Oxygen

1

The Reverend Osbourne jogged over the grass in his mackintosh. The rain had caught him in the open, crossing the meadow beside the potato field and still three hundred yards from the shelter of the trees at Brooklands. The grass was sopping and seeds stuck to the cuffs of his trousers, but he couldn’t run any faster. He hadn’t the breath for it.

He had spent the morning at the hospital with Alice Valentine, who had suffered some manner of seizure on the previous Wednesday. It was Mrs Samson who had alerted him to it, though she had not been there when it happened, and didn’t seem to know how serious it might be. He had tried to call Alec, and when that hadn’t worked, had made enquiries of his own, finally tracing Alice to the ladies’ wing of a ward in the Royal he knew quite well. She was asleep when he went in, so he sat on the chair beside her and waited, feeling suddenly old and tired himself. They were almost the same age, and he had known her for more than twenty years, ever since Stephen’s accident when he had gone to the house to discuss the arrangements for the funeral, and had found a handsome, businesslike woman, a clear thinker, and someone rather brutally honest, telling him without mincing her words that her husband had been an alcoholic and that he had never had any time for religion, never found any consolation in it. He had promised her that the service would be brief and to the point, and that was how it was. A few words on Stephen’s work at the school, his politics (with which the reverend had some sympathy). A little of the old poetry from the King James. At the graveside, Stephen’s family had rather shunned her, but then she hardly seemed to notice them. A cold day. Frost in the shadows, and only a pair of yews to shelter them from the wind. She wore a plain dark winter’s coat with no gloves or headscarf. And though there was sadness in her eyes she hadn’t cried. Not there in front of them.

The boys had been with her, of course, and occasionally she stroked the younger one’s hair to reassure him. The other one, Larry, had taken it upon himself to be the man of the house, and though he couldn’t have been much more than thirteen at the time he did it extraordinarily well, shaking hands, putting people at ease. Everyone mentioned it. The gift of knowing what to do. You couldn’t teach people that.

Then afterwards, when the cars had gone, the reverend had found that he couldn’t stop thinking of her. Her stillness. Her pride. She would enter his mind at the most awkward moments. Raising the host at communion or marrying some young couple on a Saturday, his thoughts suddenly clouded with envy. For the first time in his life he had wanted something – someone – as much as he wanted God. That was what it amounted to. But he had been too cautious, too unsure of his ground, too concerned with the opinions of others. Afraid for it to be thought that he was taking advantage, a widow fresh in her loss, the earth hardly bedded down on her husband’s grave. So he had missed his chance – if, indeed, there had ever been a chance. For it was hard to think she could have been interested in him. A Blimpish priest. An old bachelor even then, in his forties, with his garden, his books, his slide shows of the Holy Land. What had he had to offer a woman like Alice? It was almost comical really. What possible advantage could she have found in loving him?

When she woke, startling him, he was not sure that she recognized him, not at first. Heaven knows what they had given her. Yet somehow they managed a conversation, though he had found it hard to follow the flight of her thinking, and after fifteen minutes the effort of expressing herself made her irritable and tearful. She accused him of coming to see if she was dead. She demanded to know where Alec was, why he hadn’t come, a question the reverend was at a loss to answer. But when it was time for him to leave (they were bringing in the lunch trolleys, those fiercely jolly women), she had not wanted to let go of his hand and so he had stayed standing by the bed until, quite unexpectedly, something revived in her, something of the old Alice, and she had smiled at him and said, ‘Go on, Dennis. Off you go.’

On his way out he managed to corner the ward sister, an enormously fat young woman called Shirley or Shelly, who assured him that in all likelihood Alice would be free to go home in a day or two. It was a decision for the consultant, of course, and he wouldn’t be doing his rounds until Monday, but there was no reason to suppose he would want to keep her in. This was the good news the reverend wished to pass on, in person, to Alec, though it was not the only reason for his visit to Brooklands. There was something else, difficult to pin down or explain; a nagging uneasiness that had found its way into the shadow play of his dreams, where among the scurryings, the unexpected faces, the sudden departures, he had had the sensation of an impending danger; and though the nature of the threat had remained obscure, he was convinced it had something to do with the Valentines, and with Alec in particular, and that as a friend of the family and a man of the cloth, it was his duty to try to do something. After all, Alec had had his difficulties in the past. That business a few years back when he had simply disappeared, until they found him, the authorities, somewhere on the South Coast, on a beach apparently, though the reverend had never been certain whether he was merely walking along the beach, or out towards the sea.

That morning, the third since his mother had gone into the hospital, Alec had woken with the idea of creating a refuge for himself in the unused summerhouse in the garden. Somewhere to go when the others came, a place to retreat to with the play. No one had used the summerhouse for as long as he could remember. It was Stephen’s folly, a glorified tool-shed with a single window, some shelving, a bench outside. Honeysuckle and ivy had grown thickly over the wooden walls and roof, and probably stopped the place from falling down.

On a hook in the hallway he had found a ring of keys with a paper tag inscribed ‘Garden’; one of the keys had turned the mortise lock in the summerhouse door, and he had stepped into an air, fungal and slightly sour, like old cider. His first job was to empty the place, and he began to carry out old paint tins and lengths of timber, jars of slug pellets and turpentine, and the delicate remains of field mice and butterflies. He scrubbed the walls, then broke the skin of paint in one of the tins and got to work with a wide brush, spattering paint on his jeans and wishing the summerhouse were much larger, so these tasks might last him for days, and there would be no time to brood on what had happened, to replay for the hundredth time the memory of Alice slumped in her chair on the terrace, a mouthful of tea slopping over her chin and falling in threads to her cardigan.

And if Una had not been there? This was unanswerable. How swift and calm she had been! And when the fits went on, that shuddering that seemed to require such a terrifying effort, she had sent him into the kitchen to call for an ambulance, which they had followed in her car while she explained to him that an attack like this was not unusual ‘in a case like your mother’s’; that she had half expected it, and he was not to be frightened. It nearly always looked worse than it was.

At the hospital they took her into A&E. He had a last glimpse of her as the porters wheeled her into an assessment ward, her arm already connected to a drip bag, her body covered to the neck in a red blanket. Una went with her, and another nurse pointed Alec towards a bench in the corridor opposite some posters about smoking, flu jabs, condoms. He sat down and waited, watching patients shuffle by in their dressing gowns, unshaven older men most of them, peering towards the exits as if still hopeful some friendly face would appear and tell them it was time to get dressed. A woman with a trolley of overused books hurried past, and several ill-looking doctors, younger than Alec, stethoscopes draped round their necks like sacred snakes. Behind the curtains to Alec’s left a child was crying and would not be comforted.

Weirdly, after half an hour, he had fallen asleep, perfectly upright on the bench, and was woken by Brando gently shaking his shoulder, and then leading him to a quieter, more orderly section of the hospital where he had his office, a plain, functional room, not at all grand, with Venetian blinds at the window, and on the desk a photograph of a young man receiving some honour or accolade.

‘You must have had a shock,’ said Brando, perching on a corner of the desk. He was beautifully dressed.

‘Yes,’ said Alec. He had not thought of it like this but it was true. He felt he had witnessed something savage, like a beating.

‘I’m fond of your mother,’ said Brando. ‘She’s a very courageous woman.’

‘I know,’ said Alec. He wanted to get this over with. He couldn’t stand the thought that he might make a fool of himself in front of this man. Might be offered a tissue from the box on the desk.

‘We’ll keep her in for a while. Perhaps persuade her to start a course of radiation therapy, though naturally, it’s her decision. I’ll give you a call once we’ve got her settled. Then you can come in and see her. How’s that?’

In the evening Una called at Brooklands on her way home. They sat in the kitchen as the light went down and she had tried to comfort him, hinting that she could arrange for something that might help him manage. A prescription. Tablets. She had even – very briefly – held his hand, as though inviting him to unburden himself, but though it had tempted him, he had not known where to begin, what form of words, and so had kept up an exhausting and imbecilic denial. ‘I’m fine now. Absolutely fine. Thank you.’

As soon as she left he masturbated in the downstairs toilet for the sheer physical shock of an orgasm, then slept, dreamlessly, curled on the end of Alice’s bed. In some reach of the night the phone had rung but he didn’t answer it. The next day he rose early, busying himself with small tasks, throwing out dead flowers, sweeping the terrace. He found a jar of beeswax and spent nearly two hours rubbing it into the dining-room table until his fingers ached. He made lists. Hand-washed a pair of his shirts.

When he could think of nothing else, he went out to the car and sat there with the keys in his hand, staring through the windscreen at shadows that hung like phantom laundry from the trees lining the drive. It was the same on Friday, though then he had gone out to the car three or four times, even starting the engine and letting it idle for a while before he switched it off again. In his head, time moved with the starts and silences of a faulty machine. He did not wind his father’s clocks and they began to chime more erratically. Some had stopped altogether. The house grew stiller.

Osbourne startled him, tapping on the glass of the summerhouse window. For a moment they peered at each other like utter strangers. Then Alec came out and they shook hands.

‘Have I come at an awkward time?’ asked the reverend. The rain had stopped, and on the shining lawn the bric-a-brac from the summerhouse was like a small exhibition illustrating the past. There was, for example, the type of old-fashioned Dutch hoe his father had used in the garden at Meer. The reverend silently greeted it.

‘I saw your mother this morning,’ he said. ‘Much more her old self.’

‘Did they say when she can come back?’

‘Not exactly. But not long. A few days, perhaps.’ He looked for somewhere to sit but the bench had puddles of rainwater on it, and there was nowhere else. He thought: how miserable he looks, poor devil. Shifty too.

‘Larry will be here soon,’ said Alec.

‘Splendid.’

‘The day after tomorrow.’

‘You’ll meet him at the airport?’

‘Yes.’

‘Heathrow, I imagine.’

‘Yes. The early flight.’

With his handkerchief, Osbourne cleaned the sweat from his face. He didn’t care for running. ‘And how are you?' he asked.

‘I’m OK,’ said Alec.

‘Keeping yourself busy?’

‘There’s a lot to do.’

‘Is there? I suppose there is. The house. The garden. Your work, of course. Making some progress?’

‘A little.’

‘Lázár, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve certainly heard of him.’

‘They didn’t say when she would be back, then?’

‘The doctor’s making his rounds on Monday. With a bit of luck he’ll give the green light then.’ The reverend nodded, squinting at things quite randomly. It was foolish of him to have come without a plan, and now he was unsure how to go on. ‘The thing about faith,’ he began, quietly addressing a spider’s web that glittered and trembled with raindrops, a thing of fabulous intricacy under the eaves of the summerhouse, ‘is that it doesn’t have to come all at once. Road to Damascus, et cetera. You can believe for a morning. Or an hour, if that’s all you can manage. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Sorry?’ said Alec.

‘All I mean is that saying a prayer can help. It’s very natural when things are difficult. Some people think it’s hypocritical because they don’t pray when things are going well. But it’s perfectly all right.’

‘Don’t you have to believe that it will make some difference?’

The reverend paused. ‘Perhaps not even that.’ He pressed his hair into place with the flats of his hands. ‘We’re not alone,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Alec, feeling as he spoke the weight of his conviction that quite the opposite was true; that aloneness was what lay at the beginning and end of every argument. ‘Do you want some tea?’ he asked.

‘That’s very kind,’ said the reverend, ‘but I’ve decided to plant out my arum lilies today. If I see your mother first, any message for her?’

Alec shook his head.

‘Righto. I’ll tell her you’re keeping busy, then.’

They looked at each other; a silence that made evident both the purpose and the failure of their conversation. Then they shook hands again and the reverend made his way towards the stile that led from the garden back to the meadow. He had meant to say a few words about how even the worst situations had something salvageable in them, that the picture was never entirely black. The important thing, however, was that the elder boy was on his way. Things would improve then, somehow.

He looked up. The clouds now were slashed with a blue as clean as starlight, and he smiled, feeling the grateful inhalation of his soul. It was hard to believe there could be any atheists in Somerset, and by the time he was halfway across the meadow, his coat flapping over his arm, he had quite forgotten his dreams.

2

The moment László set out for his meeting with Emil Bexheti he felt a constriction of the chest, as if on the previous evening he had smoked an entire tin of Havanitos rather than his customary two. The Paris air seemed thin and innutritious. It was like breathing through a straw and it began to worry him. He wondered whether it was the beginning of something.

In the science room of his old school, dissected organs, human and animal, had been preserved in sealed bottles for the instruction of the pupils. He was sure there had been a lung there, floating in its syrup, an object that looked to have grown on the side of a tree or on a submerged rock, and which even as a young boy he had found improbable as the organ that funded human speech and laughter. And from that same schoolroom, he could recall certain mysterious and exotic terms – alveoli, pleura, gaseous exchange – that meant almost nothing to him now. It was shameful that he had so little idea of what took place in the world beneath his skin, though it seemed inevitable that in the next ten or fifteen years he would undergo some manner of enforced education. He knew, for example, that the heart was chambered like a weapon, but were there two or three chambers? Four? Was the body entirely dark inside? Was there colour?

He paused outside the Air France offices on rue de Rennes, leaning forward a little in a posture that seemed to ease the intake of air. Don’t let me be old today, he thought. Today he needed clarity and vigour, a will unsapped by any thoughts of mortality, and he turned his mind once more to the meeting, and to the note he carried, which yesterday morning, or the night before, had been slipped in among his papers at the university. A single sheet of A4 in a brown envelope. Unaddressed, unsigned.

‘The café terrace at the Monde Arabe. Wednesday 1600.’

His first reaction had been to drop it into the wire tray on his desk – both his ‘in’ and his ‘out’ tray – where he collected all those matters he did not intend to look at for a very long time. There was work to do. His Hrabal lecture, a dozen postgraduate essays to wade through. But several times during the next hour he had reached for the note and examined it as if the message, which could hardly have been more blunt, more laconic, were somehow encrypted. Finally, with a grunt of impatience, he had screwed it into a ball and lobbed it into the waste basket on the other side of the room, only to fish it out a few minutes later, carefully fold it, and put it in his wallet next to the photograph of himself holding his mother’s hand outside the old house on Szechnyi Rakpart.

Back at the apartment – it was Kurt’s yoga night – he had held the note under the lamp in the study. He had, of course, been expecting something of the kind since the call the night of the dinner, but now that it had come he felt suddenly and unreasonably implicated, as if he had agreed to it all, even solicited it. He decided to destroy the note by tearing it into pieces so small it could not possibly be reconstructed (by whom? Kurt? The Garbargs, fingering the communal rubbish?). Alternatively, it might be wiser, more complete, to burn it in an ashtray, or even to flush it away in the toilet, though in the first case there would be the lingering odour of paper smoke, and in the second, he risked the reappearance of scraps of paper from the mysteries of the U-bend. The plumbing of the Fifth Republic – or in the case of his own toilet, possibly the Fourth – was good but far from perfect.

He had paced about the study, laughed at himself, read a paragraph from the previous days Libération (Kurt kept all the papers for recycling), then flicked through a dozen pages from the last draft of his latest work-in-progress, L’un ou l'autre. To be absolutely safe he resolved to throw the note away in a street bin a good distance from the apartment. People threw things away all the time. There could be nothing remotely suspicious about it.

He spent that evening with Laurence Wylie in a bar on the boulevard Ménilmontant, the same bar in which Franklin had acquired the gun from the policeman. She had quite obviously been drinking at home before coming out, and it did not take more than a glass of Ricard before she began to repeat herself. Franklin had not been keeping his appointments with the doctor. Franklin was mysteriously sick in the night. Franklin made ‘jokes’ about killing himself. Most recently there had been a row with the gardienne, Madame Barbossa, whom Franklin had accused of snooping. She probably was, said László. Snooping was part of her job. But Franklin had made the poor woman weep by calling her a ‘collabo!’ This to a woman whose father had died heroically in the street fighting of August ’44, saving his comrades, saving France. Naturally the neighbours had become involved. It was a miracle the police had not been called. László agreed it was a mess, a tangle, and had promised that he would have another talk with Franklin, though he drew the line at Laurence’s suggestion that he also talk to Franklin’s doctor, a German of indeterminate sexuality whose waiting room was always full of painters and novelists and dancers with their STDs, their imaginary brain tumours.

At midnight he walked her home to the rue du Deguerry, hugged her in lieu of any more substantial consolation, then caught the Metro from Parmentier. There were bins in the Metro station, bins on the street, but the note had remained in his wallet. He could not quite understand it, this sudden blossoming of the neurotic. Was it some old reflex of secrecy? After all, he had grown up with Rákosi and the ÁVH, where it was taken for granted that there were informers everywhere. But he had lived in France for forty years! Was it possible that the old instincts were so easily provoked? He was not convinced, and as he took the cage elevator up to his apartment, it struck him that he was acting like a man who had decided upon a course of action he could not yet justify to himself, as though reason – or what passed for it, those little narratives of self-justification – were loping behind his true intentions like an idiot.

Kurt was at home, standing in the kitchen in his underwear eating a slice of bread and honey. He demonstrated a new contortion from the yoga class. László passed on the story of Franklin and the gardienne which, in the retelling, lost its character of melodrama and seemed merely comic. They sat up a while, then retired to the bedroom and went through the preliminaries of love-making, but after twenty minutes, such was the laming effect of his secret, László, lying over Kurt’s back like the last survivor of a disastrous cavalry charge, was forced to admit defeat.

‘Too much wine,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Sleep,’ said Kurt, good-humouredly. They were old lovers now and failure was part of the repertoire. This was Tuesday night.

On the Wednesday afternoon, having decided he would walk to the Monde Arabe, László chose to come up the rue de Rennes on to the boulevard St Germain, rather than cut through by the Panthéon and run the risk of encountering colleagues from the university. At three-thirty the day was hot, the cafés crowded with gleeful Americans. Backpackers stared at maps, and outside the St Germain Métro the hurdy-gurdy man ground out sentimental tunes while his little dog slumbered in its basket. Walking, László rehearsed his speech to Emil Bexheti, which he would be at pains to ensure was neither too indulgent, nor overly stern. I am a playwright, my friend, and my function is to observe, and then to write as honestly as I can. That is all. Naturally I sympathize with your cause. But seriously, what do you expect of me? If it’s a matter of signing a petition, or even perhaps of writing to a newspaper, these things I am prepared to consider, though you should not overestimate my influence. Above all, do not ask me to meddle in other people’s business. Such actions, however well intended, end badly…

He imagined them concluding the meeting with glasses of mint tea at the terrace café, after which he, László, would go home and tell Kurt everything and they would laugh and open a bottle of Sancerre and put Puccini on, and life would go its way with barely a ripple. How simple it was! And this fiction comforted him for several minutes, almost as far as the tower of the Monde Arabe itself, which, standing by the river in its cladding of steel tiles – each with an aperture like a camera’s, narrowing or expanding according to the strength of the light – was, he conceded, an admirably theatrical choice for a rendezvous.

Inside, glass-walled elevators ferried the visitors to the library or to the roof, and László ascended in the company of an Arab scholar – a tall, bearded, effortlessly superior type – and two teenage Parisiennes who wore the kind of tight cotton camisoles that might have earned them a flogging in some parts of the world. (He himself, or course, in such stern theocracies, would not escape so lightly.)

Just after four o’clock he stepped on to the terrace. A dozen people lounged against the rail, while another twenty or thirty sat at the wooden tables. The interior of the cafe was almost empty. He stood for a minute in the middle of the terrace, then, feeling awkward, foolishly conspicuous, he found a space at the rail and took the view. Notre Dame, the ‘Genie de la Bastille’, and in the distance, shimmering in a smoke of exhaust fumes, Sacré Coeur, looking oddly like the space shuttle, its creamy dome targeted at the sky. On one side of him, an oriental girl recorded the scene on a digital camera; on the other, a pair of lovers gazed out as if from the deck of a liner towards the coast of a country they had once been happy in.

