the language! Its weird laconic delivery. ‘Roger, you’re looking great, you’re go.’ ‘How us, Houston?’ Armstrong, cool as any gunslinger, guiding the module down, while at Mission Control the backroom boys in their white shirts sat anxiously before rows of whirring computers. How strange that today of all days he had crossed the path of these men, icons of the kind of clean-cut heroism he had never ceased to admire. It was as though their picture had been posted there as a warning, or a reminder, or in some way to mock him. He wondered how many people remembered there had been a Russian craft, Luna 15, in low orbit round the moon at the same time as Apollo, and that it had ended its flight by crashing at 300 mph into the Sea of Crises. ‘How me?’ he muttered, ‘How me?’ as he entered the elevator, ascending to the twenty-seventh floor in the company of several Japanese businessmen, who gazed studiously into the car’s limited middle distance.

The meeting had been arranged by telephone the week before by a young actor called Ranch whom Larry had first met at the party of a man in the glamour industry who owned a beautiful house in Sausalito. Ranch, looking like an Armani cowpoke, had been trying to impress a very tall black model with his display of karate kata, but the girl, listless from some dieting drug, had wandered off halfway through the action, a level of interest that might have provoked a moment’s resentment in most men, but Ranch had merely shrugged and grinned with chivalrous regret at the swing of her backside as she disappeared into the next room, and then immediately introduced himself to Larry, complimenting him on how ‘fucking great’ he was looking. Since then there had been other parties in other beautiful homes, where Larry had explained some of his predicament, and Ranch had promised to help him somehow, an idea that Larry had not, for a single moment, taken seriously.

But it was Ranch who opened the door to 2714, dressed in a dark suit and purple open-neck shirt with a large collar, his sideburns razored to knife points, his eyes back-lit by the morning’s consumption of something considerably stronger than coffee. He embraced Larry as though he meant it and led him to the television screen where something wet and bloodily intrusive was going on.

‘What is it?’ asked Larry, wincing.

Ranch laughed. ‘It’s the in-house channel. The dentists have got their own TV show!’ He laughed again. ‘Sick fucks,’ he said, then in a quieter voice added, ‘TB’s out on the balcony.’

For a moment Larry hoped it might be the same balcony he had seen Reagan on in the picture, but as he stepped out into the glare he saw that it was more modest, a different grade of opulence altogether.

T. Bone was on a sun chair set in an angle of shade. He didn’t stand when Larry came out, but smiled, and offered a small soft hand like a mole’s paw.

‘Quite a view from up here,’ he said, turning his head slightly to where the afternoon sun and the day’s emission of CO₂ had nebulized LA to a fine haze in which the buildings seemed carved from smoke. ‘Shirley Temple used to play down there. And once upon a time it was Tom Mix’s ranch. We like to come here when we’re meeting new friends. It creates a certain “atmosphere”. Have a seat, sir. Ranch, fix Mr Larry something cool and dangerous to drink.’

‘Comin’ up,’ said Ranch. He disappeared through the drapes into the bedroom.

‘He’s first rate,’ said T. Bone, leaning forward confidentially. ‘Found in a carpetbag in the ladies’ conveniences at Union Station. In and out of institutions all his life. Convinced he’ll meet his mother on “the other side”, poor lamb. Tell me, Larry. Do children in England still have those little Barnardo boxes for collecting money for the orphans?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Larry, who vaguely remembered that he and Alec had once had such a box. A little yellow cottage with a slot in the roof.

‘One hopes so,’ said T. Bone, settling back and smiling from the shadows. ‘It encourages them to think of those less fortunate. There’s so little of that these days. N’est-ce pas?”

‘Last days of the Empire,’ said Larry, flippantly.

‘Oh, not yet,’ said T. Bone. ‘No. I think we’ve a little more time.’

This man, thought Larry, returning the other’s amused gaze, contained within himself such depths of fraudulence you would never come to the end of him. To look at he was a benign, slightly eccentric figure in his sixties with an uncanny resemblance to the older John Betjeman. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and, on his very white legs, some manner of surgical support socks finished off with a pair of highly polished brogues. His accent was the sort of camp upper-class English little heard since the death of Noël Coward, but beneath it, like the faint pattern of old wallpaper under whitewash, Larry detected another voice, something grimly urban, provincial and brutish, so that it was not difficult to imagine him, somewhere in the 1950s, a little slicked hoodlum in a bombed-out and rain-damaged city like Plymouth or Slough, the type of character who carried a sharpened steel comb in his pocket.

Ranch’s cool and dangerous drink arrived, blue and gin-dry and delicious. Ranch and Larry put on sunglasses, an event followed by ten minutes of small talk concerning the heat, the merits of Mexican food, the flight of the comet. Finally, after a lengthy pause during which the ice cracked and tinkled in their glasses, T. Bone said: ‘We all adored you as Dr Barry.’

‘Jesus, yes,’ said Ranch.

‘Thanks,’ said Larry.

‘They should have made more of you,’ said T. Bone, ‘but television is run by morons. Don’t you think?’

‘Morons,’ crooned Ranch, as though he were at a revivalist meeting.

‘I’m glad to be out of it,’ said Larry, watching from the corner of his eye Ranch flick peanuts into the air and expertly catch them in his mouth.

‘We have a little project,’ said T. Bone, ‘we think would be perfect for you. Nothing extreme. The kind of viewing enjoyed by thousands of healthy Americans every day.’

‘Except,’ said Ranch, resting a hand on Larry’s shoulder, ‘it won’t be Americans watching it.’

‘Just so,’ said T. Bone. ‘You would be dubbed into Portuguese and Spanish for our South American market. Sun Valley has been playing in Brazil and Argentina for months. You’re a great favourite there. Particularly, one imagines, with the dusky housewives.’

‘You got fans in places you ain’t even heard of,’ said Ranch. ‘Bacabal, Xique-Xique…’

‘We make our little productions very simply,’ said T. Bone, looking now like Sir Ralph Richardson playing a Borgia pope. ‘We remain the true auteurs. We are an industry of enthusiasts.’

‘How long would the shoot take?’ asked Larry.

‘A week,’ said Ranch, ‘two weeks max.’

‘For which we can offer you a fee of twenty thousand dollars,’ added T. Bone. ‘Naturally we’d like it to be more but these days we have to compete with the Web. However, we can arrange payment so that you need not worry about the gentlemen at the revenue.’

‘And I wouldn’t have to do anything I could get arrested for?’

‘It’s all kosher,’ said Ranch.

‘No Lolitas or animals?’

‘I am a father,’ said T. Bone, ‘and a nature lover.’

‘One more thing,’ said Larry. ‘I’m going to be in England from next week. I don’t know how long for. Not long, I think.’

‘I’ll make a note of that,’ said Ranch, flicking another peanut into the air.

Twenty-seven floors below, where Shirley Temple had once played, a lone swimmer pulled himself across the green eye of a pool. Back and forth, back and forth, like a water beetle. It was a fine day for a swim but something in the figure’s progress, or lack of it, was disturbing. Presumably he was counting off his daily quota of lengths, getting himself in shape, but it looked unprofitable, forlorn, like that Greek in hell who pushed a rock up the hill all day just to watch it roll to the bottom again.

‘OK,’ said Larry. ‘Why not? Count me in.’

‘A great day for us, Larry,’ said Ranch, clapping his hands.

‘Delighted,’ said T. Bone. ‘Happy et cetera.’

‘What now?’ asked Larry, glancing from Ranch to T. Bone, aware that something more was expected of him.

‘Ranch will take care of you,’ said T. Bone, pulling a copy of the Hollywood Reporter from under his chair. ‘Then a bite of luncheon, chez moi.’

Larry followed Ranch into the bathroom, wondering what the statistical incidence of people murdered in LA hotel rooms was. Inside the bathroom a card propped up on a shelf above the gleaming sink announced that ‘Milagros’ – the name was inked in by an uncertain hand – was the room attendant, and that she took pride in her work.

‘We’ve only seen your face,’ said Ranch, making himself comfortable on the toilet seat under the flood of panelled roof lighting.

‘Ah,’ said Larry. ‘This is the audition?’

‘It’s cool,’ said Ranch. ‘I like girls.’

‘No problem,’ said Larry. He began to undress.

11

Karol arrived at the apartment just after nine o’clock carrying a small but beautiful bouquet of coquelicots. He also brought something of the air of the streets he had been walking through, the slightly febrile atmosphere of Paris at the going out hour when the long dusk gives way to night and the lights of the great cafés begin to shine more brilliantly; a romantic hour in which it was impossible not to feel some excitement, some hope of an adventure. László hung Karol’s coat on a peg by the door, smelling in the damp fabric the impeccable scent of a rain shower, then went with Karol to the dining room where he was relieved to find the atmosphere of melodrama had dispersed. For the moment, at least, everyone was behaving quite normally.

Kurt opened a bottle of champagne, while Karol, another exile from the East – though his vintage was ’68 rather than ’56 – told a story about a vagrant on the Metro who had approached a smartly dressed young woman and pleaded with her to become his girlfriend, and how, with a charm and sensitivity admired by the entire carriage, she had regretfully turned him down. The others began their own Métro stories while László busied himself in the kitchen. Despite the ‘gun play’ the food had not been spoiled; the veal in particular, served up in the little parcels of greaseproof paper, was succulent in its juice of sweet melted Parmesan and tender shallots. They had a tarte tatin and crème anglaise to finish, then cups of fierce black coffee and glasses of Calvados. With the dishes still on the table they sat at ease in the glow of a lamp and three candles. Kurt and Laurence smoked cigarettes. László and Franklin smoked small cigars. The smoke turned in lazy circles in the candle-dark above their heads. Karol, a writer who for many years was unable to publish in his own language, and thus had something of an obsession with translation, asked László about the English-language version of Oxygène, and László told him about the young English translator, Alexander…

‘What’s the fellow’s name, Kurt?’

‘Valentine.’

‘Ah, yes. An auspicious name. Like the hero of a Stendhal novel.’

‘And the other one?’ asked Laurence. ‘The one on the boat?’

‘No one knows,’ said Kurt. ‘Disappeared into thin air.’

‘Poor man,’ said Laurence.

‘Isn’t it time, László,’ asked Karol playfully, ‘you wrote something with a happy ending?’

‘I would like to,’ answered László, ‘but it would have to be a fairytale. Something for children.’

‘László lacks the balls for a happy ending,’ said Franklin, helping himself to more Calvados. ‘It’s so much safer to have everyone end in the shit.’

Laurence began to scold her husband; László held up his hand. ‘No, my dear. He may be right. But at my age it’s difficult to change the way you see the world. We take on a certain view when we are young then spend the rest of our lives collecting the evidence.’

‘Telephone,’ said Kurt.

‘Let it ring,’ said László.

‘Tell me,’ asked Karol, resting his large hand on László’s bony shoulder, ‘your happiest memory.’

‘So you can steal it and use it in your next book?’

‘Well, I’ll tell you mine,’ drawled Franklin, leaning heavily on the table. ‘Korea, 24 December 1950. A bunch of us dogfaces sitting around a campfire on the beach at Hungnam waiting for the LCVP to take us off. The navy had loudspeakers up playing “White Christmas” and we were heating up cans of tomato soup. A week since any of us had bathed or shaved or changed our clothes. Ollie Warand from Mission Viejo. Dutch Biebal from Baltimore. Sergeant Stauffer, Walt Bateman. Three or four others from Third Infantry. We’d lost a lot of our friends in that shithole country, but we had plenty of smokes and we were going home. I remember just staring into the fire and smelling the soup – the greatest damn smell in the world when you’re hungry. And hearing Crosby crooning down the beach, and all the guys talking in slow voices about what they were going to do when they were back Stateside. The girls and the hooch and the ball games. It was such a cold, still day. Christmas Eve a thousand years ago. I was nineteen. Nineteen years old, for Chrissakes. It wasn’t until I was back in Sioux City and out of uniform, trying to make some kind of life for myself, that it hit me just how happy I’d been sitting there on the beach. So happy that for years afterwards I could open a can of Campbell’s and get a rush. I swear I used to go out and buy the stuff whenever I had the black dog. I guess I was a soup fiend.’

‘And did you ever paint it?’ asked Kurt. ‘The men on the beach?’

‘If I’d painted it I would have changed it, so I left it alone. Anyway,’ he said, grinning, ‘Warhol painted it.’

‘Who’s next?’ asked Laurence.

Karol span a knife on the table. It pointed to Kurt.

‘I like to think,’ said Kurt, his expression composed and serious, an expression László adored, ‘that I have not had my happiest memory. I mean, that my happiest moment is still ahead of me…’

‘The perfect definition of an optimist,’ said Karol.

‘But I do remember one particular day with my father on the Alte Donau outside Vienna. Papa used to work at the Semperit tyre factory. He wasn’t an educated man. He worked with his hands, his back. And he worked hard. But on Sunday mornings in summer he would wake me before sunrise, and we would drive out to the river with our rods and nets. I was not a good fisherman. Not gifted. But this particular day I cast my line and caught the most beautiful trout in all of Austria. I swear to you, it was almost the length of my arm, and when I reeled it in the water of the river was the colour of the sunrise, so that it appeared I was pulling the fish from a lake of molten fire! When we went home I presented it to my mother. You know how boys are. I gave it to her as though it was the head of a dragon I had slain in single combat. She kissed me, and for reasons I did not understand at all, she was crying. Crying and smiling. I suppose she was proud of me.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know why that day has stayed with me when I must have forgotten other, equally good days. Maybe it was the last completely innocent day of my life…’

‘No!’ protested Laurence, who hated the idea of any irreversible loss. ‘You’re still the same boy. Isn’t that so, László?’

‘Compared to dangerous old people like us,’ said László, ‘he’s as innocent as a choirboy. A Viennese choirboy!’

‘You’re next, Laurence,’ said Karol.

She smiled, wearily, and slowly twisted one of her rings. Three small sapphires.

‘I’m afraid my happiest day was my first date with Franklin.’

‘Oh, Lordy!’ said Franklin.

‘I was twenty-two and wore a cream satin dress with a pattern of roses on it. Franklin wore a suit he’d borrowed from…’

‘Ed Sullivan, who’s dead now.’

‘Let her tell the story,’ said László.

‘We went to La Coupole. Franklin was sure it would be full of famous writers and artists, but even then it was mostly just American tourists. We drank martinis with olives on cocktail sticks, just like in the movies. I was thinking how angry my father would be if he knew. He didn’t think women should drink anything stronger than wine. And then, my God, Franklin tells me he doesn’t have any money, not a sou, and that we have to run away when the waiter isn’t looking. That was why we had a table by the door! I didn’t know what to think. Was it American humour? Was I supposed to laugh? After all, I still went to mass at St Antoine’s every Sunday. But then he took hold of my hand and we ran like Bonnie and Clyde the whole way down the boulevard Montparnasse. I was so frightened I could hardly breathe. I was sure the waiters would chase us – you know how fierce they are at La Coupole – but by the time we reached Port Royal…’ Her voice trailed away. ‘I was already a little in love.’

‘How romantic,’ sighed Kurt.

‘I remember she was wearing red knickers,’ said Franklin. ‘Somewhere between carmine and maroon, to be exact. It was hard to tell with the light.’

‘Franklin!’ exclaimed Laurence. ‘You could only have seen them because you made me climb into the Luxembourg with you.’

‘She was very beautiful then,’ said Franklin.

‘She’s beautiful now,’ said Karol.

Franklin nodded. ‘László remembers.’

‘Now you’re maudlin,’ said Karol.

‘László?’ said Laurence. ‘I wonder if I could guess your happiest moment.’

‘I’m sure you could,’ said László, ‘for I must have told you more than once. A day in November 1953 when Hungary played England at soccer in London. Wembley Stadium. No one had beaten the English on their own ground. What hope did a country like Hungary have? The government, of course, wanted victory as a vindication of the system. Real Hungarians just longed to be noticed in the world so people would see that Stalin and Rákosi had not buried us entirely. But to win at Wembley. Impossible! Yet we wanted it so badly we thought we could will it to happen. Perhaps we did. Anyway, that afternoon a kind of miracle occurred. Hungary won six goals to three!’