He waited fifteen minutes. The lovers drowsily departed. On the far bank of the river, some curious effect of sunlight and water made it appear that a torrent of molten fire coursed behind the first-floor windows of the houses on the quai de Béthune. He told himself he was relieved that it had turned out to be nothing, that this was for the best, and after a last look around, he took the lift again, crossed the courtyard, and waited at the corner of rue de Fosses for the lights to change. Next to him, a young man in a sports jacket also waited, pulling on a cigarette and staring ahead. They crossed together, and as they reached the other side the young man touched László’s arm with a gesture so slight it might almost have been accidental. It reminded László – awkward reminiscence at such a moment – of his few casual encounters in Paris in the years after he first arrived, days when blinded by an inassuageable loneliness he had gone with strangers, using lust like a hammer to smash at the tenderness in himself.

‘Yes?’

The young man flicked the end of his cigarette into the gutter, where it span in the water among the fruit peel and the Métro tickets. ‘There is a car, monsieur. Please hurry.’

He walked ahead, and after a hesitation that lasted no more than three or four seconds, László followed him on to the quai de la Tournelle, where a grey Volkswagen was parked at the rear of the taxi rank. A second man, older than the other, more heavily built, leaned over to open the passenger door. László was ushered into the back seat and the young man sat by his companion. Two policemen in shirtsleeves strolled past, glanced at the driver, glanced at László, at the vehicle itself (which had a dent on the offside door), but kept moving, as if on such a warm afternoon it was much more pleasant to continue their conversation than stop yet another car with someone vaguely foreign at the wheel.

‘Where are we going?’ asked László.

‘Not far,’ said the younger man.

They pulled out into the traffic, driving fast where it was possible, but never too fast. László leaned back, staring out at the city, its public beauty. As they went west along the river, past Pont Neuf and the Musée d’Orsay, he tried to prepare himself, marshalling arguments and defences, rebuttals to imaginary accusations. Am I afraid? he wondered. He thought that he wasn’t.

At the Pont de l’Alma they headed south and circled round until they were on the avenue Bosquet, driving back towards the river again. Then, with a lingering look in the rear-view mirror, the driver accelerated and turned hard into the kind of street László always imagined to be inhabited solely by homesick filles au pair and widows with lapdogs. A place with no bars or restaurants and which by 7 p.m. would be deserted, shut down.

They stopped fifty metres from the end of the road, and László followed his young guide through a passageway at the side of one of the buildings to where a flight of narrow stairs wound like an iron vine up a corner of the interior courtyard. Several times the younger man stopped for László to catch him up. ‘Please,’ he said, anxious now, as if he might fail in this, the last part of his task. ‘Please…’

At the top of the building they entered a corridor with walls barely wider than László’s shoulders. They were, he realized, in one of the city’s secret places, where doors with worn handles led into rooms where any kind of life might be lived, almost invisibly.

At the second door on the right hand-side, the young man knocked with the conspirator’s three quick taps. The door was opened by Emil Bexheti.

‘Thank you,’ he said, ignoring the young man and shepherding László into the room. ‘I was sure you would come.’

‘In which case,’ said László, still husky from the climb, ‘you knew more than I.’

The room was extraordinarily small, a chambre de bonne in the shape of a blunt wedge, almost directly under the slates of the roof. Stifling in summer, bitterly cold in winter. László had done his time in such rooms; he had not thought to see one again.

In the middle of the room were three chairs – two facing one – and along one wall a single bed with a sagging mattress, stripped bare. On the table beside the bed were an alarm clock and a cellphone. From one of the chairs a young woman in a black dress, her face so pale it seemed somehow scraped down, examined László with a coolness, a hauteur, he found almost intolerable.

‘This,’ said László, ‘had better be very good indeed.’

‘But that depends on you, monsieur,’ said the woman, sharply. Emil waved her to silence.

‘On me?’ László repeated. He took the chair opposite her, and as he did so he entered again, quite suddenly, that other room in that other house where men and women had come to have their parts explained to them, street maps spread over the table top, gunfire echoing across the wintry city. And now he knew he would be asked again, told what would depend on him, not by Feri or Joska, but by a young woman whose name he did not know, and who, however well informed, could not possibly understand the character of his need. He locked eyes with her and smiled – a little fiercely, a little sadly – and because she was unable to see the origin of the smile, its long roots, she was momentarily disconcerted.

‘Go on,’ said László.

And so they began.

3

There was a rumour, perhaps true, perhaps no more than a high-altitude urban myth, that passengers in economy received less of the piped oxygen than those in superior classes. Larry could not remember who had suggested this to him – it might even have been Ranch – but coming round from the slough of another mid-flight doze he was inclined to think the rumour had substance, for in happier days he had travelled on the other side of the mysterious curtain and thought he had indeed inhaled a richer mix and been the better for it. Pinker and more optimistic.

He knuckled his eyes and looked round for Ella, but her place beside him was empty; nor—turning and twisting in his seat – could he see her in the aisles. They had been allotted the middle two seats of four in the central section just to the rear of the wings. At one end of the row was an American college student on his way to summer school in Oxford, a young man with troubled skin who addressed Larry as ‘sir’. On the other side was a nun, an ethnic oriental, who had crossed herself and prayed audibly during the take-off from San Francisco, for which Larry had been grateful. Like most people he had only the haziest idea of how this communal defiance of gravity actually worked and believed that at least one person on the plane needed to offer up a prayer if they were to arrive in safety. He waited five minutes, then leaned over to ask her if she had seen his daughter.

‘Daughter?’ She spoke the word as though it were new to her, but she had evidently understood because she looked at the empty seat with real alarm, as if the child might somehow have tumbled out of the plane and fallen through miles of air into the unlit Atlantic.

‘I guess she wandered off while I was napping.’

‘We look for her,’ said the nun, decisively.

‘No, no,’ said Larry, ‘I’ll go.’ But the nun was already out of her seat. ‘My name Sister Kim,’ she said.

‘Larry Valentine,’ said Larry. He noticed that along with the more usual accoutrements – habit, beads, cross – she was wearing a brand-new pair of green-and-white sneakers blazoned with the Greek for victory.

They set off together, looking left and right along the gently vibrating body of the plane. Sister Kim stopped a passing stewardess, explaining to her, in an idiom all her own, that the gentleman had lost his little girl.

‘She’s an asthmatic,’ added Larry, hoping this would justify the presence of a nun.

‘Don’t worry,’ said the stewardess, in a voice sharply English, ‘she can’t get very far on a plane, can she?’

They went on as a party of three, just as the screens came down for the next film and the lights in the cabin dimmed. After a discreet check of the toilets, the stewardess consulted with the chief steward.

‘Does she have her inhaler?’ asked the steward.

‘Yes,’ said Larry, recalling that he had put it in the bib pocket of her dungarees as they waited in the departure lounge after a tense farewell to Kirsty, who had driven them to the airport and come as far as the check-in, crouching to hug Ella for several teary minutes. Larry had been somewhat offended, as if flying with him implied some imminence of danger for the girl. This, however, was not a good beginning.

On the screens, young women in Regency dresses were receiving a gentleman caller. Long-haul somnolence had seized most of the passengers. They gazed up, shoeless and weary. Some already wore the complimentary black eye mask and slept, or attempted to. There was little sense of any progress.

The search continued for another fifteen minutes; a man, a nun and two aircrew, processing in the aisles until at last they discovered the child on the top deck, wide awake in one of the unoccupied multi-adjustable seats in club class, apparently thinking. The steward and stewardess expressed amazement. How could she have got there without being noticed? But Larry knew that his daughter had several mysterious talents, and that not being seen by the coarse-grained gaze of adults was merely one of them.

‘You always stay with Papa,’ said Sister Kim, wagging a finger at the girl, though at the same time winking at her and then telling her how pretty she was.

Larry took Ella’s hand and walked her back.

‘You want to watch the movie, El?’ A horseman was riding through the rain, a shining black figure atop a shining black horse. But Ella preferred the colouring book she had been given in the child’s pack at the beginning of the flight, and she began filling in the patterns, her brow furrowed with concentration, as though colouring were a chore some authority required her to complete in a responsible manner for a purpose Larry was not privy to. The flora of her inward life was increasingly foreign to him. He could no longer be sure even of the fundamentals, such as whether or not she was happy, or at least content. Hoffmann’s view was that the trip would be good for her. A therapeutic encounter with a fundamental human experience. He liked, he said, his ‘little people’ to meet Mr Death and shake his paw. Kirsty had been in favour too, so Larry was overruled. But was it good for a child to be exposed to the events waiting for them in England? What’s wrong with Granny? Where’s Granny gone? No. He could not share Hoffmann’s faith in a child’s capacity for truth in the raw. Why should a child’s capacity be so much greater than a man’s?

Sister Kim was studying a book with photographs of other nuns in it. Her hands were small and careworn, working hands, and Larry wondered whether her heart were in the same condition, chapped and chaffed from the difficulty of having to love indiscriminately. He asked her if she would keep an eye on Ella while he went to freshen up. She said she would, and he took his blue leather wash bag from under the seat and made his way to the toilets, shutting the folding door of the cubicle and confronting himself in the mirror. The light in there was peculiarly unforgiving. He seemed to have acquired a grey tan, and even his hair, the brown-blond thatch to which the California sun gave threads of gold, looked ordinary and glamourless. From the shallows of his skin, an older, feebler man peered back at him.

He took a pee. Someone rattled the door. He badly wanted to smoke, but if the man who had lost his daughter were discovered endangering the flight and setting off the smoke alarm he would be met at Heathrow – another of his fantasies of imminent arrest – by social workers and transport police. He grinned at the thought of how Alec might deal with such a situation and, thinking of his brother, realized how badly he wanted to see him, and that in some way he was counting on him. What kind of shape was Alec in these days? Five, six years now since he had had his ‘wobble’ (Alice’s term), and had left full-time teaching at the comp in London. How serious had that been? Were doctors involved? He had never asked, because five, six years ago he was in San Diego doing promotion for Reebok and talking to Ray Lumumba about a part in Sun Valley. Ella had just been born, and Alec’s trouble had been like a reminder of everything he – Larry – thought he had escaped in escaping England, those Fates who naturally crowded into old used-up countries, and who had already sent his father into the dark. He had no clear idea how he and Alec were going to get through these coming weeks, what dread pressures would come upon them, but the fact was that soon now they would be orphans, a thought terrible and curious that pricked all manner of childhood anxieties.

Kirsty, whose own mother had died at forty-seven years of age when her Cessna spiralled into the Gulf of Mexico on a flight into Tampa, had made the mistake of trying to comfort him with a yard of undigested Zen the night he returned from LA. She had told him about Alec’s call, and then said, ‘You know, suffering comes from our inability to accept transience.’ And while he had accepted the truth of this, he had also known that her understanding of it was as feeble as his own, that she was pretending to a wisdom she had not earned, and it immediately sparked one of their sadder and more frenzied exchanges. In the lamplit kitchen, amid all the gleaming domestic hardware Sun Valley General had provided, they threw out remarks reckless of any consideration for justice or accuracy, a blind verbal lashing-out.

‘You want Ella to hear this?’ she had asked, when Larry, still fogged with the drink and drugs he had consumed at T. Bone’s, began to raise his voice. Hands on hips, a cartoon of the shrewish wife, she demanded to know what he had been doing in LA, and when she seemed, quite rightly, not to believe his heavily edited version of how he had spent the previous twelve hours, he had almost choked on his indignation. Her own life offered him little in the way of material for reproaches (he had come to think of this as a form of meanness) and, for lack of anything intelligent to say, anything pertinent, he accused her of carrying on with her guru, her Jap, Mr Transience, and for this, quite rightly, she had flung the remains of her OJ at him and walked out, pausing at the door to hiss: ‘I used to admire you.’

What was depressing was how quickly they could reach this stage, as if each had become specifically what the other could not tolerate, though on the following day he had apologized – a mute, somewhat cowardly apology – buying her a jar of her favourite black olives from Molinari’s on Columbus Avenue. He had left them on the breakfast bar and then spied on her from the hall as she fished them out of the oil with her fingers. It was the moment he might have gone to her – there were only three good steps between them – the moment he might have settled his hands on her shoulders and said the necessary things. But distances in a marriage – in his at least – were deceptive, and he had remained by the door, perverse and voyeuristic, watching his wife eat olives and slick her cheeks with grease when she pushed away a tear.

Someone tried the door again. ‘Later!’ called Larry. He was busy with the contents of his wash bag, turning them out on to the narrow steel shelf by the basin. Safety razor, multivitamins, deodorant, painkillers. Two spare canisters for Ella’s inhaler. A smoke-brown plastic bottle of Deroxat; five foil sheets of Xanax; a bottle of Luvox, a box of Paxil, a condom, nail-clippers, toothbrush, eye-drops, tweezers. He swallowed a Xanax and a Deroxat, and cleaned his teeth, then blew his nose, noting that his snot was streaked with blood from a last big line of adulterated powder woofed up from a CD cover in the spare room while Kirsty and Ella had waited outside in the Cherokee.

The blue-and-red capsules he had taken from Ranch’s cabinet were in a vinyl side pocket of the wash bag, still wrapped in the same sheet of tangerine toilet paper. He had not looked at them since that afternoon in the Valley, though he had often brooded on them, their nearness inspiring dark and melodramatic thoughts. There were three of them – one slightly larger than the other two. Sex and death. Or nothing at all, nothing but a crooked doctor’s invention, or some story dreamed up by Ranch to amuse the girls, so that even now he was down there in the annexe with Rosinne and Jo-babe, laughing at how the soap-opera guy had fallen for his spiel. Shoulda seen his eyes pop! Man, he just wanted to eat them right there!

Yet something in the sheer improbability, the fantasticalness of it all, suggested to Larry that the pills were precisely what Ranch had said they were, and that somewhere in Las Vegas there was a man with the necessary lethal knowledge to prepare them. But whatever the truth of it, this was the perfect occasion to be rid of them, right now, as they flew over one of those dwindling zones of the planet nobody pretended to own. Yet even as he imagined them spilling almost weightlessly from some duct in the plane’s gleaming underbelly, he was watching his hands carefully wrap them again and return them to their pocket in the wash bag. They were an asset he was not yet prepared to relinquish. Soon, of course, very soon. But not yet.

Going back to his seat, he watched the film continue its run on a score of angled screens. There were bonnets and carriages, and English hills of surpassing loveliness. The gentlemen frowned at each other and bowed, while the ladies waited for secret notes to be passed.

Ella, her colouring book on her lap, her crayon held in the tenseless curl of her fingers, looked as though sleep had caught her very suddenly. Sister Kim smiled and nodded. Larry thanked her. Her smile widened.

‘I know what you are,’ she whispered. ‘At convent we have television too, sometimes.’

‘Will you say a prayer when we land?’ asked Larry.

She said that she would. ‘Jesus is pilot,’ she said.

He laid a blanket over his daughter’s legs and reclined his seat. He was tired again, physically sluggish, but agitated by what seemed like a great backlog of thinking. He could not decide whether there were a great many decisions to be made, or none at all; whether his situation warranted some explosion of energy, some drama of action, or if he should simply wait and see; if indeed there was nothing he could do that would make the slightest difference. He could not save Alice – what manner of angel could? It seemed unlikely he could save his own marriage. And if that should fail, he did not, in all honesty, know if he would have the mettle, the knowhow, to save himself.

He took the earplugs from their bag and sealed off his skull from the sighs and little disgruntlements of his fellow passengers. He closed his eyes and made an effort to focus on transience, but it was too harsh a lesson. He was a child still, and like everyone else, with the possible exception of Mr Endo, he was swimming against the current and would be swept away. At the back of this was the spectre of an overwhelming loneliness, of a place where nobody would stay with you because nobody could. And this was what he was supposed to accept? Where was the comfort in it? What kind of courage did this letting go require? Clearly more than he had to offer. He would have to rely on quite different weapons – weakness for example – and, as he fell, not into sleep but into some parallel condition unique to the long-haul passenger, he began to imagine, and even to believe, despite the fact that in such a dearth of good air one could not entirely trust such ideas, that the last good road left open to him was failure itself. And this he decided to call hope.

4

The discussion in the little room lasted for over an hour. The window was closed – indeed, it looked to be sealed – and it was not long before they started to sweat and grow irritable. Emil, his beard shaved to the contour of his jaw, delivered a concise though thoroughly partisan analysis of Balkan politics, while the young woman, with her narrow skull, her high cheekbones, her face sloping back to the eyes, where the skin was slightly puffy and discoloured as if she were not quite well, a chronic insomniac perhaps, confined herself to asides about the international conspiracy of indifference that ignored those disasters it found unprofitable to address: the ‘no oil’ argument. László played devil’s advocate. When Emil asserted that the Albanian people, in the guise of the ancient Illyrians, had been the true first inhabitants of Kosovo, he pointed out that there was no real evidence for this, no monuments or reliable texts, nothing but a few fragile linguistic coincidences. Was it not the case that the independence movement in Kosovo was another scheme for the old ambition of a Greater Albania? And what of the legality of it? Why should the Serbs give it away?

‘You defend Miloševi?’ asked the young woman. She could barely keep her seat.

‘Milošević,’ said László, ‘is a cynical and dangerous man. In fact I believe he is mentally ill. But is this about Milošević? It feels like a tribal matter. A blood feud.’

He thought she might slap him for this, but Emil laid a hand on her arm and switched the talk to Bosnia. He spoke of the massacre at Srebrenica, the camps at Omarska and Manjaca, of killers like Arkan and Mirko Jović, and the systematic rape of women and girls by men who masked their faces because they were neighbours.

‘This will happen in Kosovo too,’ he said. ‘Trust me. It will all happen again. At least the Bosnians had an army of sorts. They could fight back.’

‘And you have exhausted all peaceful means?’ asked László. He glanced at the young woman, from whose slender limbs there seemed to emanate a convincing shimmer of violence. ‘Ibrahim Rugova seems a genuinely good man.’

‘Rugova is a good man,’ said Emil, ‘but he is not a man of action. He could not stop a hundred and fifty thousand Albanians being thrown out of work. Doctors, teachers, all those in state employment. He has not stopped the apartheid in the schools or the suppression of our language. He has not stopped detention and beatings. Did you know, monsieur, that any remark critical of Serbia is considered a “verbal crime” punishable by two months’ imprisonment? Did you know that thousands have been summoned to police stations for what the authorities call “informative talks”, interrogations that last for three days and for which no justification is ever offered? They are making their lists, monsieur, and one day they will use those lists and they will not be interested in talking. You know what the Serbs call the Albanians in Kosovo? “Tourists.” They mean to get rid of us, monsieur, and only when it is too late will the world take notice. Is it not accepted everywhere that a man has the right to fight in defence of his life? His family?’

There was a great deal more of this, though from the moment Milošević had stripped Kosovo of its autonomy, László had entertained no serious doubts about the justice of the Albanian cause. The unhappy Serbs with their deranged leader were in thrall to a mythology cooked up in the nineteenth century and reheated by nationalist communist demagogues a hundred years later. What was it he had heard it called? ‘The politics of fantasy and hatred.’ But it was one matter to denounce a regime while sitting at the dinner table among friends, quite another to assist the operation of a group committed to its violent overthrow. There could be no doubt any more whose company he was in. Did Emil Bexheti already have blood on his hands? Where had he been when the rector of Pristina University was attacked in January?

Twice during the meeting the cellphone rang. Most of the talking was done by the voice at the other end, to which Emil paid respectful attention. Towards the end of the hour he poured László a glass of lukewarm water from a bottle of Volvic.

‘In ’56,’ he said, coming to the point László had been expecting for some time, ‘did you question the legitimacy of armed resistance?’

‘No,’ said László.

‘Though you knew it was not a game? That people, many people, would be killed?’

‘We were a country under occupation.’

‘You fought for your freedom.’

‘Yes.’

‘You still believe that was right?’

‘Yes. But it might be worth your remembering that we lost. A good cause is no guarantee of victory.’

‘So the sacrifice was futile?’

‘No,’ said László. ‘Something was achieved, though it’s hard to say exactly what. They showed us our weakness, but we also showed them theirs. Certainly nobody who saw what happened then was surprised at the speed of the collapse in ’89.’

‘It was more than that, monsieur. You set an example for the entire world.’

‘The best of them did. Though in an affair like that there is always much brutality. Lynch mobs. Summary executions. It wasn’t always very edifying.’

‘I know that some consider you a political fatalist. I am, of course, familiar with your work. But I ask you once more, in all earnestness – were you and your comrades wrong to take up arms?’