‘Hurrah!’ sang Karol, who of all the others understood best what the victory had meant.

‘Everyone was listening to the radio, those big Oriens, and every time we scored you could hear the cheering coming from all the apartments, and from the street too. It was, in my humble opinion, the greatest moment in the history of Hungarian sport. I was fifteen. Everyone was so happy it could have been midsummer’s day. Ferenc Puskás was the hero of our team. I used to know the name of the English captain. Hight… Bight…’

‘Most of the team left after ’56.’ said Karol.

‘Yes. Czibor and Kocsis played in Barcelona. Puskás joined Real Madrid but he went back in ’81, back to Hungary.’

“Well, almost a happy ending,’ said Franklin. ‘Give or take a revolution or two.’

‘Egeszsegedre!’ cried Kurt, who had learnt a dozen words of Hungarian. They raised their glasses.

Karol was the eldest of them. He said that each phase of a life had its own kind of happiness. From childhood he could remember sleeping on his mother’s lap in the kitchen – the sheer animal comfort of the warmth of the stove and of the woman who of all women will love you best. Then, in the Prague Spring, there was the excitement of resistance, the erotic fervour of revolt, the thrill of being really afraid. The opportunity to be brave! Later, the sober happiness of work, of writing books and seeing them admired and respected. Lucidity. The satisfaction of a profound ambition achieved. The relief at not having failed.

‘And lastly,’ he said, knitting his thick grey brows, ‘there is a happiness that is truly floating, and is very hard to name, for it blows around the world like a magic dust. You know, it happened to me just a few weeks ago. I had given a reading in Dusseldorf. I met some old friends there – you know Krüger, László – and had a glass or two of wine, no more. Then the car came to take me to the station and we drove through a part of the city I didn’t recognize. It was a cloudy spring afternoon, quite cool and breezy. I was thinking about the most ordinary matters. What I would read on the train. Whether I would have time to call my daughter. I looked out from the side window of the car. We were crossing a bridge, a very ordinary stone bridge, not in any way beautiful or remarkable. And quite suddenly I experienced a sense of wellbeing that overwhelmed me in the way certain melodies heard at just the right moment can do. It lasted no more than a few minutes. It felt as though I had been seized by the present and shaken out, or had sensed – forgive me – my own immortal soul, something I find hard to believe in most days of the week. And all the while my driver made his way through the traffic quite oblivious to this little epiphany taking place behind his neck.’

László glanced up at the bookshelf, where the shot volume of Rilke was hidden in the shadows.

‘“And we,” he began, “Who always think / of happiness rising / would feel the emotion / that almost startles us / when a happy thing falls.”’

Karol, embracing them all, left just after midnight. Franklin and Laurence followed a few minutes later, everyone in a mood of gentle melancholy at the recollection of joys that belonged to such a distant past. Kurt and László stacked the dishes in the kitchen, then Kurt retired to the bedroom where, before bed, he would perform certain complicated yoga exercises. László went back into the dining room, turned off the lamp and extinguished with wetted fingertips two of the candles. He did not feel tired. He sat in the light of the remaining candle. The Calvados had given him slight heartburn, and the discussion of happiness had set him off on an arc of thinking he would have to reach the end of before he could rest. It was true, the stories in themselves were somewhat banal – a fish, a tin of soup, running out of a bar, a soccer match – but happiness was a subject as elusive as love, and one that required a similar subtlety of lexis and category. To begin with, it could be divided into two broad types: the happiness when you know yourself to be happy, and that which is only apparent afterwards, the type Franklin had described with the young soldiers on the beach. Then there was public happiness, such as the day of the football match, joy reflected back from the faces of everyone he saw. And secret happiness, as when he was in love with Peter, almost a burden, as though he had won the lottery yet could share the news with no one. Pure happiness was rare, confined in most cases to infants, drug fiends and religious ecstatics. More common, though just as disturbing, was the condition Karol had touched upon – happiness woven into its opposite; that paradox of wars and revolutions when the heart is so inflamed it gives birth to entirely new emotions. Terror-bliss. Grief-lust. Tender, sentimental hatreds. In Hungary that year, the year the Russians came back, as many as three thousand lost their lives and thousands more their liberty. Yet those who had been there – most of them – were glad of it, proud of their effort and their sacrifice. They had played their part: history had not caught them unprepared. And while nothing could compensate them for the loss of their country and their friends, the remembrance of those October and November days was an article of faith.

But for László, this was not the case at all. How could he look back when there was only shame to look back on? What pride could he take in consummate failure? No. He did not want to remember. He wanted to forget. To forget for ever. Yet each year the effort of it was suddenly inadequate, and the past overwhelmed him, though rarely so thoroughly as during the previous winter when, with much reluctance, he took part in the fortieth anniversary celebrations in Paris. He had always managed to avoid these get-togethers, taking care to be out of the city, and telling whoever bothered to ask that he was allergic to nostalgia. But on this occasion he had received too many pressing invitations to have stayed away without causing offence, and so he had gone with Kurt in the Citroën to Père Lachaise cemetery to stand at the empty ‘grave’ of Imry Nagy, and then on to the hotel by the Gare de L’Est where, between wedding receptions, the veterans had the use of the banqueting hall.

All around László were men and women in the vigorous last third of their lives, many of them with the manner and aspect of professionals, all of them highly respectable. Greying, a little overweight, dressed in suits and dresses from French department stores, these were the freedom fighters who had flung Molotov cocktails into the engine grilles of T-34s; who had fought pitched battles at the Corvin Passage, at Szena Square, and Csepel, and seen friends, fellow workers, neighbours slain in shell-bursts or mown down in a food queue by a passing armoured car. The stories they told, the same they must have been telling each other for decades, they told again as if for the first time, and with the earnestness of people who must explain the whole truth in a single charged anecdote, or risk losing their dead a second time, burying them not in earth, but in silence.

‘Jancsi was on Villanyi Ut when the tanks came. He lived for an hour. We didn’t even have a coffin for him…’

‘We found Éva by Szabadsag bridge. She was sixteen. She still had the gun in her hand. Someone had covered her face with a coat…’

‘Ádám was at school with me. We started work at Egyesült Izzó electrical plant on the same day. They arrested him in December at his uncle’s house. We never saw him again…’

At various points in the afternoon, László, who had intended to stay for half an hour, shake a few hands and get out before someone started reciting poetry, found himself embracing strangers who were now not strangers at all. A lawyer who had practised for thirty years on the boulevard Beaumarchais. A woman who had come up from Lille and who wore a Hermes scarf that did not quite hide the scar on her neck. A little silvery-haired fellow with a limp who worked as a mechanic in the Eleventh (he gave László a business card), and who made them laugh with his story about the Viennese woman who had given him two oranges at the refugee camp, and how he had carefully hidden one, not believing that such riches would ever come his way again. Many like that, until, under the weight of so much reminiscence, so much Palika brandy, László had at last told his own story, the story of Péter Kosáry. As he spoke he dried his face with the sleeve of his jacket, while the little mechanic who was listening to him – confessing him – had wept too, such was the largeness of spirit there among the flummery of the banqueting room, and he had hushed László (who was in danger of giving way to some kind of attack, an hysteria), saying, ‘No, no, my friend, you could not have saved him. You could not have saved him or you would have done it.’