László shook his head.

‘Would you deny to others the right to do likewise?’

‘Obviously I could not.’

‘Then may I assume you would not oppose a movement that pursued objectives comparable to those you once fought for?’

‘Why would I oppose it?’

‘Would you support it?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Actively or passively?’

‘You would make a good Jesuit,’ said László.

‘Religion,’ snarled the young woman, ‘is essentially fascistic.’

‘And you,’ said László, ‘would have made an excellent Party member. You have a head full of slogans.’

Emil said: ‘You can help us, monsieur. The risk would not be great. You are now a successful and respected man. I do not ask you to throw this away.’

László frowned at the other’s conceit. ‘Perhaps I want to throw it away. Perhaps I am not at all what you think I am, Monsieur Bexheti. Do not have too much confidence in your research. But suppose you now tell me, in the most specific terms, what it is you want of me.’

There was a pause. Emil nodded. ‘I have your solemn word that you will speak of this to nobody?’

‘Very well.’

‘Not even to Monsieur Engelbrecht?’

‘Not even to Monsieur Engelbrecht. Not immediately. Here, however, you must trust me to manage things as I see best.’

Before the woman could object, Emil signalled his agreement. ‘We are in your hands, monsieur.’

‘Let us say we are in each other’s hands,’ said László. He wondered what would happen if he betrayed them. Would a police launch fish him out of the Seine? He prepared himself – ready now to imagine almost anything – but what they wanted of him was so simple his first reaction was a sharp disappointment. They wanted a courier. A postman. Someone who would carry a case abroad, and then come home.

‘Nothing more?’

‘Nothing more.’

‘And what does the case contain? Documents?’

Another pause.

‘Money?’

‘As I am sure you already know,’ said Emil, ‘for several years there has been a tax on all émigré Albanians to pay for the parallel republic. For the schools and the hospitals we were forced to establish for ourselves. Now there are many who want us to be more active in the defence of our rights. They are prepared to give generously in order to make that possible.’

‘Money to buy guns.’

‘Also food, medicine, clothes…’

‘Uniforms.’

‘You want us to buy books?’ asked the woman.

‘I would prefer it immensely,’ said László. ‘But tell me, where would this case have to go?’

‘Can you not guess?’ asked Emil.

‘No,’ said László, ‘not at all.’

‘Where are you most qualified to go? Where would you not be a stranger? Where do you know the language…’

‘The language?’ So that was it! He had been chosen not because he was “a friend of justice”, but because he spoke an impossible language!

‘You want me to go to Hungary?’

‘To Budapest,’ said the woman.

László threw back his head and laughed: he couldn’t help it. What fun the gods were having with him now! It was strange, however, that he had not seen it coming.

‘Who,’ said Emil, leaning forward and lighting a cigarette, ‘could suspect your motives in going there? You know the city…’

‘I have not been there since ’91.’

‘How much does a city change in six years? And you have relatives there.’

‘Two rather dim cousins. A very elderly aunt. My brother…’

‘…is in America. We know all this. The point is that I would be a foreigner there. My presence would immediately be suspect. I am also well known to the Serbian informers in Paris, of whom there are many. The moment I left my apartment it would be reported.’

‘But why Budapest?’

‘That is more than you need to know,’ said the woman.

László shook his head. ‘You will have to do better than that.’

‘We go,’ said Emil, ‘wherever there are people who will provide the items that we need.’

‘I know Budapest has its share of Ukrainian mafia,’ said László. ‘Are these the people you are dealing with?’

Emil held up his hands, palms out. ‘As my colleague has said, that is more than you need to know. Or rather, more than I am at liberty to tell you. Suffice to say that when one goes shopping one does not always admire the character of the shopkeeper.’

László tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully wiped the sweat from his eyes. ‘Supposing,’ he said, ‘that I considered doing as you ask – and for the moment I commit myself to nothing – when would I have to leave?’

‘Six, perhaps seven days’ time.’

‘And I would receive this case in Paris?’

‘We will give you the details when we have your answer. You must please inform us by fifteen hundred hours tomorrow. If we have not heard from you by then it will be assumed that you do not wish to help us. You will not be contacted again. And this meeting will not have happened.’

He passed over a slip of paper with a number on it. ‘Call from a public telephone. Do not say who you are. Simply ask “Is Françoise there?” Nothing more.’

‘Is Françoise there.’

‘We will take care of the rest.’

‘One more thing,’ said László. ‘You mentioned Kurt Engelbrecht. If I find that you have involved him in any of this I will go directly to the authorities and denounce you. Is that understood?’

‘Yes,’ said Emil. ‘Perfectly.’ He went with László as far as the head of the stairs, where the young man in the sports jacket was waiting for them.

‘You know,’ said László, ‘whatever anyone may have told you about me, the truth is I was never much of a “freedom fighter”.’

Emil smiled. ‘I did not think you were Che Guevara, monsieur.’

‘You see,’ said László, looking down into the well of the courtyard where the late afternoon sunlight was heaped up in a corner, ‘I couldn’t pull the trigger. Did you know that?’

‘We do what we can,’ said Emil. ‘Each in his way.’

‘Yes,’ said László. ‘But I did nothing.’ He turned to his guide. ‘Let’s go.’

Emil watched them from the top step. As they came to the turn in the stairs he said: ‘Sometimes we have a second chance, monsieur.’ He was not sure, however, if the playwright had heard him.

5

At 6 a.m. British Summer Time, flight BA902 from SFO floated through cloudbanks suffused with morning light, Sister Kim praying serenely, until England appeared in a rush of housing estates and tiny fields. An A-road, a motorway, an athletics ground, an industrial estate. It was a landscape without much grandeur to it, but from the air, at least, it had some quality of the homely, the delicately human, pleasing after so much time amid the towers and deserts of the American immense.

Alec was waiting for them as they came through the automatic doors at arrivals; a pale, weary-looking figure among the huddle of early greeters. He waved and smiled. Larry, carrying the big suitcases, smiled back, thinking how there was always at such moments a disconcerting adjustment to be made, as if the person who had come to meet you could never quite be the person you had expected. Even a face, a posture as familiar as his own brother’s, seemed subtly misremembered.

When he cleared the barrier he put down the cases. Alec held out his hand but Larry pulled him into a hug, immediately learning more of the true history of the last weeks than any amount of talking could have produced. Not just the fizz of tension in his brother’s body, but that smell of unhappiness, like a room in a house where children have been punished.

Ella turned up her face. Alec kissed her forehead.

‘Good flight?’

‘Crappy flight. Thanks for coming to get us.’

‘No problem.’

You’re looking good,’ said Larry.

‘Really?’

‘Sure.’

‘I’m glad,’ said Alec, raising an eyebrow as though everything were irony.

As they crossed the road to the carpark, he said: ‘She’s coming back today. Una’s bringing her from the hospital around four.’

He gave this news so conversationally that Larry, the mesh of himself strung weblike between time zones, was unsure for an instant who Alec was talking about.

‘Mum?’

‘Of course.’

‘That’s fantastic! You hear that, El? Granny’s coming out of hospital!’ He was profoundly relieved. A hospital-bed reunion had been a miserable prospect, not least because hospitals had such odd associations for him. Places of entertainment. Places where he pretended to be someone else.

‘Is she better now?’ asked Ella.

‘Maybe a little better,’ said Larry, glancing at Alec. ‘But just a little.’

‘She has to take her medicine,’ said Ella, sternly.

On a steadily filling motorway they drove with the sun livid in the rear-view mirror, the Renault creaking and rattling, never quite making seventy. The brothers talked of Alice, though always with an awareness of Ella wide awake in the back seat. It did not take Larry many questions to discover that Alec had not visited her in the hospital. For this, Alec offered no explanation or defence. He didn’t say ‘I couldn’t. I tried but I couldn’t’, and Larry did not pursue it, though it angered him a little. After ten hours in the air it was difficult to have much patience with other people’s fear, their shortfalls. And Alec’s failure to do something as simple as drive to a hospital indicated that things were rather worse than he had imagined. He told himself that this was OK, that they would manage, but it gave him a sinking feeling, as if having run almost to the end of his breath he had looked up to see ahead of him vast distances still to be travelled.

They came off the motorway at Coverton – ‘Can you smell the sea, El?’ – then drove over the moor. The villages they passed were tidy and prosperous, almost suburban, the barns and old village schools converted into private houses with expensive foreign cars outside, but the hedgerows were still tall and in their way unmannerly and uproarious with June.

When they turned into the drive at Brooklands, Larry leaned forward, wondering what changes he would find. He had not been here since the retirement party the previous August when he had become shit-faced on duty-free and kissed the art teacher, Miss Whatshername, behind the summerhouse. In the light of what had followed, it was tempting to recall the whole of that night as though it were one of those movies set on the eve of a disaster no one is expecting, but which everyone is secretly preparing for. Tempting but false, for surely they had all been perfectly innocent of the future, and Alice had not said, or at least not meant, what she had whispered to him in the minutes before the fuse blew. Absurd request! What did she have in mind? That he would smother her with a pillow the moment she stopped making sense?

Then the house swung into view, its walls more bowed, more overrun with creepers than he remembered. A dozen of the terracotta tiles were missing from the roof at the gable end, the guttering above one of the upstairs windows had ruptured, and the wooden side gate into the garden was jammed ajar, turning it into a kind of trellis for weeds. He shook his head. ‘This place needs a lot of work,’ he said, ‘a lot of work.’ He felt quite nauseous with fatigue.

Napping in the twin room downstairs, Larry dreamed pleasantly of Sister Kim, and when he woke, half expected to see her beside him, his guardian angel, but there was only Ella, in shorts and T-shirt, sitting on the other bed, swinging her legs and watching him. She had opened one of the suitcases and Larry automatically looked to see what she might have helped herself to, but the case contained only clothes and toiletries, a couple of books, nothing that was likely to be of interest to her. He sent her off to find Alec while he shaved and showered and drank a cafetière of coffee and smoked three cigarettes and swallowed another Xanax. Then, feeling different rather than better, he patrolled the house with a last cup of coffee, looking into rooms and out of windows, recovering the place, trying to arrive.

He left Alice’s bedroom until last, uncertain how he would react to it, but the room had been thoroughly tidied and aired and smelled only of furniture polish, and very faintly of pine disinfectant. The curtains were pulled back and tied. There were no clothes draped over the chair, no shoes on the floor, no sickroom litter of pillboxes and tonics and half-read magazines. The double bed was made up under a patchwork cover, though at the foot of the bed the material was rucked, as if someone had been sitting there. He smoothed it out, then went to the chest of drawers where the photographs had been angled so that they could be seen from the bed. The largest (it chilled him) was of himself, sixteen, waiting in his whites to go on court at a youth tournament in Eastbourne. Then a formal portrait of Alec in his academic gown at the graduation ceremony at UEA, smiling bravely yet somehow contriving to look as if he’d lost something. Beside this, in a pretty frame of lacquered wood, a softly monochrome photo of the teenage Alice standing in front of a weeping willow with her father, and another man, younger, who has turned away from the camera, frowning at something out of shot that the others have not yet noticed.

He picked up a picture of Ella, nude on a blanket, one year old. Then an enlarged, overcolourful snap of the wedding reception at Lemon Cove, Kirsty with her hair cut page-boy style, laughing at some remark thrown from the group of delighted onlookers, while her father proffers an elaborately wrapped package. The fondue set? The engraved cocktail shaker? The steak knives?

He stood, listening for any sound of movement in the house, then slid open the underwear drawer and disentangled one of Alice’s bras, an elaborate and robust garment of elastic and wire and pastel lace with a little silk butterfly bow at the front. He thought of the stuff he used to buy for Kirsty. Nathan Slater’s party girls had taught him about lingerie – the difference between the crass and the sexy, how to match colour to skin tone, what styles enhanced a curve, what cuts most flattered. He tried to remember the last time Kirsty had worn any of it, then realized he could not remember the last time he had seen her in her underwear. It had not been recently. It had not been for months. And this, surely, was as good an index as any of how things stood between them. Their steady retreat into strangerhood.

He turned the bra in his hands then pressed one of the cups to his face like a mask. A whiff of washing powder, of dried lavender. Little or nothing of Alice. He tucked it quickly back into the drawer and pushed the drawer shut.

‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.’

In the playroom, Ella was letting Alec show her various old toys. Some of them had been laid out on the table like exhibits at a trial – a boxing glove, a spaceship, a little black gun. But the toy that had caught the girl’s interest was a glass bulb with a wire spindle at its centre and six small square sails of black-and-white card. Larry remembered it. He was surprised that something so fragile could have survived so long.

‘You have to put it in the window, El. The sunshine makes the little sails spin round.’

She wanted to know what it was called. He shrugged. ‘Make up a name,’ he said. ‘I expect you can have it if you want. Ask Uncle Alec.’

‘Of course,’ said Alec. He was pulling out the old collapsible baize-topped card table from behind a pile of boxes.

‘I don’t think she knows how to play bridge,’ said Larry. ‘Shouldn’t we be getting ready for Mum?’

‘What’s there to get ready?’ said Alec. ‘There’s nothing to get ready.’ He carried the table out into the passage, Ella, the sun machine held gravely in front of her, walking behind him like an altar girl following the priest with some curious relic of the faith.

At three-thirty, Dennis Osbourne arrived to be part of Alice’s welcoming party. He brought a bunch of pink and carmine peonies from his garden. He shook Larry’s hand. ‘America treating you well?’

‘Like royalty,’ said Larry.

They were waiting in the living room. It was twenty years since the place had last been decorated. The paint was crazed around the light fitting in the ceiling, and on the walls the turquoise paper curled outwards at the joins.

‘I expect you’ll be doing a new show soon,’ said Osbourne.

Larry nodded, wondering how Osbourne would get along with a man like T. Bone, what, trapped in a lift, they might find to say to each other. ‘Only a matter of time,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for a new agent.’

It started to rain. From the window Larry watched the garden grow lively with countless little movements of water. He had forgotten how much weather the place had, this incessant shifting of the light.

Ella and Alec were sitting either side of the card table. The reverend touched the child’s hair. ‘Hello, young lady,’ he said. Ella smiled up at him with an expression Larry thought she must have learned from one of her doctors. On the table in front of her were three red plastic cups. She was trying to decide which of them was hiding the ball.

‘And your good wife?’ asked Osbourne.

‘She’s well,’ said Larry.

‘When I think of California,’ said the reverend, ‘I think of long roads lined with palm trees. And a violet sky. And Rex Harrison leaning on a balcony smoking a cigarette with a kind of ebony filter.’

‘That’s it,’ said Larry.

Ella tapped the middle cup but she was wrong. Alec was still a move or two ahead of her. Larry wondered how long his brother had been practising. He had never seen him in the role of magician before.

As each car passed on the road at the top of the drive the adults’ attention – Ella’s too perhaps – was held there for an instant, so that the atmosphere in the room was constantly tightened and released in a way that was becoming difficult to bear.

Larry said: ‘It’s eight o’clock in the morning for me. Is there a drink in the house?’

‘Maybe some sherry,’ said Alec. ‘Look in the cupboard under the TV.’

In the cupboard there was a lone bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, two-thirds full, a fine patina of dust on the bottle’s shoulders. ‘What happened to Dad’s clocks?’ he asked. His watch had just bleeped the hour.

‘They need winding,’ said Alec. ‘I’ve been busy.’

‘I can testify to that,’ said Osbourne.

‘Well, she’ll be here soon,’ said Larry. He poured the sherry into a tumbler. Osbourne thought he wouldn’t just yet. Larry knew there was no point in asking Alec.

‘I used to know a card trick,’ said the reverend. ‘All the queens came out on top.’

‘Hey, we could have a magic show on Granny’s birthday,’ said Larry. ‘What do you think, El?’

‘Balloons,’ she said, watching Alec’s hands like a cat.

‘Quite right,’ said Osbourne. ‘Can’t have a party without balloons.’

Alec was shuffling the order of the cups. There was a certain amount of patter involved. Larry stepped up to the table. ‘She’ll get it this time,’ he said.

The cups were lined up in their final positions. Ella immediately tapped the left-hand cup. Alec lifted it.

‘Clever girl,’ said Osbourne. ‘Clever girl.’

Before the trick could begin again, they heard a car on the gravel of the drive. They froze for a moment, then filed from the room and came out of the front door just as Una was switching off the engine. Though the rain was very light, Alec had taken the big golf umbrella from the hall and was holding it over Larry and Ella’s heads. The reverend stood at the back, still holding the peonies. Una got out of the car. Larry let go of Ella’s hand and went around to the passenger door. He opened it and reached down for Alice, and though the moment before she had seemed almost inert, an elderly lady lost in the midst of some sad reverie, she was suddenly animated, gripping his arms and hauling herself from the seat. ‘Oh, Larry,’ she moaned, ‘oh, my Larry…’

She clung to him, the material of his shirt bunched in her fists, and he held her, eyes closed, whispering to her, crooning to her like a sweetheart, while the others, awed by so much undisguised need, looked on, not daring to disturb them. After a minute, Ella edged towards her father and threaded a finger through a belt loop on his trousers. Larry freed one of his hands and pressed the child against his thigh. Osbourne whispered something canonical. Una smiled at Alec, her mouth unsteady. To Alec the scene was the most profoundly embarrassing he thought he had ever witnessed, and he stared fixedly at the gravel, afraid he would make some shocking noise, a bark of grief.

‘Can we go in now?’ he asked. But nobody moved, and it seemed they would be there for ever, stupefied by emotion.

On the following day, like a failing queen surrounded by her courtiers, Alice Valentine lay in her old bed at Brooklands and explained to them all what she required of them, and how, in these, her last days, they were to conduct themselves. Despite the labour of it, the poverty of air in her lungs, she spoke at length, though among her medicines now there were new drugs that threw longer, deeper shadows, so that she strayed from the light into the dark with a suddenness that meant she could not always be sure she was making any sense. Even so, it was surprising to her that the only one who appeared to understand her was Alec.

She couldn’t move her right hand, then saw that Larry, sitting beside her on the edge of the bed, was holding it. And there, between his knees, was her granddaughter, solemn as a little Chinaman. Girl should be out in the garden, not stuck inside seeing things that would give her dreams. She asked who had bought the flowers. Alec nodded to Dennis Osbourne and she laughed, wheezed, coughed, and told the reverend that he was putting on weight and there was not the least hope of her going with him now, even if he dug up his entire garden. Samuel, she said (did she say it?), Samuel knew how to make a woman happy.

Finally, she turned to Brando and instructed him to make sure that everyone did as she asked, though rather rudely he talked across her to Una. She thought she might get very cross if he did that again. He was a foreigner, of course, really. A pastry chef. She said the funniest thing she had ever heard was Kenneth Horne in Round the Horne. Am I repeating myself? she asked. No, said Alec. Thank you, dear. She told him she didn’t mind him not coming to the hospital. You could die of sheer heartbreak in those places. And when you were too weak to make trouble, people did what they liked with you. She said she loved them all and would they please get out and come back later. Goodnight, she said, though it was still a little before midday, and when the curtains blew the light danced over the walls.

Larry walked Dr Brando to his car, a silver-blue Audi estate parked in the shade of the trees. He thanked him for coming. He asked: ‘What do you think?’

‘Well,’ said Brando, glancing at his watch, ‘she’s obviously a bit disorientated but that should settle down. I’m sure this business of speaking in French will pass too, though at least you have an expert on hand. How’s your French?’

‘I don’t,’ said Larry.

‘I’m sure Alec will pass on anything relevant.’

‘What comes next?’ asked Larry.

Brando had the key in the door of the car. When he turned it, the locks snapped up in unison. ‘It’s difficult to make predictions, Larry. Particularly at this stage. The tumours have been more aggressive than I’d hoped. A lot of it’s up to the individual, of course, though clearly she’s going to need an increasing amount of nursing care. Isn’t your wife coming over soon?’

‘Next week.’

‘So there’ll be another woman in the house. That’s good. Call me if there’s anything at all you want to discuss. And talk to Una. She knows her stuff. She’ll be able to give you plenty of good advice.’