But the logic of the answer did not comfort László, and through the following weeks, as the streets acquired their strings of Christmas lights, and Kurt decorated the apartment with evergreen and wrote out greeting cards, László had found himself traversing the immense grey fields of depression. He slept for fourteen, fifteen hours at a stretch. He had sweating fits and panic attacks, a particularly nasty one in the Métro at Odéon, so that he had to be helped from the station by a kindly tourist. Alarmed, Kurt arranged an appointment with Dr Ourahm, a consultant at the Salpêtrière, and László allowed the good doctor to take his blood pressure and shine a light into every orifice and listen for a full minute to the stutter of his heart, and finally to present him with a bill for two hundred and fifty francs and a prescription for Prozac. László paid the bill but dropped the prescription into the first bin he came to on the boulevard de l'Hôpital. He did not believe that pills could ever be the cure for those moments when life entered you with a loss you can never be reconciled to. But for Kurt’s sake he had forced himself to get up in the mornings and sit a few hours at his desk, and by acting like a normal man, one who was neither overly cheerful nor dangerously unhappy, he had discovered a certain peace of mind, and even a certain optimism that had teased him with the thought that it wasn’t all over yet, that his life, even now – perhaps especially now – might catch him unawares and show him the gate into a garden he had never walked in before, and where, as in the conclusion of a really satisfying story, everything would suddenly be forgiven. It was absurd, of course, but still…

He heard the toilet flush and glanced at his watch. One-twenty. It was time to start his own preparations for bed, but the remaining candle, what was left of it, the flame teetering on the wick, seemed to mesmerize him, so that he did not hear Kurt, on light feet, cross the corridor and lean into the room and remain there a few moments, looking with tenderness and concern at his lover’s back, and listening to him interrogate the air with a name he had sighed in his sleep for months.

12

TB lived in a modest building with a fake stucco frontage opposite a Domino pizza store in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. In the porch, Larry was greeted by a plump, conservatively dressed American matron. She had recently had her hair done and it shone at the tips with the weird blue of a food colourant.

‘Oh my God!’ she cried. ‘Oh my God! It’s Dr Barry!’

‘Delighted,’ said Larry, slipping into the doctor’s clipped anglicisms, an accent as bogus as T. Bone’s. He shook her hand. Was this Mrs Bone? He decided to follow Ranch’s example and call her Betty.

‘It’s like having Dr Barry in the house!’ she shrieked, leading him into the hacienda-style lounge and doing a mime of disbelief involving bracelets and fat brown arms. Ranch went to the bar and took down half a dozen bottles of liquor and a steel cocktail shaker, while Betty put out bowls of nuts and pretzels. On the whitewash walls of the room were inexpensive reproductions of eighteenth-century English paintings – Constable, Gainsborough, Reynolds – and a large framed award from the Institute of Adult Entertainment, the Blue Ribbon Award, for twenty-five thousand sales of a work called Lap Attack!

Larry wedged himself into a little chintz-upholstered armchair, wondering where the Jewish child he had met on the plane was, and hoping that she was happy in the arms of her father and would not grow up to resemble any of the people he was now in the room with, himself included. From somewhere out of sight came the sounds of an afternoon soap opera, a woman’s voice wailing, ‘You promised me! You promised!’

‘Is there a telephone I could use?’ he asked. ‘There’s a call I should make. Mother’s a bit poorly.’

‘Why, that’s just charming,’ said Betty. ‘You’re a good son, Larry. We have boys too, you know. Harold and John. They’re in business in Miami.’ She pointed to a row of elaborately framed photographs on top of the shiny black back of a Japanese piano. Grinning boys with crew cuts. Frizzy-haired teenagers leaning against an old Chevrolet. A wedding picture with one of the boys, Harold or John, beside an overdressed, utterly anonymous young woman. The pictures stood in the shade of a tall vase of exotic white flowers. The impression was of a shrine to the dead.

‘The Sunshine State,’ she said, and she went to the photographs and made imperceptible adjustments to the angles of the frames. Ranch put an arm around her shoulders and kissed her cheek with a loud smacking noise.

‘Betty’s the best.’

Larry nodded. The last of the dangerous drinks was beginning to take effect and seemed to be numbing out certain nerve endings in his spine. If the Thunderbird had been outside he would have excused himself and driven away before this gathering, this little ship of fools, sailed any farther into the grotesque. But the car was not there and he needed twenty thousand dollars or there would be no car, and not too far in the future, perhaps, no family to drive back to.

Ranch tapped him on the shoulder. ‘How about a tour of the studio before we eat? You up for that?’

‘I most certainly am,’ boomed Larry, in the magisterial voice of the doctor. Betty squealed with delight, while T. Bone, stretched out on a recliner chair, the demiurge on his leather cloud, smiled beatifically, and made certain weary movements with his hand, as though blessing them.

Larry trailed Ranch across the drive to the garage. The air temperature had reached into the eighties, and the light, surrounded by shadows of impenetrable blue, trembled on the corners of windows, on hub-caps, even on the white flowers of the jasmine that had twined high around the drainpipe at the corner of the house. In the bathroom of 2714, Ranch had been favourably impressed by Larry’s still-athletic physique. He was softer than he had been, of course, was beginning to round out, so that in a few years, he thought, he would start to look almost womanly, but his body, despite his increasingly attritional lifestyle, had remained astonishingly loyal. He had depended on it so long, the excellent physical basis of himself, that it was hard to imagine how he would continue if it should fail him. He dreamed sometimes of a catastrophic collapse, some disaster like the amputation of a leg, or face cancer, or elephantitis. He did not believe he was someone who could ‘deal’ with such an event, the type who would ever be ennobled by suffering. At thirty-six (was this not one of the defining neuroses of the age?) he had begun to fear getting old, and could not share Kirsty’s vision of benign elders dispensing wisdom to the young and pottering around, glamorously weathered, like Fonda and Hepburn. He thought he would make a wretched old man. But he also wondered whether he might not be a completely different person at fifty-five or sixty, and that what seemed so complicated now, the great Rubik’s cube of moral dilemmas, might, from the top floor of his life, seem to have been nothing but the fruit of a temporary confusion, and that he had spent his prime like one of those circus clowns who, on all fours, can give the impression of two midgets wrestling together.

Ranch unlocked the padlock on a steel side door into the garage. The air inside was surprisingly chilly. There were no windows. He flicked the light switches. ‘We like to keep it simple,’ he said.

The space ahead of Larry, illuminated now by six quietly fizzing fluorescent tubes, looked as though it were used for storing the salvaged remnants of a house fire, objects retained only until someone had the will to do away with them. A dozen spare and improbable costumes hung from a mobile wardrobe rail next to two mattresses covered with the type of plastic sheeting found on the beds of incontinent children. Other props included a square of mulberry-coloured carpet, an office desk and chair, a six-foot plastic palm tree and a hat-stand from which dangled, suspended by one of its eye sockets, a latex gorilla head. It was hard to imagine a space less conducive to the performance of a sex act, and the skin of Larry’s balls tightened at the thought of it.

‘We got lights and multi-track sound in the back. All the dubbing and post-production’s done on site. Al’s our man behind the camera. You’ll like him. Nadine’s the sound girl. Her sister’s the fluffer. That’s where TB sits.’ He gestured to the obligatory folding director’s chair. ‘Fellini’s his big influence.’

‘And yours?’ asked Larry, fingering the inside of the gorilla head and feeling a slight tackiness as though it had recently been sweated in.

‘Marky Mark. Schwarzenegger. Sir Olivier of course. TB’s taught me to admire a lot of English stuff. Muffins and Shakespeare and all that shit. Can’t get my head around cricketing, though.’ He laughed.

‘Cricketing’s hard to get your head around,’ said Larry. ‘Have you ever been to England?’

‘Been to Mexico,’ said Ranch. ‘Hablas español, amigo?

‘Un poco,’ said Larry. Then on a whim he asked: ‘What’s T. Bone’s real name?’

Ranch studied him with an expression of mock amazement. ‘This is LA, Larry. Who gives a fuck about his real name? C’mon. I’ll show you my place. Get you fixed up.’

Ranch’s place was a single-storey annexe at the back of the main house. A sprinkler near by made the grass shine. On the doorstep of the annexe two girls sat in the shade of a bougainvillaea sharing a can of cherry Coke and a joint.

‘Yo!’ said Ranch.

The girls got to their feet.

‘Cool suit,’ said the one with the ring through her eyebrow.

‘This is Rosinne,’ said Ranch. ‘And this is Jo-babe. Say hi to Larry, girls. He used to be on TV more often than the weather.’

The girls shifted their gaze from Ranch to Larry, shamelessly assessing the magnitude of his celebrity. He knew already there would be no repeat of Betty’s transports.

‘I kinda recognize you,’ said Rosinne. ‘I think, like, my mom used to watch you. You going to make a movie here?’

‘It looks that way,’ he said.