‘OK,’ said Larry. He had other questions. About pain. About what exactly happened at the end. But the doctor was in a hurry and the questions would have to wait. He watched the car move up the drive with that big-car hum and crunch of gravel, then shut his eyes and turned his face to the sun. He was still struggling with the jet-lag. The previous evening, after speaking with Kirsty (‘Sure, sure. Everything’s just fine’), he had fallen into a profound sleep, only to wake two hours later and spend the remainder of the night listening to the labour of his heart and to his daughter mouth-breathing in the other bed. He knew he would be no use to anyone until he could relax, but he was working in a range of emotions the Xanax was not equipped for. He decided to run a bath. A long soak might unlace him a little, then perhaps he could nap for an hour and get some of this weight of sleep off his shoulders. He went back into the house, fetched his wash bag, and set off for the bathroom at the far end of the first-floor corridor. On the stairs – where he managed to avoid more than a fleeting glimpse of the PLEASE! spread – he met Ella and the reverend coming down. Evidently, Osbourne had shaved that morning without the use of a mirror. His throat was nicked and there was a little crust of dried shaving cream by his left ear. When Larry asked Ella what she wanted to do, she bunched her lips and shrugged. The reverend said he’d go into the garden with her and see whether there were any early cherries.

‘Got your inhaler, El?’ asked Larry.

She showed it to him.

‘OK.’ He tousled the girl’s hair. ‘Play nicely.’

On the landing, Alec was coming out of Alice’s room, pulling the door shut.

‘Una still with her?’ whispered Larry.

Alec nodded.

They moved away from the door towards the window that overlooked the garden.

‘What was she saying?’ asked Larry.

‘Una?’

‘Mum. All that French.’

‘A lot of things.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as who brought the flowers. What it was like at the hospital. She said she wanted to go back to the old house. To Granny Wilcox’s.’

‘Wow. I don’t even remember how to get there. Do you?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘You think she’s well enough to go anywhere?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We practically had to carry her up the stairs.’

‘It’s what she wants.’

‘Does she know what she wants?’

‘You think you know better?’

‘Of course not. Jesus. No need to bite my head off.’ He almost said: She’s my mother too. Being back at home he suddenly felt about fourteen. ‘Maybe we should talk to Una about it. Brando says she knows her stuff.’

‘She does.’

Pause.

‘I’ll be in the summerhouse,’ said Alec.

‘Fine.’

‘She’s got a bell.’

‘I know.’

‘She said she was glad you’re back.’

‘Yeah. Me too.’

Passing the orchard, Alec heard the reverend counting.

‘Sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three…’

Ever since coming down from London he had longed for others to share the burden with him. Shield him. But now that they were here he found he missed the solitude of the week before when the garden’s great resource of quiet had begun to tease out something equivalent in himself, which now all these voices drove away. It made it hard to be civil. It certainly made it harder to think.

The air in the summerhouse was flat with heat and heavily scented with the honeysuckle. He left the door open and set the manuscript on the table by the window. On the shelf, where clay flowerpots had once been stored, he had put his dictionaries and other useful books, including copies of Sisyphus Rex and Flicker in the Eliard translations. His own effort had ground to a halt a third of the way through the second act. After Alice’s fit, which had taken on in his mind the dimensions of mythology, he had found it almost physically impossible to concentrate. It was like lying with his head below a finely suspended anvil, trying not to think of what would happen when it fell. He couldn’t do it. Not even a letter from Marcie Stoltz, forwarded by Mr Bequa, in which she confessed herself ‘intrigued’ to know how the work was progressing, had made any difference. Anything beyond the white front gate of Brooklands had a remoteness that beggared the imagination, though he thought Stoltz might start to phone (she had his number at the house), and he would have to start lying to her, saying how well it was going and how excited he was.

He polished his glasses with the tuck of his shirt, then took a pencil, sharpened it, and opened the manuscript:

Mineur un: J’ai revé de ce moment cent fois. Même quand j’étais éveillé.

Mineur deux: Et comment termine le rêve?

He didn’t think Larry understood a thing. Larry was thinking about Larry. Or about Kirsty or America or something. But not about Alice. Of course he cared, they all cared, but the others were just looking on, and that wasn’t enough. He didn’t believe any of them could see what he saw: the complete impossibility of letting it go on and on for weeks and months. But what could he do? Did he still believe in fairytales? In stumbling across a magic cure? He thought perhaps he did, and this seemed funny in an utterly bleak sort of way, and he was laughing to himself when Una tapped on the timber by the open door.

‘I didn’t know it was a comedy,’ she said.

‘Only in parts,’ said Alec.

She stepped into the shed. ‘Is that him?’ She pointed to the portrait of Lázár in the Luxembourg which Alec had pinned to the edge of the shelf. ‘What’s that he’s carrying?’

‘A cake perhaps. Or a bomb.’

‘I’d say he’s got a kind face, so it’s probably a cake.’

‘Probably.’

He studied her while she studied Lázár. A slight pout to her lower lip. Pale lashes. Grey eyes touched with violet. A little round scar on the side of her nose as if once she wore a stud there. She had on a blue cotton dress, sleeveless, and her shoulders were tanned, honey-brown against the just visible plain white strap of her bra. She must have been lying in the sun at the weekends, and he imagined her with a boyfriend, a doctor perhaps, who had a boat or a convertible. Someone like a young Brando.

‘What was your mother saying?’ she asked.

He told her about the house.

She nodded. ‘Let’s see how we get on. You’re going to need to keep a closer eye on her now.’

‘I know.’

‘I’ve put the Dexamethasone on top of the chest with a note explaining the routine. Will you make sure she takes it? We don’t want her back in the hospital if we can help it.’

‘I’ll put it on the list,’ he said.

‘I like your brother,’ she said.

‘We’re very different.’

‘Oh, I’m not so sure of that,’ she said. ‘Are you nearly finished with the play?’

‘It’s coming on.’

‘That’s grand.’

Dennis Osbourne, red-faced from his exertions, was trying to conceal himself behind a slender tree in the orchard. Una waited, smiling at him, until Ella came through the long grass and captured him.

‘Your daddy wants you,’ she said, holding out her hand to the girl. ‘Sorry to spoil your game, Reverend.’

‘I need a sit-down,’ he said. ‘How’s Alice?’

‘Back on the English now. She’s getting quite mischievous, isn’t she?’

‘Poor woman,’ said the reverend, squatting awkwardly on the grass. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘She’s sleeping. Best let her get on with it.’

‘Yes,’ said Osbourne. ‘Sleep’s the great healer, I suppose. I shall see you later, Ella.’

‘Thank you for playing with me,’ said Ella, who had been carefully drilled in the importance of such remarks. She took Una’s hand and together they went into the cool of the house. Una said goodbye to her in the living room. She was running late for an appointment in Nailsea. A young haemophiliac with Kaposi’s sarcoma. Mother going out of her mind. Afraid to sleep. Asking why all the time. Why him, why us. Why why why.

‘Be a good girl now,’ she said. ‘Keep an eye on them all till I come back.’

Ella waited. When she heard the front door shut she switched on the television and started flicking through the channels, though without a remote control she wasn’t sure at first how to do it, and even when she had worked out how to use the buttons she couldn’t find MTV. She settled for a cartoon, and had curled herself on to the sofa to watch it – the manic pursuits, the crash-bangs – when her father appeared, wrapped in a white towelling bathrobe, the wash bag in his hand. He switched off the television and knelt on the floor in front of her.

‘We have some talking to do,’ he said. ‘Some very serious talking.’

6

The evening that followed his meeting with Emil Bexheti, László dined with Kurt at Marco Polo’s on the rue de Condé. Asparagi di campo, risotto alia sbirraglia, tortellini bolognese – all the good things. Then they walked home together, hand in hand, past the church of St Sulpice and along by the side of the Luxembourg. It was a little after twelve. A scattering of stars showed faintly above the lamplight, and the air was redolent with that mix of gutters and public gardens, tobacco smoke, restaurant steam, and the sour but somehow likable breath of the Métro exhaled through broad grills in the pavement, which give to Paris nights their inimitable savour.

Kurt squeezed László’s hand; László squeezed back. He was never entirely comfortable with this way of walking, and he reserved it for those moments of especial tenderness when something more than mere proximity was required. It was not that he was ashamed of Kurt. On the contrary, he was often joyfully incredulous that such a sweet-tempered young man should agree to stay with him. But László was a homosexual who retained a certain abstract disapproval of his tribe. In San Francisco, during his tenure at the Théâtre Artaud, he had been appalled at some of the things he had seen, men using each other much as dogs use table legs, a corrupt and worthless version of the Dionysian. In truth he had never really thought of himself as queer or Gay. A mariposa. A fruit. His case, he believed, was much simpler. There had in his life been certain people, beginning with Peter, whom he had needed, and who happened to be men. He did not want to make a vocation of it, to go on marches, wear badges. And anyway, he was from a time and a place where the notion of ‘coming out’ had been utterly unimaginable. Homosexuality was illegal in Hungary until years after he had left. His parents might have stood it – they were doctors, liberals, readers – but the Party would have destroyed him. Two men in a bed in the act of adoring each other was as subversive as a secret printing press, and it had not been much easier when he came to France – except in the theatre, of course, where nobody cared what you got up to, or who.

But tonight he wanted to think of the past he shared with Kurt Engelbrecht, rather than the one he possessed alone, and where, increasingly, he felt himself a ghost among ghosts, a wanderer in the Fields of Asphodel. At the apartment on rue Delambre he threw open the windows, lit the candles and fetched a bottle of Sambuca from the drinks cabinet beside the bookshelf in the dining room. He filled two small glasses, added a coffee bean to each, and with his lighter heated the surface of the liquor until it ignited with ghostly blue flames. He passed one of these entertaining glasses to Kurt. ‘Venice,’ he said.

‘Venice,’ replied Kurt, grinning.

‘La Fenice e des Artistes.’

‘Murano.’

‘San Michele.’

‘The Cittadi Vittorio…’

‘Ah!’

They had not done this for a while, this resuming of those ten or dozen stories that constituted the official history of their intimacy. As always, it began with Venice, and the morning they woke in their hotel to find the city furled in freakish snow, and had sat, wrapped in blankets, watching it for hours, wonder-struck as ten-year-olds.

Then Seville – the Triana district at 4 a.m. Footsore, irritable, hopelessly lost, wandering into a riverside bar to hear cante hondo, the crowd smoking as though in a trance, the singer, a middle-aged man in a dark suit at the far end of the bar, delivering his song in spasms of grief, ecstasies.

‘Next?’

Vienna. A melancholy hour at the grave of László’s mother, followed by a difficult, somewhat comical weekend with Kurt’s parents, kindly people only a few years older than László, who had addressed him during his entire stay as ‘Herr Professor’, preferring to think – could they really have believed it? – that his interest in their son was exclusively pedagogical.

And the holiday in New York with László’s brother, János, a divorced optometrist with an apartment full of prize-winning schnauzers. It had been Kurt’s first visit to America and they had driven from the airport in a yellow cab at dusk, rocking on bad roads through canyons of electrified tower blocks, Kurt almost in tears at the romance of so much light…

Evenings at the theatre. Nights on the town. Weekends in the country. Do you remember? A history with very few of the pages glued together, though each time they played the game, each occasion inspired by some unvoiced disquiet, the recollections were reworked a little as the line between memory and imagination became subtler, or just unimportant. It nearly always worked, and if not, well, there was the sambuca to make up the difference. This, thought László, was entirely the point of such drinks.

It was ten-thirty by the time he let his eyes open to the daylight. Kurt was long since up, the duvet on his side thrown back as if he had leaped from the bed. László slouched to the bathroom. He felt excited and slightly ill, his cock half erect, a persistent buzzing in his left ear, a taste of alcohol and fire on his tongue. He stood under the shower and coughed for a while, trying to clear his lungs, then shaved, catching the scrawn of his throat and emerging into the kitchen thirty minutes later with three scraps of toilet paper stuck to his skin by the adhesion of his own blood.

Leaning by the stove he ate a croissant beurre, a painkiller, a vitamin pill, then dressed himself in grey slacks and a linen shirt and went down into the street feeling like a Hemingway character, some old boxer ennobled by weakness, hauling himself into the ring for a last big fight. The day was for settling things, and it was in this spirit he intended to have his talk with Franklin Wylie, though quite what he could say to him that would be of any use he was not at all sure. Something to shame, something to encourage. It was impossible, or at least unacceptable, that all their years of friendship should end in silence, a dull glare of mutual incomprehension.

He caught the Metro from Montparnasse Bienvenue, changed at Sebastapol and arrived at Parmentier shortly before noon. At the greengrocer’s on the corner of Rue Jacquard he bought a large bag of cherries, then walked to the rue du Deguerry and tapped in the code to the outer door, but as he crossed the vestibule to the stairs, Madame Barbossa spied him from her office and flagged him down. She had met him on many occasions, knew he was ‘like family’ with the Wylies, and revered him as a man of culture whose name might be found in the newspapers from time to time, though she had no practical idea of what he did. She told him that Monsieur Wylie had gone out early, eight o’clock, just as she herself was coming in. Madame Wylie had left two hours later to have lunch with her mother at the old folks’ place in Epinay.

‘I should have called,’ said László, though he was surprised; it was almost always safe to assume Franklin would be at home at this time of the day, working or mooching, sleeping even. He offered the gardienne a cherry. She was looking at him as if he might, handled in the right way, reveal some item of scandal, something she could add to her collection of Wylie stories. Something to amaze a neighbour.

‘The spare key?’ asked László. He was not averse to a little gossip, but this was not the occasion for it. ‘I’ll put the cherries in the fridge so they can be enjoyed cold.’

‘As you like, monsieur.’

She fetched the key from her office. László wheezed his way to the fourth floor and let himself in. It was an old apartment, and little had been altered since the Wylies had bought it in ’78 or ’79, choosing it for its high ceilings, the pretty church across the street, the flood of the evening sun. The walls in the hallway formed a little gallery, densely hung. There were things by Franklin there, but most of the pictures were the work of dead friends, including a Phillip Guston, and even a Beuys sketch of what looked like a severed head, Orpheus perhaps, ‘his gory visage’ floating down the Hebrus.

He moved into the kitchen, where pans and skillets hung in rows from butcher’s hooks. It was the scene of many fine suppers together in the past. Laurence was a first-class cook; she was also a tidy woman, even a meticulous one, for whom the kitchen was a serious space, a place to be respected, so it was surprising and unnerving to see in the middle of the room a bottle of red wine left where it had fallen or been dropped or, God knows, thrown. A starburst of glass, the wine pooled in the hollows of the tiles and spattered on to skirting boards and cupboards. The record of an impact, very exact.

He tiptoed around the debris and placed the cherries on a shelf in the fridge, then looked beneath the sink for some newspapers to clean up with, and was crouched there reading the front page of an April edition of Libération when he heard what sounded like the soft opening or shutting of a door somewhere in the body of the apartment. He stepped into the passage.

‘Franklin?’

Not even Madame Barbossa’s vigilance was perfect. Franklin might have returned long ago, slipping past her while she admired someone’s dog or baby. When he wished to he could move very quietly, a tall ghost, padding up behind people, startling them with a sudden tap on the shoulder.

László moved along the corridor to the studio, the largest room in the apartment, with big windows overlooking the church, and a door at the far end leading into a small washroom.

‘Franklin?’

Along the length of the wall opposite the windows was a long table – an old dining table – its surface covered with a guano of slopped and dried paint. Brushes and palette knives stood to attention in a score of tins. Above the table, the shelves were loaded with coiled aluminium paint tubes, aerosol cans and plastic bottles of pigment, fabulous colours that would have exhausted László’s vocabulary had he attempted to name them all. And there were tools for gouging and scraping, boxes of charcoal, print rollers, a staple gun, all the paraphernalia of the artist, which writers, condemned to pen, keyboard and ashtray, feel such envy of. But there was nothing on the easels or pinned to the walls, not even a sketch, though on the floor there were half a dozen large canvases stood up with their backs to the room, as though in disgrace. No scattering of rags, no endearing mess, nothing to suggest the sanity of work. The place looked to have been finished with, abandoned. László could remember a time when there had always been flowers there – fistfuls of them in jars of discoloured water.

He lifted the outermost canvas on to the pegs of an easel, and stepped back. Though the greater part of Franklin’s output had always been abstract, large-scale, incensed with colour, the painting on the easel was figurative in the style of the German expressionists – Kokoschka, perhaps, or Barlach – and depicted a newly married couple on the steps of the mairie. The bride, in her costume of rose blooms, was immediately recognizable as Laurence Wylie. Not the young Laurence (a woman centred in her smile, in the warmth of her regard), but Laurence as she was now, Laurence the martyr, the victim, the dupe. It was grievous to see, but such was the quality of Franklin’s attention to her, the scrupulous depiction of an unhappiness he himself had authored, that László felt his throat constrict and his eyes become moist. Confronted with such a face, with the perverse love that had laboured over its depiction, blame or anger was beside the point. Useless.

He turned from the woman to the figure at her side. A man in a black suit, his head tightly wrapped in what appeared to be cellophane, or that plastic film used to preserve food, so that his features were flattened and distorted like a bank robber’s in a stocking mask. His back was arched in the agony of a suffocation, his fists bunched in rage, but his bride, oblivious to his torment, or just helpless to relieve it, ignored him, and looks directly forward, engaging the gaze of the viewer as if searching for some deliverance beyond the frame, though there was something else in her expression, some mute communication painted into the eyes like a code, that László could not immediately make sense of. He had to stand farther back – two, three steps – before he saw that it was a look of warning.

In the telephone box on the corner of the road by the church, an Arab girl was hunched down on the steel floor, smoking and talking intensely. László checked his watch, then leaned against the railings to contemplate the sparrows bathing in the gutter, scrupulous little birds, shivering the water from their feathers and hopping about in the sunshine. Ten minutes later the girl came out and László went in. The receiver was warm from her hand still, faintly scented. He dialled very carefully. After three rings he was answered.

‘Is Françoise there?’ he asked.

7

It was twilight at Brooklands. Larry came out on to the terrace and sat in the canvas chair opposite his brother.

‘Ella in bed?’ asked Alec.

‘Yeah. Mum?’

‘Asleep. I think.’

Larry had a bottle of Teacher’s from the off-licence in Coverton. He had driven out in Alec’s car before lunch and since then had worked his way through half the bottle. He poured himself another two fingers, drank one of them, then leaned forward and said, ‘Ella’s taken something.’

‘Hardly the first time,’ said Alec. He was drinking tea.

‘No. This is different. This isn’t a bracelet or a ring.’

‘Money?’

‘She’s taken a pill,’ said Larry. ‘I don’t know how but we’ve got to get it back.’

‘One of Mum’s?’

‘One of mine. From my wash bag.’

‘What kind of pill?’

Larry shook his head.

‘A painkiller? Sleeping tablet?’

‘I wish.’ He took a deep breath and started to explain, though he knew the story required more context than he could ever hope to provide. He said he had gone to LA to discuss a film deal. He omitted to mention the nature of the film, though he gave Alec something of the characters of T. Bone and Ranch, despite the fact that talking of them in the calm of an English garden made them seem like figures in some outlandish cabaret. He mentioned the hotel, the lunch party, the bathroom, the box. The pills. He’d hoped to make it sound casual and mostly normal, but actually it didn’t sound normal at all.

‘Suicide pills?’

Both of them – a reflex with its roots in the hinterlands of childhood – glanced up at the window above as though the light might suddenly flick on, and Alice lean out, wise to their secrets and demanding explanations.

‘Fucksake…’ said Larry, wincing. He had not introduced the ‘sex’ pills. Nor did he know which of the two Ella had taken because he could no longer remember Ranch’s explanation of the difference. Either way, it didn’t bear thinking about.

Alec blinked behind his glasses for a while. ‘You’re sure it was Ella?’

‘Of course it was Ella.’

‘You talked to her?’

‘For an hour, yesterday, as soon as I found the thing was gone. Again today. She blanked me completely, both times. When I told her how dangerous it was she seemed to understand, but with Ella you never know. I even phoned Hoffmann…’

‘Hoffmann?’

‘Her shrink in Frisco. He’s away at some child homicide convention in Detroit, so I left a message on his machine, then had a panic attack thinking what if he tells Kirsty? Can you imagine? So I called back and left another message saying he was only to talk to me about it. Not that I trust him much.’