‘Hey! You’re English,’ cried Jo-babe, approvingly. ‘Sick!’ She offered him the joint. He grinned at her, the lovely violet blankness of her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘Jo-babe.’

‘You’re welcome,’ she answered, in the voice of a cartoon character he was not familiar with. The others laughed. Then they all went into Ranch’s place.

The annexe, one-time hideout of Harold and John before they had gone to make their way in the Sunshine State, consisted of a single large bedroom and adjoining bathroom. There were three televisions of different sizes in the bedroom, a Burt Reynolds poster, a stringless Fender guitar, and a big soapstone Buddha whose lap served as an ashtray. The floor was littered with CD covers and magazines, a mix of comics and pom and fashion. Jo-babe aimed the remote at the music system in the corner. There was a pause, then the room filled with Nirvana, and she began to dance, free-form, stringy arms, stringy legs, sometimes hopping nimbly over Rosinne, who had flopped on to the floor to pool through the latest issue of PLEASE!.

Ranch sat cross-legged on the rumpled bed, a mirror on his lap with a picture of Bogart on it and the legend ‘Here’s looking at you, kid!’.

‘Don’t mention this to T. Bone,’ he said, dividing a little heap of powder into four lines, then leaning over his reflection to snort energetically through a length of McDonald’s milk-shake straw.

‘Not a word,’ promised Larry, hoovering up his line from Bogart’s hat and passing the mirror to Rosinne, who thanked him as mildly as if he had handed her a glass of milk.

‘Are these girls in the film?’ asked Larry.

‘These girls? They’re way too skinny,’ said Ranch. ‘We only use professionals. Cindy X. Selina D’Amour. Sasha Martinez before she went to rehab. A Chinese called Patty Wang. Maybe she’s Filipina. Then there’s Scarletta Scarr, who’s kinda my godmother. We use her if there’s any S&M stuff.’

Larry thought briefly of his own godmother, a woman called Penny who had been at teacher training college with Alice in the sixties. He asked: ‘Were you nervous the first time you did it in front of the cameras?’

‘No way,’ said Ranch. The mirror had come back and he had immediately begun to cut up another four lines, scooping the drug out of a plastic envelope with the corner of the razor. ‘I was born to do this kind of work.’

‘You never had an occasion when you couldn’t do it? Couldn’t perform?’

‘You’ve just gotta be professional,’ said Ranch. ‘Stay focused.’

‘Focused,’ repeated Larry, nodding.

‘Think of the money,’ said Ranch.

‘Money turns you on?’

‘Dumb question,’ replied Ranch, grinning. ‘Hey, didn’t Dr Barry fuck everyone at Sun Valley?’

‘Not on camera,’ said Larry.

‘You’ll be great,’ said Ranch. They paused to take the coke. When Larry had given the mirror to Rosinne, Ranch put a finger to his lips, winked, and said quietly: ‘C’mon, I’m gonna show you something. Put your mind at ease.’

For the second time that day Larry followed Ranch into a bathroom. This one had bulbs around the mirror. Unflushed pee glittered in the toilet bowl, and the air smelt of patchouli oil and smoke. Ranch turned to the wall-mounted medicine cabinet behind the door, opened it, and took from among the array of vitamins and painkillers, a small carved wooden box of the kind you could buy in any Chinatown.

‘My little box of tricks,’ he said, unhooking the catch to show two compartments containing small coloured capsules, a dozen or so on one side, perhaps half as many on the other.

‘Sex and death,’ he added, cheerfully. But his face, as he gazed into the box, was no longer boyish. There was a haze of fatigue, like a sediment suspended in his skin, suggesting to Larry for the first time what it cost Ranch to go on being Ranch.

‘Wow,’ said Larry, looking at the capsules. ‘Which is which? They look the same.’

‘Now that would be too crazy,’ said Ranch. ‘These ones with the red at the bottom and blue at the top will give you a hard-on you could swing a piano from. And these little critters with the blue at the bottom, they put the lights out. I mean, for ever. Kaput. Hasta nunca. Leaves no trace in the body. Nothing anyone could find.’

‘You’re kidding,’ said Larry. ‘That’s bullshit.’ He found himself laughing, a little drunkenly.

Ranch shook his head. ‘More things in heaven and earth, Larry, than you ever fuckin’ dreamed of. I got them from a doctor in Vegas who wanted to do some voodoo with a girl I was seeing. You know what doctors are like.’

‘Have you tried one?’ asked Larry. ‘I mean one of the sex ones.’

‘Never needed to,’ said Ranch. ‘It’s just nice to know they’re here. Insurance.’

‘They could be anything,’ said Larry. He wanted to touch them.

‘Could be.’ Ranch closed the box and put it back in the cabinet. ‘Maybe I should throw them out before some chick takes one for period pain. The thing is, I like the idea of them. You know what I mean?’

Larry nodded. He knew.

‘Hey, you’ll be great,’ said Ranch, putting an arm around Larry’s shoulders and gently leading him back into the bedroom. ‘You’ll be beautiful.’

13

When László was a boy, going to bed had been a matter of swilling his mouth out, stripping down to vest and shorts and jumping as quickly as he could between the sheets beside his brother János. Sleep would come to them in the music of the drains from the upstairs apartments and the rattling of the trams on Szechenyi Rakpart. Now, his elaborate couché was an ever expanding chore that required a good fifty minutes of light physical labour in the bathroom, and which began with what the doctors liked to call ‘moving the bowels’. For quarter of an hour he would sit on the wooden O reading crinkled copies of Void magazine, or frowning at Marcello Mastroianni smoking on the old film poster for La Dolce Vita on the opposite wall, and then inspect the resulting mess (wondering sometimes if there were not millions of men at that moment peering anxiously or even with pride at their own shit) for any ominous signs of inner bleeding. His father had died from cancer of the colon.

Satisfied that his insides were functioning as they should, he would move on to the basin and the large bevelled mirror to start work on his teeth. It was only in his forties that he had begun to put his crooked, tobacco-stained teeth in order, entering, in a fit of vanity or self-consciousness, the painful and overpriced world of crowns and laminate veneers, extractions, root work and novocaine. Between 1978 and 1981 he had spent entire afternoons in the jet-fighter seat of Monsieur Charass, whose masked and looming face had become one of the permanent props of László’s dream world. When László left the surgery for the last time he had possessed a set of teeth, some his own, many not, that seemed to have been stolen from someone much younger, and which he secretly thought of as ‘American teeth’, still having old-fashioned ideas from his boyhood about American vigour and dollar-beauty.

His face presented a more stubborn problem. There was no Charass to take away the crimps and sunbursts of his skin, but Kurt (that marvellous boy!) had introduced him to the world of anti-ageing creams, and László had immediately become a devotee, even something of an addict. These small expensive pots peddled by elegant women in the Gallerie Lafayette, women whom it seemed were required to wear on their faces a sample of every cosmetic they sold, contained such dreamily improbable ingredients as jojoba oil, pro-phosphor, concentrated line-lift serum. His latest buy – he had been drawn to the counter by a picture of a girl with a complexion of humid alabaster, and a poster exhorting him, somewhat drunkenly he thought, to ‘Forget Time!’ – promised to deliver pure oxygen molecules directly to the cells of his skin via the Asymmetric Oxygen Carrier System.

In his first enthusiasm, these creams had seemed to László one of the western world’s most seductive achievements. He had even claimed, in a not entirely flippant essay for Le Monde, that it was precisely such a product, fruit of a playful science, that had made communism untenable and helped bring about the collapse of its empire. Who could care about collective agriculture, presidiums, space labs or Five Year Plans when the face of everyone over thirty looked so withered and unloved, while those on the other side of the curtain could rehydrate and nourish their skins with luxurious creams? Wasn’t that what we feared about time, about death, its assault upon our vanity, the grinding out of whatever measure of physical loveliness we had enjoyed? How much more effective it had been, this creative narcissism of the West, than all the Minutemen missiles or the corruption and stupidity of the Party stooges. True, the lotions, teased into his skin with gently circling fingertips, had not made him look any younger, but he was convinced they had retarded the process of decay, protecting him a little from gravity and toxic air, from the effects of too much smiling or frowning, even perhaps from that scourge of all faces: guilt.