‘Did you tell him what she took?’

‘I said she was having a regressive episode. After a while you start to speak like them.’

Alec sipped from his mug. Larry the athlete, Larry the party king, Larry the handsome, Larry the successful, Larry the happy husband. And now Larry the man who kept suicide pills in his wash bag. He hardly knew who he was sitting next to.

‘What on earth were you going to do with it?’ he asked.

Larry shrugged. ‘I meant to chuck them away in the plane.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘That’s not the point any more. The point is getting it back. I’m pretty certain it’s not in the bedroom. I stripped the mattresses. Emptied out the drawers. But she’s good at this now. It could even be in the garden. Can you talk to her? She likes you.’

‘What am I supposed to say? Give Daddy back his pill?’

‘Just try and get it into her head how serious this is.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I can’t believe you had it.’

Larry rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his palm. ‘I feel like I haven’t slept in a year.’

‘What did you do with the others?’

‘Others? Flushed them away. A little late, I know.’ He shook a cigarette from the pack and lit it.

‘I didn’t know things had been so difficult,’ said Alec.

‘Since Sun Valley. Before then, I guess.’

‘You didn’t say anything.’

‘You’ve had troubles of your own.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

Larry laughed – sheer fatigue as much as the whisky. He put a hand on his brother’s knee. ‘You’re a complete fucking mess,’ he said.

‘I manage,’ said Alec.

‘Sure. Do you remember when I went to America for the first time and you were about to spend your year in Paris? You remember that?’

‘Yes,’ said Alec.

‘It feels like the last time I spoke to you.’

‘That was ten years ago.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

Alec shrugged.

‘Did you like it?’

‘What?’

‘Paris.’

‘Yes.’

Larry nodded. ‘That’s good.’ He was looking over the potato field to where night was finally tidying away the tower of the church. It was a view so long etched on to the retina of memory it made him soulful. He saw himself as a boy, and Alec too. He saw Alice as a vigorous woman, and even his father as a man not yet on the edge, his shadow striding across the garden. All of them, their lives flitting like the little bats that dived and swooped around the eaves of the house.

‘I suppose we should have a plan,’ he said. He was starting to drawl. ‘What do you think? Should we have a plan?’

8

On Thursday evening Kurt Engelbrecht returned to rue Delambre with two plastic bags of groceries in either hand. He carried them into the kitchen, put them on the table and called for László. He had bought more cassis, and there was still half a bottle of white wine in the fridge from the previous evening. At eight o’clock it was early and late enough for an aperitif.

At the bottom of the sink he saw László’s plate, knife and coffee cup from lunch, the plate still with its debris of apple skin and olive stones and cheese rind. It was one of László’s habits – if something so casual, so unconsidered, could be called a habit – together with getting flecks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror, and now and then forgetting to flush the toilet, that Kurt found mildly provoking, but which he never mentioned in the belief that László was operating a similar restraint in regard to the little blindnesses of his own.

He began to unpack the first bag, putting the vegetables on the wooden rack and arranging the fruit in the big glass bowl. Then he went into the passage and called a second and a third time. There were several reasons for László not to be there: he had stepped out with the mail, or had gone to the tabac for more cigarillos (though with his chest troubling him he had promised to leave them alone for a while); or he had simply gone down on to the boulevard to enjoy the warmth of the evening, buy a paper, chat to Madame Favier at the patisserie. He might even be taking the rubbish out, all credible explanations for his absence, so it seemed strange to Kurt, looking back on it later, strange and significant, that he should immediately have gone to the study with his heart thudding, and opened the door there with such a feeling of dread.

What had he expected to find? A smashed glass? An overturned chair? A body? But the room, quarter lit by the setting sun, was quite innocent. No sign of any haste or trouble. No air of menace. Yet far from reassuring him, this calmness, the sheer order of the place, convinced him that something had indeed occurred, and that his unease of the last week, the fear of some unspecified event, some violent alteration to the steady progress of their days together, had at last been realized. On László’s desk the papers of his manuscript were gathered into a neat pile, the pens lined up at the side, the little ashtray emptied and wiped. Even the chair had been slid under the desk, as though no one would ever need to sit there again, as though it were all done with and finished.

Propped against the bottom edge of the computer monitor on his own desk was a blue oblong envelope with his name on it. He stood a moment, looking at it, then went back into the kitchen and touched the china of László’s cup as if he hoped to feel some trace of warmth in it still. Then he washed it, washed the plate and the knife, and put them away in their proper places. There were spits of grease around the gas rings on the cooker. He cleaned the cooker. There were crumbs on the floor beneath the breadboard. He swept the floor, then vacuumed it, and was on the point of filling a bucket with hot water to scrub it when he recognized the folly of such tactics. He left the half-filled bucket in the sink, rolled down the sleeves of his shirt, and went back into the study. It was darker now. He turned on the green-shaded lamp and slit open the envelope with the little Opinel penknife he kept in his desk drawer. Inside the envelope were two sheets of paper written over on both sides in black ink. He could tell from the handwriting that they had been written slowly and were probably not a first draft. He carried them to the window and read them standing up, one hand, the tips of his fingers, pressing on the surface of László’s desk.

When he got to the end he read it through again, then tore it methodically into small pieces, placed the pieces in the ashtray, and using the same lighter László had used a week earlier to ignite the sambuca, he burned them and crushed the embers into a black dust. Then he moved the lamp closer to the window and leaned towards the glass, looking south to the boulevard Edgar Quinet, and the walls of the cemetery where Sartre and de Beauvoir and the glorious Beckett lay.

9

At six o’clock, Larry stood at the kitchen stove, labouring over the evening meal. A pillar of steam broke across the red of his face as he prodded the rice with a wooden fork, frowning at it like a soothsayer investigating the liver of a slaughtered ram for those striations and whorls that would betray the future to him. Beside the hob, propped against a mostly empty bottle of white wine, was one of Alice’s cookbooks, an Elizabeth David, open at a recipe for risotto, though it had, of course, been necessary for him to find alternatives to the chicken stock and the beef marrow and the diced ham, and everything that would, in his opinion, have given the meal flavour and nutritional profit, but which his wife – ‘I don’t eat dead animals, Larry’ – would have refused to eat, to touch even.

He had collected her the previous morning – Alec’s old car again – from Terminal 4 at Heathrow, where she had come out a little dazed and fragile in the wake of a sports team of blazered young men with crew cuts, who were joshing each other loudly despite the early hour. When he had called her name it had taken her a moment to locate him, and as she searched the faces at the barrier her expression was unmistakably a look of distress, as though this were not an orderly airport in an orderly country, but somewhere more fluid and dangerous, and still half asleep, time in a tangle in her head, a voice from the crowd had marked her out. But then she had seen Ella and let out a joyful ‘Hi!’, and for a while they had been like any other family there, grinning hard and trading hugs. Only a very practised eye could have seen it for what it was: a tenderness shot through with shared and private fears. She was upstairs now, in the room above his head, tending to his mother.

He checked the recipe and ladled more stock on to the rice. He was wearing one of Alice’s blue canvas aprons and handling the food with a certain alcoholic swagger that made him wonder whether he might not be very suitable for some kind of low-budget cookery programme. Catchpole in the kitchen: classic English cuisine from steak and kidney to spotted dick with television’s best-loved medic. There appeared to be an inexhaustible demand for colourful types who could chatter to camera while dicing peppers or flipping Thai prawns in a wok. Set against his present difficulties, this didn’t seem such an outlandish idea, and while being a TV chef was not, he thought, a wholly proper way to earn a living, it was preferable to what awaited him in the chill of the garage at San Fernando. It would certainly be the better option when KDBS organized the next Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

Ella was on the terrace; he could hear her through the open glass doors chatting in her considered way with Alec. Her stubbornness in the matter of the capsule had, in the last week, provoked Larry to extreme tactics. He had offered her money (twenty dollars). He had threatened to spank her (though they both knew he wouldn’t). He had spied on her through the keyhole of the bathroom, and even followed her into the garden, trailing her from tree to tree, stalking her as she gathered daisies and buttercups, crouched to turn a beetle with a twig, sang to herself. Did she know he was there? Or was this conspicuous innocence unfeigned, so that he was persecuting an entirely blameless child? What if one of the capsules had rolled off the shelf while he was in the toilet on the plane? Would he have noticed? Could he trust himself any more not to make such a mistake? What confidence could he have in his own judgment?

Alec had had his little chat with her. Apparently she had heard him out without giving the least hint she knew what he was talking about. And then Hoffmann had phoned, back from Detroit, telling Larry he would have to bill him for the call, and speaking to Ella while she stood in the kitchen holding the receiver with both hands, wide-eyed, nodding, saying yes, no, yes, I will, OK, uh-huh, OK. It had done no good. She was like a child in an Edward Gorey cartoon, a little thing in a taffeta party dress wandering about the house with a pistol in her hand.

‘Alec!’

Alec leaned into the kitchen.

‘This’ll be ready in twenty minutes, max. We should start getting Mum down.’

‘Right.’ He didn’t move.

‘You want to do it? Or you want to stir this and I’ll go up?’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Alec. But he came over to the stove and took the wooden fork from Larry’s hand.

‘Don’t let it dry up,’ said Larry. ‘And lets put some candles out. Make an evening of it.’

‘Good idea,’ said Alec, without the least enthusiasm.

‘And as for you,’ said Larry, as Ella appeared in the doorway, regarding him shrewdly with her head cocked to one side, ‘as for you…’ But he had no idea what to say next.

In Alice’s room, Kirsty Valentine, only daughter, only child of Errol and Nancy Freeman (formerly ‘Friebergs’) of La Finca, Lemon Cove, California, sat on a stool at the end of the bed holding her mother-in-law’s feet in her hands, palping the soles with her thumbs in the way she had been shown in a class on reflexology at the day centre in San Francisco. Alice leaned against a bank of pillows, already dressed for her evening downstairs. Earlier in the afternoon, Toni Cuskic had come by with her wallet of scissors, her clips and dryer, her poodle, and had brushed out the snags from Alice’s hair, plaiting it, at Alice’s request, into a neat silver rope.

Her hair, and the blusher she had rubbed into the absolute white of her cheeks, put Kirsty in mind of a Bette Davis film she had watched recently, part of a gay icon series on AMC. Yet somehow the fashion suited Alice, suited the newly blatant nature of her stare, the startling bluntness of her questions – ‘Why don’t you have another child?’ ‘Do you still love him?’ ‘Are you faithful to each other?’

This, perhaps, was ‘disinhibition’, a term Kirsty had picked up scanning the cancer literature in Barnes and Noble: the tumours, weevil-like, eating away at the furniture of adult judgment; an irresistible, irreversible decline that ended in full-blown dementia, when the mind was of no more use than a fancy mirror in an unlit room. Nicer then, infinitely more consoling, to imagine there was something rather Zenlike in Alice’s new directness, that her manner derived not from the perishing of the intellect, but from her impatience with the conventional. If people had to die – and Kirsty was enough of an American not to accept the absolute inevitability of it – she wanted them to go full of a profound and liberating knowledge of things. When else should you be wise, if not at the end? But several times in the last twenty-four hours she had witnessed the shadow of vacancy or panic fall over the blue of Alice’s eyes, and in her heart she knew that here was a woman being shut up inside herself. That she bore it at all seemed nothing less than heroic.

But how should her questions be answered? It wasn’t just the problem of balancing tact with honesty, the etiquette of talking with someone so terribly sick, it was her own painful uncertainty as to what the answers really were. Did she still love Larry? She supposed that she did, but her ‘Yes, of course’ had about it the ghost of a qualification, as though she had said ‘probably’, or ‘most of the time’, or ‘not like I used to’. The difficulty was being able to see him clearly, to have, as she had had in the past, a single clear idea of him. These days he seemed to shimmer, being at the same time the man she had strolled with on Muir beach in the weeks before the wedding, the pair of them lit up, laughing because they were getting away with it, this remarkable trick of happiness, and some stranger who shambled in and out of the rooms of the house in shorts and sweatshirt (his favourite had ‘Barney’s Beanery’ printed over the heart), tumbler in one fist, cigarette in the other. He reminded her sometimes – still a big man, still solidly built – of a boxer who, the night before the fight, has unaccountably lost his nerve and begun to unravel. What was his problem? What had so bent him out of shape? His father? The drink? Losing his job? Was it something organic? Something in the air? Lead insult? How was she supposed to tell?

As for having another child, to Alice she said, ‘I’m not sure this is really a great time.’ But the reality was simpler and sadder: how could they have a child when for months they had slept with a wall between them? (Two walls: the bedrooms were separated by the passageway.) And what of the child they already had? Hoffmann had rung the evening before she was due to fly with some talk of another episode, though, oddly, he had seemed more concerned about Larry, who, according to the professor, was ‘struggling to articulate the appropriate responses’. What exactly he had meant by this she was unsure, she preferred not to ask, but the phrase looped through her head during the flight over until it acquired some ominous quasi-mystical significance that had threatened to bring on a migraine. Worst of all, it seemed to support her own most private misgivings, the unpalatable fact that she was less and less comfortable leaving Ella alone with Larry. She had seen the way he crossed roads, jaywalking through the traffic, not yet trying to stare it down, not raging at it, but playing with the danger. And he laughed at the television – news items, sad movies – in a way that spooked her. When Natasha Khan, her friend over in Sunset, asked if Larry had a gun in the house (Natasha’s ex kept an assault rifle in the games room) she had immediately gone home and turned out all the drawers in the guest bedroom, uncovering a small stash of pornography and sports magazines, a quart of bourbon, a flight schedule (SF to Vancouver) and, most miserably, a pair of her own panties, not even clean, which he must have fished out of the laundry basket in the shower room. But no gun. And then at Heathrow, Ella on Larry’s shoulders holding up a sheet of paper saying ‘HELLO MOMMY’, they had looked fine together, just fine, and she had felt ashamed of herself. Whatever Larry was, whatever he was becoming, there was a reserve of sweet water in him it was mean of her to doubt. It was Hoffmann perhaps, Hoffmann she should give up trusting.

From the landing Larry called: ‘Decent in there?’

‘We’re decent!’ sang Kirsty.

He came in, flushed in a way she immediately and wearily recognized.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘It’s nice for her feet,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Supper in fifteen minutes. Let’s get your shoes on, Mum.’

She had a pair of trainers, large white cushioned shoes with Velcro straps in place of laces. These had been Una’s suggestion, and though they looked cartoonish on the end of Alice’s skinny legs, they were gentle to her skin, and after the first time she wore them she no longer complained of their ugliness. The thought that they were in some way fashionable had even made her smile.

‘You want some gas?’ asked Kirsty. The bottle, industrial black, was at hand’s reach on the covers.

‘Just the inhaler, dear.’ Larry passed it to her, watched her spray it twice into her mouth; the inadequate in-breath followed by the inevitable, miserable coughing. He slid his arms beneath her shoulders and righted her. She stood, leaning her head against his chest, then they shuffled on to the landing.

‘I’ll go get Ella to wash her hands,’ said Kirsty.

Larry asked: ‘How do you want to do this?’

‘Slowly,’ said Alice. ‘Very slowly.’

The stairs were too narrow for them to descend side by side, so Larry went in front of her, and by keeping two steps below her she could hold on to his shoulders. Her arms were trembling, a feeble electricity that Larry felt through the whole length of his body. When they reached the dining room the others were standing by their chairs, waiting.

‘Here I am,’ she whispered.

Larry guided her to her chair at the head of the table. Alec had found the candles and set them in their silver stems, but the flames, paler than the light that came through the windows, barely showed.

It took another five minutes to get her settled, a cushion wedged behind her back, a linen napkin tucked into the collar of her dress. Sometimes, as she moved, she let out a low, involuntary moan.

‘Hey,’ said Kirsty, ‘don’t you think Alice’s hair looks great? I wish I had someone like Toni at home. Doesn’t her hair look great, Alec?’

‘Yes,’ said Alec. ‘Toni’s very good.’

‘Oh, he doesn’t know,’ said Alice. ‘Everything’s a mystery to him, poor soul…’

She looked at Alec, who had the place on her left. Larry, serving out the risotto, noted it: another of those exchanges he had seen three or four times during the last week, part of some on-going wordless discussion between them. Something he was outside of. He didn’t like it.

‘I hope you’re going to eat this, El.’ He put a spoonful of the sticky rice on to her plate, passed it to her and sat opposite. ‘Bon appétit, everyone! You see, Mum, I learned that much.’

‘Ella’s been learning some cute French songs at school,’ said Kirsty. ‘What’s the name of your teacher, honey? They start the kids real early.’

‘Is this a mushroom?’ asked Ella, holding up a grey comma on the tines of her fork.

‘Yes,’ said Larry. ‘A special kind of delicious mushroom. Try it.’

Ella scraped the mushroom on to the rim of her plate and started picking out the others.

‘Ella!’ He turned to Kirsty. ‘Make her eat something, will you.’

‘You mean force her?’

‘I mean she’s old enough not to play with her food like that.’

‘So she doesn’t like mushrooms. It’s not a major failure, Larry.’

‘Look at him,’ said Alice. She nodded to the photograph on the sideboard of Grandpa Wilcox in uniform. ‘Look at him watching us all.’

‘We’re going to the house, right?’ asked Kirsty.

The visit had been arranged the previous week. Larry had managed to contact the couple who lived there now, Rupert and Stephanie Gadd. When Larry had explained things they were understanding, Rupert Gadd promising to be ‘on stand-by’ the following Sunday. Apparently they were just back from Italy.

‘I remember Granny Wilcox showing me Grandpa’s medal,’ said Larry. ‘You remember it, Alec?’

‘The DSO.’

‘Is that like a Purple Heart or something?’

‘The Distinguished Service Order,’ said Alec.

‘Wow.’

‘Where is it now?’ asked Larry.

‘Arnhem,’ said Alice. She had put some rice on to her fork but hadn’t actually eaten anything. ‘Saved his sergeant. Saved him completely.’

‘I guess he was the real thing,’ said Kirsty.

Larry drew the cork on a bottle of Montepulciano. He was the only one drinking.

‘Go easy today,’ said Kirsty in a low voice.

Larry smiled at her. ‘Do you know what side your Grandfather was on? Old man Friebergs?’

‘Je-sus,’ said Kirsty, rolling her eyes.

‘Latvians fought with the Nazis,’ explained Larry.

‘They had more reason to hate Russians than Germans,’ said Alec.

‘How’s your guy?’ asked Kirsty.

‘Lázár? He might have shot a few Russians, I suppose.’

‘I think it was called the Condor legion,’ said Larry. ‘Is that right? Or the White Eagles. A kind of Latvian SS.’

Kirsty glared across the table. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. And my father fought in Korea, so don’t you dare say my family are some kind of Nazis.’

Ella, who had shown no interest in her risotto, asked if she could have a banana. Larry said no, but Kirsty took one from the fruit bowl and peeled it for her.

‘I hate this kind of talk,’ she said. ‘I don’t want Ella to even have to think about it.’

‘A great American tradition,’ said Larry. He pushed away his plate and reached for his glass, but the wine was too light. He needed a real drink. He needed to get out.

‘Granny’s crying,’ said Ella.

It was true. Head bowed over her uneaten supper, one sticky tear had made it to the end of Alice’s nose.

‘Hey, hey… what is it?’ Kirsty went to her and put her arm around her shoulders. She sounded close to tears herself. ‘Are you tired? Huh?’

Larry crouched on the other side of the chair. Alice was saying something but he couldn’t understand her.

‘You want to rest a little?’ asked Kirsty. ‘You want to go back upstairs?’

‘She’s just come down,’ said Larry.

‘For Chrissakes! If she wants to go back up. You want to go back up, Alice?’

Alice sniffed. ‘So sorry,’ she said. ‘What a mess.’

‘OK,’ said Larry, ‘we can do this another night.’ He took his mother’s arms, drawing her from the chair. Over her shoulder he hissed: ‘Where’s Alec?’

Kirsty looked round, shrugged. Ella, her mouth crammed with banana, pointed to the open door.

After this, the evening failed at its own pace. Ella was sat in front of the television set, as if, in any emergency, this was the natural thing to do with a child. Kirsty stayed upstairs with Alice, coming down half an hour later to make fruit tea for her. Alec, lurking in the kitchen, knew that he should go up and check the pillbox. It was his job – the only one of any consequence that he had – but to go into that room now and take the risk of catching Alice’s eye, of not being able to defend himself from what he saw there, of her seeing how utterly split he was between pity and disgust, this was too much. And really, what did it matter if she took her medication? Her fucking medication. It was rare for Alec to speak an obscenity, unusual for him even to think one, but he found himself alone with the supper dishes, muttering to the soapsuds like a derelict. Fucking Larry with his fucking wife. Their idiotic fucking behaviour. His own behaviour. His own fucking stupidity. His fucking cowardice.

‘Not the hugest success,’ said Larry, breezing in with a tray from the dining room.

‘Are you surprised?’ asked Alec. ‘When you go on like that?’ He didn’t look at Larry but he heard the sharp offended intake of air.

‘Like what?’

‘Bickering.’

‘Who was bickering?’

‘Who do you think?’

‘So it’s all my fault?’

‘Can’t you see how ill she is?’

‘Of course I can see! What do you expect me to do about it?’

‘Show some basic consideration.’

‘Well, that’s pretty rich coming from you,’ said Larry, prodding his brother’s shoulder as if to remind him who, between the two of them, had the physical power. ‘Where were you hiding? Eh? Where did you run away to?’

‘You know who you remind me of these days?’ said Alec, scrubbing the non-stick surface off the rice pan. ‘Dad.’

‘I was wondering how long before someone came out with that crap. I just didn’t expect it to be you. Christ! A couple of drinks would improve you no end.’

‘Yeah. I can see how much good it’s done you.’

‘And try getting laid once in a while. I’ll even lend you the money.’

‘Is that what you do? Is that why you two can’t talk to each other any more?’

‘Keep your nose out of it, Alec.’

‘Or were we supposed not to notice?’

‘Go to hell!’

"You go to hell.’

‘What’s going on?’ asked Kirsty.

‘Nothing at all,’ said Larry. He picked up a cloth, and with elaborate care started to dry one of the glasses.

Kirsty frowned, then slid Alice’s mug into the hot water, resting her other hand on Alec’s back. ‘I think she took all her drugs.’

‘Thanks,’ said Alec.

‘She said some weird stuff when we were in the bathroom. Still, I guess she was tired.’

‘What kind of stuff?’ asked Larry.

‘Stuff you say when you’re tired.’ She yawned. ‘I’m gonna put Ella to bed.’

An hour later she went to bed herself. She had moved into the downstairs room with Ella; Larry had shifted his gear upstairs to Alec’s room, where there was an old-fashioned camp bed of tubular steel and wire mesh. There were only single beds in the spare room so this new arrangement had been passed off as a purely practical matter, though who this was intended to fool or reassure, Larry didn’t know.

The brothers finished the clearing up then sat on the sofa in the living room to watch the evening news. After the May election the government was getting busy, declaring a Year Zero, salvaging the nation’s future by making it modern and fashionable. Among the politicians they interviewed there was a strange, compulsive use of the word ‘new’.

Think it’ll work?’ asked Larry.

‘Plus ça change,’ said Alec. But he admired them for trying. For doing something.

Larry said he thought they were some kind of Khmer Rouge, and that he intended to visit a good old English pub while there was still one left to visit. He remembered a place called the Blue Flame, fifteen minutes’ walk across the fields. Flagstone floors, wooden barrels, not quite clean. A place with pickled eggs and cheap cigarettes.

‘Do you mind?’ It was understood that one of them would have to stay for Alice.

Alec shook his head. ‘I might do some work.’

‘No hard feelings about tonight?’

‘No hard feelings.’

‘Just letting off steam. It’s bound to happen.’

‘I know.’

‘Catch you later, then.’

‘Sure.’

When he was gone, Alec switched off the television. Out of the quiet came the sound of his mother’s coughing, a muffled hacking and retching that reached its crescendo, then slowly died away. He hurried into the garden, crossing the lawn and gulping down lungfuls of milky air. In the summerhouse he struck a match, lit the storm lantern and set it on the shelf by the portrait of Lázár. Then he sharpened his pencils, opened the manuscript of Oxygène, and for twenty minutes performed a kind of mime of work until the deception was no longer tolerable, and he leaned back on the rear legs of his chair to watch the insects that came to the light through the open window, among them a pair of large butter-coloured moths that knocked the dust from their wings on the glass waist of the lantern and flew like manic angels around the playwright’s head.

A little before midnight, Larry returned, crooning some country-and-western number as he clambered over the stile and weaved his way back to the house. Alec extinguished the flame in the lantern and sat on in the dark, long enough, he hoped, for Larry to have got to bed. He didn’t want to speak to him again tonight. Though they had made their peace, he was still shaken by the row in the kitchen, could still feel where Larry had jabbed his shoulder. And where were you hiding? Go to hell! They had fought often enough as kids, as teenagers, passionately against each other for half an hour. But tonight he had seen something new, an anguish that mirrored his own, a depth of trouble he knew nothing about and could not have explained. Kirsty had been right the evening he called San Francisco (and he had been wrong): people change. And how credulous of him, how unthinkably naive, to imagine that his brother would just go on the same, untouched by the disorder that found its way unerringly to others lives – to every life in time. But how was he to understand himself now? What more telling definition of himself could he hope to find other than being what Larry was not? He had never questioned it. Had anyone? It was the easiest way to think about him. So what now? If Larry wasn’t ‘Larry’ any more, who was Alec?

At a quarter to one he recrossed the garden. Flower-heads showed silvery against the dark of the foliage, and the night felt heavy, liquid, the stars not quite in focus. Perhaps it meant a change in the weather, a heavy dew tomorrow. He locked the terrace doors, drank a glass of tap water in the kitchen, and was on the point of switching off the lights in the living room when his attention was caught by the card table in the alcove beneath the stairs. He had put the table there the day after Alice came out of hospital, and at the same time had put the pieces of the little conjuring game back in the box. But now they were out again, the three red cups in a line across the centre of the table. He went closer. Who had taken them out? Larry? Why should he? Certainly not Kirsty. Ella, then. Ella, of course. If nothing else, her obsessive nature betrayed her: the intervals between the cups must have been uniform to within a centimetre or two. But when? And who had she wanted to play with? He crouched, studying the cups in turn, then lifted the middle one.

‘You win,’ he whispered. He picked up the right-hand cup. Still there was nothing. He turned over the last.

Nestled on the baize, like the egg of some giant hornet or dragonfly, was the capsule – shiny blue and shiny red. He picked it up. It was almost weightless, its little load of pharmaceuticals just visible through the slightly dented glycerin skin. The hair prickled on the back of his neck, and he swung round as though expecting to catch Larry or Ella or, God knows, Alice, standing by the door, watching him, seeing the expression on his face, and knowing what he must be thinking. But he was quite alone. Nobody was going to disturb him.

He placed the capsule between his lips, tore a strip from the evening paper, wrapped the capsule, and slid it into the breast pocket of his shirt. Then he put away the cups, closed the box, turned out the lights and went upstairs, pausing for a moment, in a kind of passion, outside his mother’s room.

10

At 8.45 on a morning of dazzling sunlight, László Lázár stepped down on to the platform at Westbahnhof. In one hand he carried his old blue ‘pilot’s’ bag; in the other a black holdall of tough imitation leather handed to him at the Gare de l’Est the previous evening by a middle-aged man he had never seen before.

It was not, of course, the money – that would come later – and when he had looked inside it, locked into one of the toilets on the train, he had found it to contain nothing but a dozen newspapers – Le Monde Diplomatique – and two large white bath towels, presumably for the sake of bulk. In Vienna he kept it with him, depositing the blue bag at left luggage and taking a taxi to the Opera House, killing time in Kärntner Strasse, Singer Strasse, the Hoher market. Several times he paused to watch the street in a store window, trying to catch from out of the animated sheen of passers-by a glimpse of any figure that stopped when he stopped, but the only persistent face, the only face his trick surprised into a guilty stillness (a face like milk splashed on dark wood), was his own.

At 12.30 he returned to Westbahnhof and took a seat in the station restaurant, a table between a pillar and a large pot plant, from where he had a clear view of the glass and steel doors. There were still twenty-five minutes before the rendezvous, but this time he did not intend to be startled by an unseen approach, as he had been at the station in Paris, turning to find a face too close to his own, a stare like a policeman’s, a voice reciting, ‘Françoise said to give you this,’ in an accent he was starting to be familiar with.

The waitress came, a plump girl, profoundly bored, and stood beside him with her pad of paper. He had no appetite – the fag of tramping with the holdall through a hot city he had little affection for had triggered a nagging headache – but he selected something at random from the menu and ordered a bottle of Kaiser beer. She brought the beer immediately. It was cold and it seemed to do him some good. He relaxed a little, closing his eyes, trying to come to terms with the fact that he was here at all – in Vienna! – when in a saner, more orderly world he would be at his desk in Paris, picking at lines of dialogue and starting to wonder what there might be in the fridge for lunch.

The rhythms of the train were in his blood still, a sensation distantly familiar to him, for he had once known the night train well. Four or five times a year he had taken it to visit his mother and Uncle Ernö. ‘The Orient Express’ – an exotic name for a conveyance that was neither luxurious nor even particularly fast. Six berths to a compartment, eleven compartments to a car, and along the length of the carriage a narrow corridor where people smoked and leaned at the windows, gazing moodily at dark blue fields and the lights of strange towns.

And there was always some incident, some curious encounter. On this trip he had spent an hour somewhere in Eastern France calming the fears of a red-haired American girl who had heard, or perhaps read in one of those tedious guidebooks no one seemed capable of leaving home without, that there were criminal gangs who sprayed knockout gas into the sleeping cars in order to rob, or even to murder, the unconscious passengers. His English – unused since San Francisco – was shaky, and she spoke nothing else, but with the help of some schnapps he had at last succeeded in making her see the absurdity of her fears, though privately he suspected that farther to the east (Romania?) such gangs did indeed exist, for these were desperate times.

Once the girl was asleep, and the Frenchman on the berth below her ceased to grind his teeth, László had stretched out on his own bunk, and thought back to to his last journey on the Orient Express, the winter of 1989, when he had come to Vienna to watch his mother die. János had flown in from New York (where his marriage to Patty was ending in the divorce courts), and the pair of them had carried on a three-day vigil at their mother’s bedside in the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, János muttering in László’s ear about justice and love and private detectives, while László watched the February snow, silver and dark, building drifts on the sill of the narrow window above his mother’s head.

It was the type of end that people call ‘peaceful’: the old woman, skeletal after months of wasting, suddenly absent, the breath gone out of her mouth, her eyes shut like a pharaoh’s. A brief, apparently untroubled translation. But at the instant of her going he had been shaken by the sense that in that cramped and curtained space at the end of the ward something revelatory had taken place, sacred even, and he had clutched at it in the hope that his grief could be meaningful, a noble effort to reconcile himself to the will of the transcendent. But the moment didn’t stay. He was too much of the materialist, brought up on dialectics, the True Path, the Victory of Socialism. He had no grounding in religion, no child-learned texts with which to dress the moment up in language, no consoling images of souls in flight. So her death, like that other, earlier death, in Budapest, had remained untransfigured, and merely what it was: an enigma that outstared reason, and left him for a while in a perfection of loneliness that had frightened him badly.

Afterwards, when the formalities were done, the papers signed and the porters had taken her to the morgue (a little flower of bruises on her wrist where the drip needle had been), the brothers had clung to each other in the corridor outside the ward, two middle-aged men, unshaven, raw-eyed, foreigners in a rage with death, while either side of them the nurses went about their business, walking on soft-soled shoes that seemed to make no noise at all.

‘Bitte?’

His food had arrived: a slab of pork surrounded by a mess of green which, consulting the menu, he discovered to be creamed spinach. He picked up his fork, afraid that it would look suspicious if he made no attempt to eat what he had ordered, but after the first mouthful he decided that it would look more suspicious to eat such food, and he pushed aside his plate, glancing up from the table at the very instant his contact emerged through the swing-doors.

She had cut and dyed her hair (auburn) and was dressed in faded jeans and a man’s blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, but there was no mistaking her: Emil’s friend, though shorn of that aura of severity which, in Paris, had shivered from her skin like smoke. She looked now like someone’s favourite niece – his, perhaps! – smiling and crossing to his table with a confident swing of the hips. Over her shoulder she carried a bag identical to his own, though from the tautness of the strap, the way she lowered it carefully to the floor beside his chair, it was evidently much heavier.

She kissed his cheeks. ‘You had a good trip?’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

She sat opposite him and lit a cigarette. When the waitress came she ordered a Coke.

‘You should eat,’ she said, looking at his plate.

László shrugged. ‘The heat…’

‘There may be a storm later,’ she said.

‘You think so?’

He would have liked to have known what the rules were here, whether he was to assume they could be overheard, despite the fact there was no one at the tables either side of them, and there was music, the inevitable dreary waltz, seeping from speakers hidden in the walls. He thought they should have given him some training in Paris. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself.

He leaned towards her. ‘Will you be coming with me?’

‘No,’ she said. Then with a trace of her old impatience, ‘Of course not.’

She drank her Coke and crushed an ice cube between her teeth. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘The Budapest train leaves at fourteen-twenty. When you reach the city you will stay at the Hotel Opera on Révay utca. Do you know it?’

‘I know the street. Near the Basilica.’

‘Correct.’

‘And what do I do there?’

‘You go sightseeing.’

‘For how long?’

‘Two, three days. Leave the bag in the hotel safe.’

‘Wouldn’t it be safer to keep it with me?’

‘It is important that you do exactly as we ask. Nothing more and nothing less. When everything is ready you will be contacted.’

‘How?’

‘That is for others to decide.’

She tapped out her cigarette, then reached down, very casually, to take hold of the strap of his bag.

‘You have everything you need?’

‘But that depends on you,’ said László.

She allowed herself the briefest of smiles. ‘Enjoy your vacation,’ she said. He wanted to ask her whether they would meet again, but already he felt quite sure that they would not. He was sorry for it. Having so thoroughly disliked her at their first meeting, he now decided she was admirable, pure as a blade, though he suspected it was a purity that might one day feel justified in leaving a device in a crowded bar. Charlotte Corday, Ulrike Meinhof. Joan of Arc! How odd he should find himself her confederate in this affair. He watched her walk away. Was she ‘Françoise’? It was a long time since a woman had interested him like this. He was pleased to find it was still possible.

He signalled for the bill, paid in cash and left a tip, but when he came to lift the bag the weight of it astonished him. He had to adjust his grip, bend at the knees a little, hoist the thing on to his shoulder. How much money felt like this? Quarter of a million? Half a million? Impossible, of course, to guess the value without knowing the currency. Deutschmarks or dollars, presumably. Krugerrands? Perhaps. Whatever it was, the donations of the diaspora had obviously been generous, though many of them were gastarbeiter and must have felt the loss of what they gave. For the rest, a tycoon like Bexhet Pacolli could have made the bag heavier without much sacrifice. So, too, those who had become wealthy in more sinister ways (the heroin racket in Zurich was said to be run by Albanians, and the capos there might have welcomed the chance to buy influence). Unlikely that Emil and his friends would be greatly worried by the provenance of the money. In times of need, hard currency could always justify itself.

He bought his ticket in the station hall, collected his pilot’s bag, and went on to the platform, where the train (the ‘Bela Bartók’) was on time, the engine and a score of dusty carriages creeping in under the afternoon shadows of the station. László boarded and edged down the aisle until he came to a compartment emptier than the rest, with two unoccupied seats facing forward. Here, he stowed the blue bag on the overhead rack and sat on the seat by the window, the black bag at his feet, one loop of the strap wound around his wrist. Behind him, two Hungarian voices, city accents like his own but with an argot he didn’t always understand, discussed the latest Ferencváros game. The carriage was stifling – old rolling stock with no air-conditioning – and he longed to sleep, but waking up in Budapest with the bag missing would be a very expensive mistake indeed. It might, quite literally, be more than his life was worth.

A whistle blew, a child was held up to wave goodbye, a little air began to eddy in at the tops of the windows. He sat back, took, or tried to take, a deep breath, but his lungs were sticky, and when he tried a second time, forcing it, there was a pain, like a ravel of irritated nerve ends threaded through his ribs in a line beneath his left armpit. Now here was another thought to play with. After all, there would be nothing extraordinary about a man of his age having a coronary on a hot day, travelling. In casualty they would open the bag looking for his medication, or just made curious by the weight of it. A pity he would not be there to see their faces.

He put on his sunglasses and retrieved a crumpled copy of Die Presse that had been pushed under the seat in front. He was becoming exasperated with himself, his relentless self-concern, his fantasies of collapse, of finding himself looking up from the floor at the faces of strangers, someone – there was always someone – shouting ‘Don’t move him!’. Did he wish for it? The failure that would excuse all others. Poor László! What could he do? A sick man! Helpless!

At Hegyeshalom, an hour out of Vienna, customs officers boarded the train. The Austrians, with their snappy berets and blue-grey tunics, were almost dapper; by contrast, the Hungarian trio, in caps and rumpled khaki, had the hapless look of young military conscripts, though for László, uniforms of any description could still provoke in him the old fear that those who wore them were spiders who moved along the web of the law, and whose interest could snare him in a tangle he would never escape from. He unwound the strap from his wrist and took off his sunglasses.

‘French?’ asked one of the Hungarians, in English, as László passed over the passport, which in 1971, after the success of Sisyphus Rex, the French government had at last seen fit to grant him.

‘From Budapest,’ said László, replying in Hungarian.

‘Budapest?’

‘Forty years ago.’ He wondered if the other understood. How much would he know about ’56? People would not remember it forever. Another generation and it would be a paragraph in a textbook memorized by schoolchildren for the sake of an examination question.

‘You’ve been about,’ said the young man, scrutinizing the stamps in László’s passport.

‘For my work,’ said László, and he prepared himself to deliver an acceptable explanation of what his work was. He knew from experience that customs officials were often nervous about writers, a tendency at its worst in those places with a long tradition of locking them up, and where the habit, the reflex of persecution, was hard for them to break. But he then realised that the young man was only envious of those enticing little stamps, and was, in fact, not particularly interested who came into Hungary, or who left. Hungary would be in the Community soon, another branch of the great European department store. The world had moved on; the grey-faced men, those who had worn coats lined with frost, were lost in the very history they had thought themselves the masters of. The country was open now, though László did not think he would ever quite get used to that. It had come too late for his generation.

They stopped again at Györ, then continued across the plain, where the heat rose in a silvery haze from grasslands and cornfields. Broad, low, farmhouses floated past; cars queued patiently at a level crossing; shadows indolent as moat water surrounded the blackened walls of an old Soviet-era industrial plant. László leaned his head against the window and fell asleep. Immediately, he began to dream, discovering himself in a street he did not quite recognize, one of those urban settings collaged by the unconscious from a dozen different cities; places lived in, or seen from the window of a taxi, or on a cinema screen. He was dressed in a baggy black suit like a type of circus clown, and dragged behind him an enormous overpacked suitcase tied shut with lengths of string. At the corner of the street, garbed in the outfit of a Mexican bandido, Emil Bexheti leaned against the wall with his arm around the shoulders of a beautiful woman, who laughed shrilly to see László stumbling up the dust of the street. And yet the mood of the dream was not oppressive. In spite of the sense that he could not possibly carry his burden much farther, he was content, almost cheerful, in the dogged fashion of a man who acts out his fate knowing that there can be no other. And after a while he ceased to hear the woman’s laughter. The city abruptly ended and he was out in the country, hauling the case – which now he dimly recognized as the one he had left Hungary with, his father’s case, a thing of solid burnished leather with the initials ‘A.L’ stencilled on the top – along a white road that undulated into the remote distance; a white ribbon threaded through a deserted arcadia, which would lead him, unerringly somehow, to his final destination…

He woke as they were pulling into Kelati station, the spell, the unexpected peacefulness of his dream, replaced by a great agitation of noise and movement. In a panic he reached forward, cursing himself and scrabbling under the pages of the newspaper that had fallen from his lap while he slept, and then, in his relief, laughing out loud as his fingers grazed the waxy sides of the bag.