The petit four of this banquet of self-attention was a dab of Aqua di Parma, a perfume once used by both Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant – quite reason enough for any lesser mortal to indulge. The bottle had been given to him as a parting gift by Guilleme Bernadi, producer at the Teatro Argentina in Rome where they had put on Flicker in the spring of 1995, and the scent, with its tones of honey and sherbet, unfailingly reminded László of the night tour in Guilleme’s Spider soft-top, Beatles tapes on the cassette, warm Roman air, real southern air, blowing over their faces as they turned down streets so narrow and crowded with 2 a.m. revellers he had had the sensation of driving through the midst of an endlessly extended open-air restaurant.

He held up the bottle. It was still two-thirds full. Enough, at a dab a night, to last him into his dotage, when perhaps the middle-aged Kurt, portly and balding, would push him around the apartment in a wicker Bath chair, and all his past life would have become like the events of a single afternoon, in which much had been done, but little, nothing at all perhaps, achieved. His did not underestimate his work, his hard-won craftsmanship, the pleasure it gave, but increasingly it felt like something he did in order to avoid doing something else, a forty-year displacement activity, and he wondered, leaning into the mirror to watch himself think, what the true currency of human success might be. Certainly it had nothing to do with prizes, reviews, his photograph in a newspaper – it was extraordinary what little difference such things made. Neither was it a matter of figures, like the number of francs you had, or happy days, or friends at your funeral. And love?

Loving, you would not die of utter loneliness like a dog at night in a field. But love was too arbitrary. It was mere good fortune. A cloudburst. Any number of base and useless people were capable of it. Hitler had loved his Eva. Stalin, too, must have loved somebody once. No. We needed to be weighed more carefully than that. So what better than those sudden tests of worth and courage for which there was no preparation other than your entire preceding life? Those moments when you must step forward from a line of silent faces and declare yourself; say yes when the others say no; run back into the burning house without the least hesitation. Or just ask a question, like little Sandor at school on Ulloi Ut, who stood up from his desk and asked the teacher why it was necessary for certain pages in the history books to be glued together. In such moments you could fail beyond your wildest dreams. Or succeed, of course. There was that too.

He touched the precious drop of scent on to his neck, tied his robe and left the bathroom, shuffling in Moroccan slippers along the corridor to the bedroom. He grinned to himself, lugubriously, at the thought of the Bath chair. The twilight of a passionate dilettante! It was not much to look forward to.

In bed at last, in the warm lamplight, Kurt’s gentle sleep-breath the most peaceful sound in the world, László lay back on the pillows, arms behind his head, and tried again to remember the name of the English football captain. Billy? Could ‘Billy’ be a family name in England? Mr Billy? He had visited London four times, all theatre visits. He found the city somewhat troubling. Eerie and exhausting. This time he would ask his hosts to take him on a little visit to the country. He had looked at a map recently in Galignani’s and seen the most extraordinary place names. Leek! Sheepwash! He would pick out a name at random and insist on an excursion. Perhaps his young translator would drive him. They would go on what Edith Wharton used to call a ‘motor-flight’, and stop every hundred miles for tea and cakes.

The phone was on László’s side of the bed. When it rang he was so startled he knocked over the glass of water on the bedside table as he snatched at the receiver.

‘Monsieur Lázár?’

‘Yes?’

‘I am sorry to call you so late. I tried to call you earlier but without success.’

A voice with an accent. A voice faintly familiar.

‘Who is this?’

‘We have met before, monsieur. At the university. We discussed the situation in the Balkans. Perhaps you remember?’

‘Wait,’ said László, ‘I’ll take the call in my study.’ Kurt was awake. László smiled at him. ‘Its nothing,’ he said. ‘Sleep. Dream of fish.’

In the study, he crossed the unlit room, switched on the desk lamp and picked up the extension. He knew who it was now: Emil Bexheti, leader of an Albanian students’ group at the Sorbonne. A young man born for conspiracies.

‘I’m here,’ said László.

‘I am disturbing you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I will be brief, monsieur. I wish for an opportunity to talk with you again. Somewhere in private. Not, I think, at your apartment. Or mine, of course.’

‘And this must be arranged at two o’clock in the morning?’

‘You received the new faxes, monsieur?’

‘No. Yes, perhaps. I haven’t looked at them. You want to talk about the Balkans again?’

‘I would be honoured if you would agree to meet with me.’

‘May I ask why me? Why in particular?’

‘We think you are a friend of justice.’

‘“We”?’

‘You know what it is to have an oppressor in your land. To be ruled by force. By fear. You know what it is to see…’

‘Enough of this!’

‘We respect you, monsieur.’

‘Not enough to stop you calling me in the middle of the night. Are there no Balkan professors you can wake up? What about Dr Kelmandi?’

In the background, László could hear another voice, a man, older, speaking with hushed, rapid authority. Not French. Presumably Albanian.

‘I apologize, monsieur. But if you look at the documents I have sent you will understand our urgency.’

‘Who are you speaking for? The students? Or someone else?’

‘May I believe that you will meet with me?’

‘You know where my rooms are at the university. I have no objection to seeing you there.’

‘Thank you, monsieur, but not at the university. You will be contacted again in a few days with the name of a safe place. Goodnight, monsieur. I am sorry. Goodnight, monsieur.’

The line went dead. László replaced the receiver and stood in the green light thinking of the room somewhere in the city where Emil Bexheti and the others were gathered to make their plans, their late night calls on behalf of the ‘We’. He decided to have absolutely nothing to do with them. They were quite capable of making trouble, precisely the kind of trouble the Garbargs probably already suspected him of. He yawned, stretched and was about to turn off the lamp when something on the floor between the two desks caught his eye, and he reached down to pick it up. It was the napkin in which he had carried the gun from the dining room. He looked about for a few moments but there was no sign of the weapon and he knew it had gone. For a night at the end of May, the study seemed unseasonably cold.

14

Cutting coke on Jo-babe’s belly, Ranch used a credit card rather than a razor. She lay very still on the bed, her T-shirt bunched up under her little breasts, the lines organized around her belly button like long white scars. On the other side of room Rosinne was putting a new CD into the jaw of the music machine.

‘No more Bjork,’ called Ranch. ‘She’ll make us crazy as she is.’

‘I like crazy,’ said Rosinne, but it wasn’t Bjork, it was the King in full sail singing America’s Favorite Yuletide Melodies.

‘Inspired choice,’ said Larry, who stood by the window working with his tongue to loosen a piece of meatloaf trapped between his front teeth. Lunch had been an hour in the sunlit dining room of the main house, where there were more pictures of Harold and John, the lost boys, and several piles of shiny unlabelled videocassettes. Betty, her charm bracelets jangling, had brought in the meatloaf, the peas and potatoes, and after that some odd approximation of an English steamed pudding with scoops of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, mocha flavour. As a courtesy to her the men had not talked business at the table, but when she cleared away the bowls and put the coffee on – the swing-door to the kitchen bringing gusts of another soap opera – ‘…I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you kids…’ – TB had produced a folded single-sheet photocopied contract from the breast pocket of his shirt, and slid it over the table to Larry.

‘The grisly formalities,’ he said, winking.

Larry scanned the contract. ‘Who are “Southern Enterprises”?’

‘I,’ said T. Bone, ‘am Southern Enterprises.’

‘I thought it mighta be the Mafia.’

‘You wag,’ said T. Bone.

‘And I get the first five on signature?’

‘In a lovely fat envelope that only we will ever know about.’

‘What about Cindy X and Selina D’Amour and the others. Do I meet them before we shoot? It would be nice, you know, to talk to them. First.’

‘My dear Larry,’ said T. Bone, helping himself to another triangle of foil-wrapped cheese that seemed, like much of the meal, to have come from some museum of food, ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. The important thing is to keep yourself in tip-top condition. We want you looking sleek as a young seal. Our productions should exude a sense of optimism. No bags under the eyes, please. Ranch knows all the tricks.’

So Larry had signed, and after coffee he and Ranch had been excused like children to go back and play in the annexe. The ‘fat’ envelope was produced, and Larry made his goodbyes, kissing Betty’s hand and treating her to the doctor’s penetrating pre-diagnosis stare. She blushed, deeply.