He clambered with it down on to the platform, weaving through the gangs of accommodation touts, tough-looking women mostly, holding up cards with ‘Room to rent’ spelled out in English and German and Italian. Above their heads, pigeons flew in swift formations, their wings rippling the light that fell in a wash from the great fan window at the city end of the station. Émigré, playwright, international courier, László Lázár was back, and in his old language he silently greeted his old home.

11

On Sunday morning, Alice Valentine waited on the sofa in the living room at Brooklands. She was wearing a fawn winter coat, and round her neck a stole of mink fur, with a mink’s desiccated head on either end of it. The stole had belonged to her mother, and fifty years ago might have bestowed some glamour on a young woman with an evening dress and a powdered throat, but time and hordes of golden moths had done much damage to it. The creatures, with their glass eyes and ragged ears, seemed to be suffering from acute alopecia, and Alec thought of the old dog skin at the end of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, dropped from a window on to a dust heap. But Alice had wanted it, and after long searching he had found it coiled in a hatbox at the back of a wardrobe on the landing. None of them knew why she wanted it; perhaps in tribute to her mother on the visit to the old house. No one asked her for reasons any more.

It was a quarter to twelve by the time they left: Larry, Ella and Kirsty in the back of the car, Larry with his knees almost up to his chin; Alice in the front with her stick, her oxygen, her tissues, her supermarket carrier bag of pill bottles. They travelled on minor roads under the looped shadows of the trees, Alec leaning forward at the wheel like a card player, though there was almost no traffic. Ella, in a green frock and sandals, sat between her parents, poised and silent. Larry scratched the top of her head and she gazed up at him.

‘How you?’ he whispered. ‘How we?’

They had had their little talk about the return of the capsule (‘our secret’), though he had spoken to her more in gratitude than reproach. He was grateful to Alec too. Evidently his conversation with her had been more effective than they had realized. The thing was gone now; Alec had sent it the same way as the others (extraordinary what gets flushed down people’s toilets!), so that particular crisis was over. He had been unexpectedly reprieved, and the escape had invigorated him, so that for the first time in months he felt that better things might be possible. If he could rein back on the booze, the powder, the tablets, the mood swings, the lying, this time perhaps he would defy the lengthening odds and make the world right again. But the change would have to be convincing. It would have to show on his skin like a light, for there were only so many times a person could promise reform before the words ‘I’ll change’ began to sound like ‘I want to change but I can’t’. It might, of course, be too late; he was so cut off from Kirsty’s private thinking now, the tendency of her thinking. For all he knew she had already instructed someone in the States, some lawyer, and he’d go home to find the paperwork waiting for him. She’d had a week on her own over there, and that Khan bitch might have talked her into something. But it was his instinct that he still had one last chance, and he intended to reach for it.

With his left arm laid along the top of the seat – his hand behind the nape of his wife’s neck so that she would only have to lean back a little for them to be touching—he gazed through the side window of the car and saw a half-dozen rabbits scattering across a field. Sheep grazed; lion-coloured cows stood by troughs in the shade of trees, swishing their tails. There was corn growing and oilseed rape, and red tractors raising a dust in the hayfields. In spite of everything – motorways, pesticide, a million new homes – here at least the country had retained its riches, its mannerly beauty. In his hurry to put England behind him he had underprized this. Now he felt the tug of it, as though this landscape – the first he had opened his eyes to – had some authoritative claim on him, something at the level of blood, which he was finally ready to acknowledge.

He looked at his mother, hunched in her seat as though the air were hardening on her shoulders. Could she take any pleasure in this? Was that still possible? It was a long time since she had been out of the house – a long time since going somewhere meant anything other than going to the hospital – and when he and Kirsty had gone in with her morning tea (into the shaded room no breeze seemed to freshen) she had been so flustered and confused they had wondered if the outing would be possible at all. She had complained wretchedly that she could no longer find any position to be comfortable in; how at night she wanted to turn on to her side but was afraid she would suffocate. Then, when Kirsty left them alone – Ella calling ‘Mom!’ from the bottom of the stairs – she had said she knew what a ‘kind doctor’ would do, a remark that Larry had refused to understand, though she had followed him around the room with her eyes until Kirsty came back and he could escape into the garden for a smoke.

For days now (months?) he had been trying to gather in himself the courage to speak to her. He needed – and the need was urgent – to appear before her as he truly was, to make himself visible to her: no more the shining target of her old pride, but a man who had proved unequal to those imperfections in himself he had barely suspected the existence of five years ago. And though he supposed she had already resigned herself to the loss of the old dream in which they had been such loyal partners, he was afraid that she would slip away (say ‘die’, Larry!) while some pretence still clouded the space between them. He needed to be recognized. It would take no more than a moment’s attention, a hand raised in blessing, but he would have to choose his moment with the utmost care. And choose it very soon.

To the right of them was Salisbury Plain: low, pale green hills jointed to the sky by fragments of dense, dark woodland. Then as they came within twenty miles of the house, Alice began to point things out. A church where she had once been a bridesmaid. A haunted pub. The gates of an estate behind which some local character had lived out a lordly decline.

To Ella, Kirsty explained: ‘This is where Gran’ma lived when she was a little girl.’

‘OK,’ said Ella, and she put on a short mime of looking out with interest, though there wasn’t much to excite a child from North Beach who had seen canyons and mountains and giant sequoia trees.

When Alec missed the turn-off, Alice waved a crumpled tissue at him and called him a fool, as if they drove this way every week. He apologized, reversed, and turned into a lane that ran between unmown verges, the ruts and potholes blue with last week’s rain.

‘Wow,’ said Kirsty, ‘real countryside.’

‘We may see some bears,’ said Larry. ‘Better wind up your window, Mum.’

But she wasn’t listening to them any more. She wasn’t interested in their chatter. This was private.

Larry leaned forward and touched his brother’s shoulder. ‘You remember this?’

Alec nodded. There were fields here they had once played in together, greening their knees. And certain small farms they had worked on during the holidays or at weekends, baling or scrumping, earning a few pounds, then drinking milk in the farmhouse kitchen when it was too dark to work. It stirred them, seeing it again, the lane twisting into the hills like time itself, and for the last fifteen minutes the journey was processional and solemn and they rode in silence.

The house stood alone on a stretch of road at the outskirts of the village: two storeys of red brick with the year ‘1907’ pricked out in black paint on a stone above the front door. From the outside at least, the place did not look very different, though there were new high gates, and a yellow alarm box prominent beside an upstairs window, and in the centre of the driveway a little fountain – cherub and urn – as in a country hotel. Alec parked the car between a Range Rover and a green MG, and as the brothers gently levered Alice from her seat, an old Labrador limped over the gravel to meet them, snuffling at the hem of Alice’s coat, as if the mink, dead half a century ago, still leaked some subtle feral stink.

‘Shoo,’ sighed Alice, but the dog was full of doggish interest in her, and followed them to the front door. Larry tugged at the craftwork iron bell-pull (a plain electric buzzer in Grandma Wilcox’s day), and after a minute the jangling was answered by a young man, twenty, twenty-two, who stood in the door frame, pale and pretty, his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, looking at them as if good style meant a level of unresponsiveness that bordered on the moronic. Evidently, no one had told him who this gaunt and weirdly dressed woman might be. He leaned against the door and drawled, ‘I’m Tom.’

‘Yes,’ said Alice, and letting go of her sons she staggered past him into the dark of the hall.

‘We’ve come to visit,’ said Alec, hurrying after her, afraid that she would crash disastrously on to the tiles.

‘Name of Valentine,’ added Larry, grinning at the boy’s discomfort and following the others inside.

‘We’re Valentines too!’ said Kirsty. ‘Do you have a bathroom for my little girl?’

By the time they were all in the house, Stephanie Gadd had emerged from one of the downstairs rooms, a woman in the vicinity of fifty, youthful, vigorous, dressed casually but punctiliously in navy blue slacks and a chiffon blouse. She had a string of pearls at her neck, which she turned and tangled in her fingers as she spoke.

‘Well done!’ she cried. ‘Did you have an awful journey? Tom had a B of a time coming down from London.’ She smiled at her son, lingeringly, then, without turning, gestured to the man behind her. ‘And this is Rupert, my other half.’

‘Really pleased you could make it,’ said Rupert. He grimaced and shook hands, squeezing hard as if he hoped to communicate dumb sincerity through the force of his grip, though when Larry squeezed back, much of the colour left the older man’s face.

Tom was asked to show Ella and Kirsty to the downstairs loo. The others were led into the dining room where an elaborate buffet lunch was laid out on snowy tablecloths.

‘Just finger food, I’m afraid,’ said Stephanie. ‘I don’t think people want anything substantial when the weather’s this warm.’

Alice was seated between Alec and Rupert. She would not be parted from her coat or stole, and sat in her place like the last days of a Hollywood starlet, or one of those women undone by absinthe in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.

When Kirsty and Ella came back, Stephanie handed out the plates and invited everyone to help themselves. On Sundays they were very informal and she hoped that was all right. Rupert drew the cork from a bottle of wine and held up the bottle to the light. He said he belonged to a wine club – ‘nothing too serious, just some chaps’ – but they had been impressed by this red from Peru.

‘Just pour it, darling,’ said Stephanie. She made an elaborate female solidarity face at Kirsty, who did her best to return it.

At the window end of the table, Tom Gadd, still unbuttoned, occupied his chair with a kind of doomed elegance, toying with a slice of Parma ham, a stuffed olive, then, with a blatant yawn, excusing himself to make some phonecalls.

Alice sipped at a glass of mineral water but ate nothing. For several minutes towards the end of the meal she appeared to be asleep, but when Stephanie returned from the kitchen carrying a tray of sliced peaches and freshly made meringues, saying how sorry she was she didn’t have more, that it wasn’t more special, that it was just something to ‘fill a hole’, Alice silenced her, calling out in a voice retrieved with visible effort, and saying, ‘Please! Please can we see the house now?’

There was an instant’s confusion. The skin on Stephanie’s face tautened, as though her self-control might be far more fragile than her manner had so far suggested. But she recovered herself, set down the tray, and touched her pearls. ‘How very thoughtless of me,’ she said. ‘Of course you can see the house now. Rupert!’

‘Absolutely,’ said Rupert, springing from his seat. ‘Are we all going together?’

They started in the lounge, filing in behind Stephanie, who, sketching freely in the air, explained how they had knocked through and enlarged and finally forced upon these simple rooms a type of luxuriousness. In each of the rooms there came a moment when they gathered around Alice as though to witness a public act of recollection, but her gaze was distracted. She frowned as if they had brought her to the wrong house, or she was searching for something in particular, something that wasn’t there, the fine end of a thread that would lead her back.

They went upstairs, Alice at the front clutching on to Larry’s arm, the others inching up behind them.

‘You have a beautiful home,’ said Kirsty.

‘How kind,’ said Stephanie. ‘We keep our little place in London, but it’s not the old London now.’

‘Can’t buy a morning paper,’ said Rupert, ‘unless you speak Portuguese or Urdu.’

‘Un moment!" called Stephanie, striding to the head of the column. She opened the door at the far end of the corridor and announced the master bedroom. ‘We brought the mirror in Italy,’ she said. And then to Alec: ‘Do you know Siena well?’

Larry, who thought he might be able to have a lot of fun at these people’s expense, picked up a photograph from the mantelpiece beside the mirror. Two boys in cricket whites in the school grounds of some middle-ranking English public school. The boy with the bat was recognizably the languid Tom. The other boy, slightly older, blond-brown hair in a flop over one of his eyes, held up a ball as though he had just taken five wickets and was trying not to look too pleased with himself. At the far left of the picture there was the green flutter of a woman’s dress, and the dark green brim of her hat. Larry put the photograph back on the mantelpiece, catching sight in the mirror of Stephanie Gadd staring at him with an expression he had last seen on Betty Bone’s face in the San Fernando Valley.

At the window, Alice was gazing down into the garden. It was smaller than the one at Brooklands, and neater, running down a slight incline between beech hedges to the bank of a stream. The others joined her.

‘There,’ said Alice, a voice barely audible. ‘There…’

‘Do you mean the old willow?’ asked Stephanie.

Alice nodded, pressing on the glass with her fingertips.

‘You want to go into the garden, Mum?’ asked Alec.

She turned to him and smiled, beamed at him as if she were surprised to find him there, and his suggesting that they go out somehow made it possible. ‘What an angel,’ she said. And then turning to Stephanie Gadd, she repeated it: ‘My son is an angel.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Stephanie, her hand straying towards the pearls again. ‘Yes, I can see that.’

For a few minutes the garden gave Alice new strength. With her stick she moved on her own across the trimmed lawn with more energy than she had been able to muster in weeks. It was mid-afternoon, the velvet hour. At the point of farthest visibility, the air was silver and slate, darkening nearer the horizon, almost purple. Something was building out there, new weather, but it was still a long way off, and might, in the end, come to nothing.

‘The place doesn’t look too bad on a day like this,’ said Rupert. He was standing with Kirsty in the shade of the house.

‘Oh, I think it’s heavenly,’ she said.

‘Old fellow from the village mostly. Can’t understand a word he says but he’s reliable. Steph’s the brains behind it all.’

‘It was kind of you to let us come.’

‘Not at all.’

‘I think she’s OK now,’ said Kirsty, watching Alice pause to lean her face into the heart of a large yellow rose.

‘Still,’ said Rupert, ‘it must be wretched for her.’ Then in a voice that was quite different, he added, ‘We lost Tom’s brother to leukaemia two years ago. They used Tom’s bone marrow but it didn’t help much.’ He grinned, as though his face suffered from a poverty of expressions. ‘Poor Tommy seems to think it was his fault. You know. Thinks he should have done more.’

When Alice started to slow down, a toy unwinding, they brought out a chair for her and tried to coax her into the shade. They were solicitous and complained that she was overexerting herself, but she insisted they set the chair on the grass in front of the willow. Alec helped her to sit. She clutched at his hand and told him it was the garden she had come back for. Nothing in the house had helped her–who were those people? – but the tree was miraculously unchanged. The perfectly kept secret of itself! The same tree she had seen each morning from her bedroom window as she got ready for school. The tree behind whose branches she had hidden with Samuel, her head on his shoulder, Sunday afternoons before he took the train back to London. The tree she had stood beside the night she went out to rescue her father. The night he told her about the flame-throwers. Did he know about that?

Alec nodded. He had no idea what she was talking about. And could this really be the same tree? He had his doubts. But her face had acquired that particular waxy glaze that meant her pain was on the flood. ‘We ought to go,’ he said.

She gestured with her hand. She wanted to stay a little longer. Sit there on her own. She was expecting someone. She didn’t know who. Not yet. But someone. ‘I’m very tired,’ she said. ‘Don’t know if I can stand up again.’

‘I’ll help when you’re ready,’ he said.

‘Will you?’

‘When you’re ready.’

He crossed the garden and joined the others on the patio, where they had gathered under a sun umbrella.

‘Everything all right?’

‘Fine,’ he said.

Stephanie brought out a jug of home-made lemonade, and for twenty minutes they made small talk, a shrill to-and-fro of pleasantries that only Ella felt free to ignore, twisting in her seat to stare at Alice’s back, at those fascinating creatures slung over her shoulders, those little savage heads, their glass eyes prinked with sunlight. It was a sight she would remember even into middle age, long after she had forgotten the house and the people who lived there, or even why they had gone. She asked about it when her mother came to visit her and the grandchildren in New York (the Thanksgiving of 2037), but Kirsty had no memory of mink heads, though she could recall, she said, clear as day, the storm on the drive home, and, of course, the birthday party the following week. And all that that entailed.

12

When the phone rang he snatched up the receiver, certain it would be his contact giving him a time and a place to hand over the bag, but it was the automated wake-up service informing him that it was 8.30 a.m. He lay back on the pillows. He was in a large clean bed in a large clean room. Muted colours, everything new. A large window with a net curtain looked over the narrow street. There was very little noise. Filtered sunlight fell on the glass-topped table.

For another half-hour he drowsed, then dragged off the sheets and went through to the bathroom, opening the complimentary bottles of shower gel, shampoo, conditioner, and standing under the shower with his face turned up to the jet. He had, he reckoned, stayed in over two hundred different hotels in the last twenty years, sometimes for pleasure, but mostly on work trips, ‘business’ (as if he had a business!). Places where he waited for an interview, for a discussion with a producer, a call from home. Rented space where the life of the last tenant was often still apparent in a trace of tobacco smoke or a hair laced around the plug chain. Sometimes much grosser evidence. In a hotel in London he had once found a splash of blood on a bathroom tile, and in a good hotel in Dublin – recommended – an unflushable human turd.

At the Hotel Opera on Révay utca, breakfast was included in the price of the room and served in a restaurant on the ground floor. On his way past the front desk, László raised a hand in greeting to the waist-coated receptionist with whom he had left the black bag the previous evening, though not before he had looked inside it in his room, disappointed to discover that whatever was in there had been thoroughly wrapped: an outer skin of waxed brown paper and beneath it what felt like a thick layer of plastic sheeting. He had been tempted to make a small incision, just big enough to see the stuff itself, but kneeling beside the bag with his nail scissors he had lost his nerve, afraid that his trespass would be discovered and somehow punished. He had the receipt for the bag in his wallet: a slip of green paper like a ticket for clothes at the dry-cleaner’s.

The restaurant was doing a brisk trade. A lot of German was being spoken, some English, some Japanese. When he asked for a table the waitress seemed slightly surprised to be dealing with a Hungarian. She found him a quiet place next to a pair of fine-boned, grey-haired ladies, whom László immediately decided were artistic spinsters heading off for a day at the National Gallery, where they would take an informed interest in winged altar pieces. They bid him a cheery ‘Grüss Gott!'. He nodded to them and smiled, and crossed to the buffet to make his selection for breakfast. Salami, mangoes, little French cheeses wrapped in foil. Sugary cakes. High-fibre cereals. Hard-boiled eggs. Odd how unappetizing it was, heaped together like this, the catering manager’s vision of plenty.

He drank two cups of coffee (too weak), ate half a grapefruit (not bad), and returned to his room, where he brushed and flossed his teeth. He had been booked in for three nights, with an option to extend, though please God it would all be over before then. There was nothing to do now but wait, and he hated waiting. He lay back on the bed, massaging his chest and thinking of the hundred and one things that might go wrong. Then he buttoned his shirt, put on his blue Nino Danieli jacket, checked himself in the mirror, scowled, and fled into the streets.

Emil was right, of course: the place had not changed much in six years. There was more traffic, more of the brand names one would expect in Paris or New York. More bars and casinos and sex clubs (their neon boasts – ‘Beautiful Nude Girls Inside!’ – almost erased by the glare of the sun). More tourists too, gangs of them with floppy hats and brightly coloured knapsacks, peering at buildings, staring at menus, vying with each other, it seemed, to be most like a tourist. But on the broad pavements of Andrássy ut the young women still walked arm in arm with just the right degree of sexual boldness, and in the gloom of the street corners the men still smoked and gossiped like amiable shades in the vestibule of Dante’s Inferno. The same air of indulgent melancholy, the wry humour. It was still Budapest.

He called at the Writer’s Bookshop on Liszt Ferenc ter, drank an espresso at the cafe there, then turned towards the river, passed the new Bank Centre on Anany János ut with its slabbed marble hide, walked through Szabadsag ter, and came out on to Steindl Imre utca, where immediately he felt some barometric shift in the atmosphere, as if the density of the known, the familiar, the ingrained, had subtly increased. Behind the new coats of paint and the rows of German and American cars (not the latest models, of course, and it was not hard to find old Skodas and Trabants), this was the old neighbourhood where the past of fifty years ago loomed like a tinted print under tissue paper. And it was here, in ’91, that a voice had called out his name and he had turned to see the face of his old school-friend, Sándor Dobi – Sándor the questioner! – and though that face had grown slack with time, darker, less nervously resolute, there had been no hesitation in László’s response. They had embraced, and over lunch become as drunk as students, stumbling over their stories. Sándor had spent twenty years in America – the construction industry, then a small restaurant business – and had two daughters in Minneapolis, and two ex-wives with whom he was still on excellent terms. ‘Fine times,’ he said, as they broached a fresh bottle of Palika. ‘But my dear Laci, in the end you have to come home. Nowhere in the world will fill your heart like the place you first saw the light.’