‘Oh, Larry,’ she sighed.

‘Adieu, Betty.’

He knew that one of them was mad.

Close to, Jo-babe’s seventeen-year-old belly was a thing of wonder, the taut surface finely atremble with the jelly and clockwork of her guts. Larry leaned down and sniffed a line through one of his new hundred-dollar bills; then, with the very tip of his tongue, he licked the stray grains of powder from her skin and nuzzled the head of a tattoo lizard that peeped from the waistband of her jeans. He wondered whether he would have sex with her, whether indeed he was supposed to, so that Ranch, presently watching a hand-held TV with a screen the size of a playing card, could examine his technique, offer advice on angle, thrust control, that special grunty kind of porn fucking.

The King was doing a South Seas steel-guitar version of ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’. Larry got up to dance with Rosinne, who looked sulky and puffy-eyed, aware perhaps that this wasn’t the life Santa had promised her as a little girl. She leaned her head against his chest and they shuffled round together, his hands pressed against her back, her breath moistening a patch of blue cotton above his heart.

‘Snoo-ow o-on snooooww…’ sang the King, accompanied now by a choir of children and a Detroit brass section, his voice rolling like a big sea, wave after wave of tremulous emotion, an irresistible, heartbreaking, nonsensical bawling. They danced with Rosinne’s bare feet on Larry’s shoes. She was so light he didn’t think she could weigh much more than Ella. She had her arms around his neck. He held her very close, sliding one of his hands up her back where her skin was slick with heat as though she were running a fever. Once upon a time he had danced like this with Kirsty, the two of them leaning into each other like a pair of exhausted brawlers, those days of courtship at her father’s place in Lemon Cove when he could not look at her without wanting to touch her, could not touch her without needing to lie down with her, and like some slouch-mouthed movie star had called her ‘baby’ and ‘honey’ and ‘sweetheart’. On occasion – he had not dreamed this – the mere sound of his voice had made her flinch with pleasure as though he had stroked the denim between her thighs. So how on earth had he got from there to here? What was this tangle between them, this knot of ravelled emotion? It was pathetically distressing to him that he did not make love to his wife any more when he could recall so clearly the nights he used to plunder her, that look of insane concentration on her face, her arms flexed against the head-bars of their iron-framed bed, pushing against him with all her might as though she could never have him deeply enough inside of her. How had he got from that to this? From his wife to teenage coke fiends. From Kirsty to Scarletta Scar?

‘…iiin the bleeeek mid win’eer… la-A-ang agOOOOO!’ sang the King. Rosinne snuffled and turned in the cradle of his arms. He kissed the top of her head then gently released her, sliding out from beneath her feet.

‘Got a phone in here, Ranch?’

‘Under the bed,’ said Ranch, pointing, but not looking away from the little screen where people very slightly larger than horseflies were doing things to each other. Jo-babe was still on the sheets, contorting herself in a doomed attempt to reach the last line of the drug on her belly. Larry searched under the bed. A Hemingway novel. A copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. A strip of passport photographs showing Ranch ten years back, grinning in a booth somewhere in America Profunda. Also a purple telephone of aerodynamic design with four yards of grey wire connecting it to the socket. He took the phone into the bathroom, slid the wire under the door, then shut the door against the King’s slacks-and-rocking-chair cover of ‘Stille Nacht’.

He had expected Alec, but it was Alice who answered.

‘412…’

‘This is Ground Control,’ said Larry, but Alice, her voice still wrapped in the heavy velvet of sleep, continued her recital of the number.

‘It’s me, Mum. Larry.’

‘Hello dear,’ she said. ‘Ça va?’

‘Did I wake you?’

‘It’s still dark,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry. I was going to talk to Alec.’

‘Oh, Alec,’ she said. ‘He does his best.’

‘I know,’ said Larry. He had the receiver wedged between his shoulder and his ear, the body of the phone in his left hand. With his right hand he opened the medicine cabinet.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Not too bad, dear. I haven’t gone mad or anything like that.’

‘Of course not.’ He unhooked the little brass catch on the box. The lid popped up. He could hear very clearly the long drag of his mother’s in-breath.

‘There’s so much to think of,’ she said. ‘Hard to know where to begin.’

‘I’ll be with you soon,’ he said, holding a red-and-blue capsule up to the light and squinting to see the tiny grains of chemistry in it. ‘And Ella too.’

‘Kirsty’s a good girl, Larry.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she there?’

‘She’s next door.’

‘Come soon, won’t you, dear.’

‘I wish I was there now.’

‘I know, dear.’

‘Go back to sleep, Mum.’

‘You too, dear.’

‘Sweet dreams.’

A sigh. The phone went down. Larry shut the little box, closed the medicine cabinet and wrapped the pills in a sheet of tangerine toilet paper, before slipping them into the envelope with his money.

‘Who wants a piece of the doctor?’ he said, coming back through the door into the big swirl of the King’s music, but the others had their eyes fixed on more private horizons, and no one answered him.

15

There was a room under the stairs they called the workshop, though like the playroom where no one played any more, it was many years since anyone had worked there. Stephen had used it for repairing his clocks, or, when his hands were not steady enough, for drinking. Some of the gear was still there – the Formica-topped bench and the Sherline lathe – and even after so long the room seemed to have preserved a faint tang of cleaning ammonia and solder, so that Alec could never go in without for an instant seeing the shadow of his father’s back, the air like a sheet on which the print of the sleeper was still visible, a fragile outline that time would eventually smooth out to make the absence perfect.

Above the bench, loops of black flex with bulb sockets at eighteen-inch intervals hung from a steel hook. He unslung the flex and searched in the cupboards for the coloured bulbs, which he found, blue, red, green and yellow, neatly stowed in their corrugated boxes. These were the party lights, and though there was not the slightest need for him to test them tonight – it was another three weeks before Alice’s birthday – he let himself follow the promptings of the moment without question or analysis. He knew when the bulbs had last been used: Alice’s retirement party ten months ago, and the bulbs’ little skullcaps of dust confirmed that they had not been touched since. How well she had seemed then! Allowing herself a measure of optimism, a bullishness the family had been quick to share in. There were plans to travel. France, of course, particularly her beloved Brittany; but she had also sent off for brochures on the Far East and India, and in a short impromptu speech in the orchard at the beginning of the party, she had announced her intention to spend more time, much more time, in California, with Larry and Kirsty and her granddaughter. Among her retirement presents from the school there had been a smart leather holdall, airline carry-on size, and of all the gifts she received that day, none had delighted her more. It had been used, thought Alec, three or four times. Only once to America. Not quite enough to lose its bloom of newness.

He sat tailor-fashion on the concrete floor of the workroom, moving the flex through his hands and patiently screwing in the bulbs, careful to keep the colours in sequence. The party had been a success. Nearly all the staff from the school had attended, including Alice’s doting secretary, Mrs Dzerzhinsky. The neighbours, Judith and Donald Joy, lawyers who liked to wear white, had strolled over from their thatched cottage, the roof of which, topped by a pair of straw squirrels, could be glimpsed from various parts of Brooklands’ garden. And Osbourne was there, paper plate clutched at chest height, moving his bulk among the guests like a flightless bird – benign, myopic, faintly comical.

In a wet month they had been fortunate to have a balmy evening; real southern air that people said excitedly was like Tuscany or the Cote d’Azur. The women in summer frocks showed off their tanned arms; the men hung their jackets from the branches of the trees. Alice, tipsy on wine, slightly hoarse from too much talking, held court at the end of one of the trestle tables. Everyone knew what she had been through the previous year, events referred to as her ‘close shave’, ‘that nasty business’, or even ‘when she was away’, and they were determined to show their pity and their affection. Mozart and Rodriguez and old-time jazz played on the ghetto-blasters, and there was a barbeque, a kind of brick altar, at which Larry presided, flipping steaks and searing tuna, sometimes with Ella on his shoulders, until Kirsty, fearful that the smoke would bring on an asthma attack, had reached up to rescue her.

The first guests left around midnight; a last case of white wine was brought out from the house. The late stayers made themselves comfortable on the unmown grass. Someone fell asleep under a tree and snored contentedly. Then everything was doused in a warm rain – the lights fizzled, a fuse blew, and amid much laughter people took shelter where they could. Alec found himself under the branches of an old cherry tree with Alice, just the two of them, listening to the splashing of the rain on the leaves.

‘Promise me something,’ she said, breaking the silence between them. ‘If I get ill again you won’t let me die gaga.’

‘But you’re not going to get ill again,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’

She turned to look at him, though to each the other’s face was no more than a shadow, the obscure locus of a whispering voice. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’ve spoken to Larry.’

‘Larry? What did you say to him?’ He was furious with her, but then the rain, as in Tuscany or the Côte d’Azur, ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and someone called, ‘Where’s Alice hiding? Come out, come out wherever you are!’

‘It’s all right,’ she said, touching his arm, and she left him. ‘I’m here!’ she sang. ‘I’m he-re!’

Larry fixed the fuse. Everyone cheered when the lights came on again. The party had a new lease of life. Mr Bajrami, who taught maths, performed an impromptu flamenco with Miss Lynne, who taught art. Larry dispensed nightcaps from a large bottle of Black Label he had bought at duty-free in San Francisco. Alice told a risque joke about two nuns on holiday in Paris, a joke Alec had heard her tell once a year for as long as he could remember. The last car door clunked shut just as the light came up, the dawn mist drifting off the fields.

‘Bye-bye, Alice. God bless. Marvellous party!’

Carrying the coiled flex over his shoulder, the extension lead in one hand and the storm lantern in the other, Alec mounted the three mossy steps from the terrace to the lawn, then crossed the lawn to the wooden gate that led into the orchard. There had been an orchard here for perhaps three hundred years, if the first trees had been planted when the house was built. The present trees were shaggy with lichen, and despite pruning some gave fruit only one year in three. But the fruit they did give, small and hard and tart, was, for Alec, the true taste of an apple, and he never bought apples in London, however sweet or polished they looked on the supermarket shelves.

He walked to the centre of the orchard, set down the lantern and lifted the lights from his shoulder. There were four trees, well spaced, which served as the posts from which the lights were always hung. He began to work, securing the bulb at the end of the flex in a nook just above his head, then walking backwards, paying out the flex until he reached the second tree, then backwards again to the third and fourth, before connecting the flex to the extension lead and running the lead to a socket by the wall. He was crouched there with the plug in his hand when he heard the ringing from the house. In the instant of hearing it he thought it was the alarm, and that he would not answer it. Then he realized it was the telephone and he sprinted across the lawn, blindly, reaching the kitchen just as the ringing stopped. He went to the bottom of the stairs. The call went on for perhaps two minutes, after which he heard the receiver returned clumsily to its cradle. He went up.

‘Larry,’ she said.

‘I was in the garden. Sorry.’

‘He’s coming soon,’ she said.

‘I couldn’t get to the phone in time. Sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No.’

‘Goodnight, dear.’

‘Goodnight. Mum?’

‘What?’

‘Goodnight.’

In the orchard he plugged in the bulbs. They worked perfectly, jewelling the dark as on so many nights in the past, nights even when Stephen was alive. The cat was back, caught in the glare as it hunted in the long grass. It froze, then leaped on to a water butt, leaped onto the wall, and away into the invisible. Alec returned under the square of lights, and after standing there a moment like a man who has entirely forgotten what he came for, he sank down with his back against one of the trees. He knew now, with a certainty that bordered upon relief, that he wasn’t going to manage. No labour of the intelligence, no artifice or soft voice could help him. Losing Alice would not be difficult, it would be unendurable, and something in him would simply not survive it. With the others he would have to go on pretending for a while, but out here there were only bats and stars to see him, and he took off his glasses, folded them carefully, put his head in his hands, and wept.

16

There was a moment sometimes, on waking, the moment before she remembered to be ill, when she felt almost normal. It reminded her of a scene she must have watched in an old film: the condemned man led out of his cell to be shot, but pausing in the courtyard to register the temperature and the light and whether or not it was likely to be a fine day, as if he would be part of it, as if it mattered. Habit, like that poor Burmese Orwell wrote about, stepping over a puddle on his way to the gallows, not wanting to get his feet wet. Was that the last to go? Certain gestures, reflexes, a way of cocking the head or moving the hands in speech? Her own hands felt as if they would soon become too heavy for her, as though they were great paddles instead of fragile webs of bone and knotted blue veins. It was hard to keep her rings on now. They slipped off while she slept.

With a grunt of effort she sat up on the side of the bed, then leaned forward, a position that she found helped her to breathe. The room was fuggy. Too many flowers, too little air. She would open the window. After all, what did it matter if she caught a cold? And what if it became pneumonia? The old person’s friend, they used to call it, though she doubted there was anything very friendly about it, drowning in your own bed. But which of the doors out of this world was easy? Stephen smashed up in the Rover. Her father, his fingers yellowed from three packets of Woodbines a day, dying from something malignant and vague like disappointment or boredom. And now herself, this. Death blooming in her skull like a flower. A black tulip.

She turned to the window. There was nothing much to see, just the stealthy undermining of the sky. 3:51 said the clock, 3:52. Not long now.

At the second attempt she stood up. The world swung, then settled. Her feet found her slippers and she shuffled to the window, struggled with the catch, rested, struggled again, and finally got it to open. Was it night or day that washed over her now? She caught a whiff of the fields, the moor, the five-miles-off sea. Somewhere out there a car was driving through the lanes. She couldn’t see its lights, but the drone of its engine carried very clearly. Some man or woman with his own burden of happiness or confusion. Someone who knew nothing about her and whom she would never meet. Not now.

Her cigarettes (and a spare Ventolin inhaler) were in the blue pomander pot of Venice glass on the window ledge. Una knew that she had them there, but all she had ever said was to be careful not to have a flame near the oxygen bottle unless she wanted to blow the roof off. The idea was not without appeal. A great blue flash, a bang that would echo for miles, then no more nights to be sweated through. She took the lid off the pot and shook a cigarette from the pack, an ultra-light, a breath of fresh air she used to call them. They no longer gave her any pleasure but they gave her the memory of pleasure, and that was something. She flicked the lighter. The coughing on the first drag almost shook her off her feet. She used the inhaler, coughed again, then spat the bitterness into a tissue and pushed the window wider, letting the breeze slide like water over her skin.

Away to the right there was a glow above the orchard, almost as if there were a fire there, though the light was too steady for flames. She leaned and peered. A light in the orchard. What on earth was Alec up to? Was he outside still? At this hour? It was he, of course, who would try hardest to hold on to her. As a toddler he could not bear to have her out of his sight, following her around the house, even into the toilet, staggering after her, her little warder, her second-born, her baby. It pierced her that she could not spare him this, and a wave of tenderness went through her, followed by a sudden flush of self-hate in which she appeared to herself as a cronish, mean-spirited woman, who in the long enterprise of loving had failed those towards whom she had the most explicit duty. A mother was there to be devoured! (It was the hour for such strange thoughts: moths that only flew at dawn.) Not just her milk, but her bones and blood and brain. Had she kept something from them? Was that what Alec had come back for – to find what she had kept from him? To claim it? To eat up the last of her? She had a sudden startling image of them, Alec and Larry, in black suits like bank clerks, coming into the room and sitting by the bed, until shyly, tearfully, they reached beneath the pulled-up sheet to bite off a fingertip, an earlobe…

Ash dropped on to the bubbled paintwork of the windowsill and she carried her cigarette into the bathroom and doused it under the tap, careful to avoid the mirror there, for she too wished to remember herself differently. She sat on the toilet seat, panting, then crept back to the bedroom and eased herself between the sheets. Soon, the sun would break through the lower branches of the trees that grew alongside the drive. Already the first birds were beginning, single notes, tentative, as if their instinct for the light might be mistaken. She shut her eyes. For the first time in days she felt herself relaxing, almost a swoon. Now, she thought, now would not be a bad time; and once again she felt it, the sensation of an approach, the secret certainty that someone was moving towards her, distant still, but closer to her every hour, someone who would help her do it, who would know how to help her. It frightened her a little but she wanted him to come, and she opened her hands, thinking it would be best to be ready.