Was Sándor still alive? He had confessed to prostate trouble (‘a year ago, my friend, I thought “prostate” was something you went to a lawyer for!’). Had he meant cancer? How many of them were there now, scattered like ashes over the widths of the Earth? Lives such as theirs had not been conducive to longevity.

At the end of the street he crossed a line from shadow into broad sunlight. Ahead of him were the Buda hills, Fishermen’s Bastion, Matthias church, and away to the right, almost out of sight, the river split at the prow of Margarits island and poured its tons under the wings of the bridge. Cruise boats, the sleek and the frankly chaotic, were moored by both banks, and advertised trips to Visegrád or Esztergom, some of them promising lavish dinners, and even erotic shows, as if witnessing a Russian or Romanian teenager wiggle her hips to a tape of gypsy violins were the acme of old Hungarian romance.

On Szechenyi Rakpart, the apartment building had been given a new livery of pale green paint, though the effect was spoiled somewhat by a graffiti artist who had sprayed an illegible protest in red swirls along one side of the building. László approached the heavy double doors and read the names beside the bells: Binder, Serfleck, Kosztka, Dr Konig. In ’91 there had been at least one name he thought he knew, but not now, though he could not quite rid himself of the sense that if he looked again, rubbed his eyes and stared, he would find ‘LAZAR’, and push the worn button and go up to the old apartment and see his father listening to the sport on the radio, his mother rolling the pulp of dumplings between her palms, János combing hairballs from Toto the dog; and Aunt Gabi – the majestically breasted Gabi – complaining of how the veins in her legs were wide as bootlaces, and András, listen, András, don’t you have some kind of cream for it? Aren’t you supposed to be a doctor?

In the midst of his daydream the door was opened, and from the dark of the hallway two Persephones emerged with their shopping baskets. They eyed him suspiciously – this pale, dapper little man – then crossed the road to catch the number 2 tram, which was arriving with a tap-tapping of the overhead wires, like a giant yellow grasshopper rubbing its steel legs together. The door swung shut and he turned away. He needed somewhere cool to sit, somewhere that didn’t press upon him with the past, and retracing his steps he found a restaurant in the square south of the Basilica, with wooden booths and cotton tablecloths and not a tourist in sight. He took a table by the window and ordered his old favourite – goose livers in sour cream with mashed potatoes and onion – and while he waited he flicked through an edition of the previous day’s Hirlap, trying to take an interest in the antics of the government, though it was the same game of musical chairs he had grown so weary of everywhere. In the middle pages, however, two items caught his attention. The first was a short article about the Balkans, warning of a coming storm in Kosovo, where Serb abuses had become more outrageous. Milšsević, argued the journalist, survived by the manufacture of crises, and was in need of another war. Any war, even a disastrous one, would serve him better than a peace in which his enemies would have time to organize. There was a photograph of the militia leader, ‘Arkan’, in beret and black fatigues, machine-pistol over his shoulder, chin jutting, a real people’s hero. Looking at him, László found that the voices of doubt in his head were momentarily stilled. Arkan made questions of right and wrong, for and against, seem simple: one was instinctively opposed to such a man – no special virtue was required – and if the money in the bag hurried this gangster on the road to hell then so much the better. It was an end that justified a great deal.

The second article, ostensibly comic, concerned a minor scandal in one of the old bathhouses – a local government official caught in flagrante delicto at the Király on Fo utca, with one of those anonymous, hollow-eyed young men who go on the prowl in such places. It was a grubby story, somewhat sad, but reading the piece László was drawn irresistibly back to his own adventures in the bathhouses, those softly dripping worlds, relics of Ottoman times that survived into the heart of the People’s Utopia like orchids in a commissar’s lapel. And there he was again! A skinny boy hunched on the slatted bench of a steam room, surrounded by the old men with their sagging balls, their starbursts of purple veins, their damp newspapers…

He used to go with his father or Uncle Erno, sometimes with Péter’s family – a weekend treat – and it was in the bathhouse at the Gellart Hotel, the grandest of them all, that Péter had kissed him for the first time as they changed into their clothes at the end of the session, Péter’s Uncle Miklós dressing in the next cubicle, whistling folk songs. It was a kiss that fell like a splash of rain from a clear sky, breaking on to the back of his shoulder, transfixing him.

Nothing was said. What could be said with Miklós half a metre away, climbing into his flannel suit? But at the apartment that night, while János slept and the moon crossed the window right to left, László had sat up, feverishly trying to pass the moment through the machinery of reason, for already, at sixteen, he was condemned to be an intellectual, possessor of a mind that stared at itself. What had happened to him? He could not think of the moment as sexual: his understanding of such things was too shallow, too schoolboyishly vulgar. The kiss, he decided, must have been an expression of that ideal friendship Comrade Biszku spoke off in the Pioneers, and this soothed him for a while, tamped him down. But his daydreams of intense conversations, of epic chess matches and cross-country bicycle tours, had given way, in flashes, then in long sustained reverie, to the blatantly erotic; to the need for skin and hard breathing and intimacies whose names he trawled for in the pages of his parents’ medical textbooks, and later, more tantalizingly, in the cache of foreign novels they kept in a suitcase under the bed. Zola, Milosz, Thomas Mann…

And Miklós had had a further part to play, for it was in his apartment in District VII, more spacious than László’s or Péter’s, more private, that they at last lay down together, clumsy and furtive as a pair of apprentice house-breakers, unbuttoning each other on a bed with ruined springs and a coverlet of brown corded wool that smelled of the nineteenth century.

How much had old Miklós known? That bachelor and old-style liberal, with his card evenings, his tears at the first notes of Bartok’s ‘Rhapsody’. Did he spy on them? Was he excited by it? Well, he was long since dead, cutting the veins in his legs with a barber’s blade and dying in a bath of rose-red water the winter that followed the uprising in Prague. His housekeeper, Magda, had discovered the body, and László’s mother had telephoned László in Paris, and been surprised at his long silence, the weight of sorrow he could not keep quite secret from her.

After eating, he returned to the hotel.

‘Any messages?’ None. He went to his room, caught the news on TV1, and fell asleep over a book, his head pillowed on his arm, his face quite solemn in repose. Now and then there was an out-breath that seemed to contain the fragment of a word. Then he would frown, grow momentarily tense, and faint back into some more profound level of sleep.

When he woke the room was dim. The arm he had rested his head on was quite insensate. He had to move it with his other hand as though it were a piece of driftwood.

He looked over at the bulb on the telephone, wondering if he might have slept through a call, but there was no flashing light. Was something not ready? Had something gone wrong? Would they warn him? He wondered how many others there were, men and women in rooms like this one perhaps, half bored, half anxious, waiting for a signal, a note under the door, a tap on the shoulder.

He switched on a table light, pulled up his shirt and examined his chest in one of the room’s several mirrors. He could not decide whether his mysterious ‘complaint’ was marginally better or slightly worse, though there was no particular discomfort now, nothing that required him to take a painkiller with his aperitif. All the same, he thought of shadows on the lungs, of emphysema, of gross impediments in the branching of his airways. When he got back to Paris he would see someone about getting an X-ray, and he sat on the end of the bed, recalling the names of all the doctors he knew.

13

The night of the visit to Granny Wilcox’s house, Alec was woken by a noise he could not at first identify. He lay in bed, staring up through the not-quite-dark of the air, listening, but hearing only his heart, his breath, his brother’s breath, and the faint mechanical basso of the water pumping station behind the Joys’ house. Yet whatever it was that had woken him, it had thrust him out of sleep, startled him, so that he knew at some level he had been listening for it all night – for many nights perhaps – monitoring the audible world for a sound that could not be innocently explained.

He sat up and lifted a corner of the curtain. The storm that had broken over their heads on the drive home (striking the windscreen with waves of stone-coloured rain) had passed, leaving in its wake a coolness of clear, moonless air. It felt late – three, four a.m. – but the alarm clock on the table with its luminous hands was turned away from him towards the camp-bed.

‘Larry?’

‘Yeah,’ said Larry, ‘I thought I heard something too.’

‘What?’

‘No idea.’ Larry fumbled for the rocker switch on the cord of the bedside lamp, put the lamp on, and unzipped the sleeping bag.

‘You’re going out?’ asked Alec.

‘I need to piss.’ He yawned until his body shuddered, then pushed a hand through his hair and moved to the door. He was wearing a pair of Felix the Cat boxer shorts. ‘I may be some time,’ he said.

Alec heard him flick on the landing light. Then a pause of three, four seconds, and he was back, leaning into the room, brittle-faced. ‘Mum’, he said, and disappeared again.

Alec climbed from his bed. He felt small and powerless and utterly unprepared. He put on his glasses. There was really nowhere to hide. After a few moments he went out.

Alice was face down in the doorway of her bedroom, her nightdress caught up around her thighs, her panties in a tangle round her ankles. The backs of her legs were streaked with diarrhoea, and there were small black pools of it on the carpet. It was not hard to see what must have happened. The confusion. The floundering in the dark. A last panicky attempt not to foul herself. Had she called out to them? Was that what they had heard?

Larry was crouched beside her, his fingers feeling for the pulse at her throat. He looked up at Alec. ‘Go downstairs and call Una. Tell her what’s happened, but that it doesn’t look like she’s broken anything. And she’s not unconscious. Tell her I’m going to get her back into bed…’

‘Should she be moved?’

‘I’m not going to leave her here. Not like this.’

‘No,’ said Alec. The stink was very real. A smell of rot. A stench like the smell of the sickness itself.

‘Ask if there’s anything else we should do. Anything we should give her. And when you come up bring all the cleaning stuff you can find. OK? Go!’

Alone with her, Larry spoke in a whisper, telling her he would take care of her. He checked again for signs that she had damaged herself in the fall – he had once performed a similar procedure as Dr Barry, though on that occasion the patient had been a female lifeguard thrown from a moving limo by her jealous lover – then he stood, leaned, lifted her in the cradle of his arms, and carried her into the bedroom. Her legs were very cold. He thought: She’s going to die on me. I came too late.

He laid her on the bed, covered her feet and went into the en-suite bathroom. In the mirror he caught glimpses of himself frantically snatching towels, sponges. There was a pink plastic bowl. He put a bar of soap in it and filled it with warm water.

When he came back into the bedroom Alice was stirring, tugging feebly at her nightdress. Her breathing was much louder now, though whether that was good or not Larry had no idea. He put the oxygen bottle on the bed, opened the valve and pressed the mask over her face. It seemed to frighten her at first, as though he were trying to stifle her, but as she took in the gas she grew calmer.

‘Everything’s all right,’ he said. ‘Everything’s dandy.’

He pulled off the soiled panties and dropped them on to the floor by the bed. ‘We’ve got to clean you up,’ he said. ‘Is that OK?’

He dipped the sponge into the bowl, squeezed it out, and began to wipe her legs. He worked methodically, wiping her with the sponge and dabbing her dry with the towel. He washed between her legs, wiped the pinched red skin of her backside, cleaning her as sometimes he had cleaned Ella. He was unaware of any emotion other than an irreducible tenderness that embraced them both. He was babbling, telling her things he had told to no one. Shameful moments. Low-life moments culled from his progress through the bars and motel rooms of America. Private, frightened moments in the last third of a bottle on nights when getting drunk would not do at all. He gave her names, acts, everything he could dredge up, including the deal with T. Bone and Ranch. The garage at San Fernando. The gorilla mask. ‘And this is me,’ he said, ‘this is what I am now. The other’s all gone. I fucked up. Do you see? I fucked up and I can’t get back. I’m sorry, Mum. I’m very, very sorry.’

While he spoke he went on washing her, towelling the wasted muscles, the tissue-paper skin, the black-and-grey pubes that still seemed to grow strongly from her sex. When he thought she was clean he fetched a fresh nightdress, a good warm woollen one, from the chest of drawers. He was hurrying now. She was so cold. Her arms, thin as his wrists, had no force of their own. He had to guide them into the sleeves of the nightie, trying not to get her fingers tangled.

‘Larry?’

It was Kirsty. She was standing by the open door in the long T-shirt she had been sleeping in. He wondered how he looked to her, his face glazed with tears, dried shit on his arms. What kind of madman.

She came closer, leaning over Alice from the other side of the bed.

‘How is she?’ she whispered.

He shook his head. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘I spoke to Alec. Una’s coming first thing. We have to call her again if, you know, we get worried.’

‘Where’s Alec now?’

She touched his cheek. ‘He can’t deal with any of this. You know that.’

He nodded. A tattoo of mulberry bruises was starting to show along the length of Alice’s right forearm, but there were no marks on her head.

‘You sit with her,’ said Kirsty. ‘I’ll clean up outside.’

‘Ella?’ he asked.

‘Asleep.’

‘Good’

‘You were talking to her,’ said Kirsty. ‘To Alice.’

‘Yeah. Though I don’t suppose she could hear any of it.’

‘It’s better to think that she can.’

‘Yes.’

‘Baby? Talk to me some time. Will you do that? Talk to me some time.’

She left him and went on to the landing. ‘God, you frightened me,’ she said. Alec was kneeling on the top step of the stairs, his hands in the pink rubber gloves Mrs Samson used, a scrubbing brush in one hand, a blue J-cloth in the other. He didn’t have his glasses now and in the white light of the overhead bulb he looked about sixteen. He held up a brightly coloured plastic bottle of disinfectant spray that he had found under the sink in the kitchen and asked if she thought it was the right thing, or whether it would bleach the colour out of the carpet.

‘I can do that,’ she said, soothingly, but he ignored her, and after watching him work for a few moments, she shivered and slipped past him and went down the stairs.

14

On Monday afternoon, just as László was convincing himself of the mission’s failure, that he would have to go back to Paris with the bag and find some way of returning it to Emil, they contacted him.

He was walking in the shade on Révay utca, a few metres from the entrance to the hotel on his way back from lunch, when a child – a boy of eight or nine – crossed from the sunlit side and held out an envelope.

‘For me?’ asked László.

The boy thrust it into his hand and sprinted away in the direction of the Basilica. László looked to the end of the street, and thought he saw a man step hurriedly out of sight, but the light there was too dazzling to see things clearly.

At the steps to the hotel the doorman asked: ‘Did the kid want money?’

‘No,’ said László.

‘They try it on with the foreigners sometimes.’

László read the note in his room, then used the box of complimentary matches to burn it in an ashtray. There were only two lines to remember: a place – Statue Park – and a time – 3 p.m., Tuesday. He had heard of the park but had never been there. He asked the woman at reception. She said that it was in the XXII district on the other side of the river. Did he want to go there? They would book a car for him.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Lâszlô. ‘And I’ll need my bag. The black bag.’

‘Of course,’ she said. If he gave her the ticket now she would have it waiting for him. He gave her the ticket, though he didn’t like to hand it over. There was nothing now, nothing material, to connect him to the money. What if she were not on duty tomorrow? What if he had somehow to prove the bag was his? But she was there the next afternoon, and the bag was waiting for him behind the desk.

‘Heavier than it looks!’ she said, passing it to him.

‘You’re right,’ said Lâszlô, and they wished each other a nice day, like a pair of Americans.

A taxi was parked by the steps of the hotel. The driver, in short-sleeved shirt and sunglasses, introduced himself as Tibor. Lâszlô sat in the back of the car, the bag tight against his thigh.

They crossed the river, climbed into the hills, and reached the edge of the city. Dusty green verges. Twenty to three. A small golden cross swinging from the rear-view mirror as Tibor gunned the car on a blind bend past a lorry loaded with stone. (As a rule, Lâszlô avoided taxis with religious trinkets in them after nearly dying in one in Spain that had an entire shrine on the dashboard. Recklessness was a trial of faith for these men.)

There wasn’t much to announce the park, just a single billboard a hundred metres before the turn-off. They slowed – though only barely – and swung into an empty forecourt, pulling up in front of a raw-looking, red-brick, neoclassical façade. A kind of folly.

‘Want me to wait?’ asked Tibor.

‘Come back in half an hour.’

‘Want to leave the bag?’

‘My cameras,’ said László, climbing out of the car. ‘I may take some shots in the park.’

‘Maybe you’ll see some pretty girls,’ called Tibor, leaning from the window. László raised a hand, but didn’t look back.

In the ticket booth a middle-aged woman was reading a magazine. She had taken off her shoes and was resting her stockinged feet on a stool. When she saw László she folded the magazine, swung down her feet with a grunt of effort, and flicked a switch on the CD player behind her head. A men’s choir, in full voice, surged from the speakers at a volume that made László wince, and as she tore his ticket from the roll, he saw that the discs were for sale. Soviet Anthems One. Soviet Anthems Two. And there were various old communist badges and red stars and even identity books, like the one he had burned in Paris on the rue Cujas a few days after he arrived there. Who bought this stuff? Was it humour? Irony? He took his ticket and his guidebook and walked through the turnstile into the park. The music abruptly ceased. He was, as he had feared, the only person there.

Ahead of him was a space about the size of a soccer pitch. A large formal garden rather than a park, though without a single tree or flower. White sanded paths connected a pattern of grass rings, and around the edges of the rings the statues – those saved from the gleeful acetylene torches – were deployed in the sunshine like pieces of defunct weaponry. Soldiers, political leaders, abstracts of ideal citizens cast in monumental bonze or sharp-edged steel or stone, their hands raised, their bodies straining forward to greet the future. Some he recognized. Others dated from after ’56 and were new to him. But glowing in the mid-afternoon sunshine they were still impressive, still exercised some remnant of their old imperium, the light flashing from their massive shoulders, their bayonets, their metal chins. The strangeness was in seeing them all together, corralled in the park, walled in, as though they might break out and impose themselves again on the squares of the city. It had been wise of someone to insist on keeping them. There was even an element of humiliation to it, a sense that the monuments could be shamed, their failure kept in public view. And how utterly of the past they were! How soundly beaten! But moving among them, László began to feel a flutter of unease, like the survivor of a sea battle washed up among the bodies of his enemies, afraid that one might groan and stagger to his feet and be vengeful.

Their spell was broken (it was always thus) by laughter. A tour bus had arrived, and the park was cheerfully invaded by teenage students from some international summer school, who fanned into the park with worksheets and baseball caps, calling to each other in French and Italian and English, and taking each other’s pictures in front of the statues. What did they care for all this scrap metal? Communism was something their fathers and grandfathers had known about, perhaps feared. Now it was the pelt of an old wolf, a shaggy old bear, moth-eaten and ready for the tip. Did they find it odd that people had been so easily duped in the past? That anyone could have been so foolish as to believe in the common ownership of the means of production, the abolition of class, the equal distribution of wealth? Their generation was more sophisticated, more knowing, and yet, thought László, also more childish than the one he had grown up in. He liked their irreverence – no looming fathers with black moustaches to keep them in line – but what would they do with this freedom? He worried for them. Les Enfants du paradis. A pair of them, necking behind the Heroes of the People’s Power memorial (‘Those loyal to the people and the Party will be forever remembered…’) stared at him sharply, as though he were the litter man, or perhaps a pervert, and he moved quickly past them.

It was seven minutes after three. Using the bag as a seat, he squatted in the shadow of Lenin – the incarnation that used to greet the workers at the Manfred Weiss iron factory – and leaned his head against the hem of the dictator’s overcoat. He was thirsty, light-headed, longing to be rid of the bag and riding the train home to Paris. Would Kurt forgive him? Excuse it all as menopausal adventuring? A somewhat delayed mid-life crisis? He gazed at the toes of his shoes, the sand in the suede. In this heat it was difficult to think things through, and he began to feel like a figure in the far background of a painting, two or three strokes of the brush, no real face at all, there simply for balance or colour, while in the foreground the emperor’s army rode past on their magnificent horses.

It was twenty past before his contact appeared. A tall, darkly dressed figure ambling through the students, another of the famous black bags over his shoulder. It was strange never knowing who would come for you. This one, with his lank hair, his bristly chin, his easy and rather charming smile, looked as though he might play jazz piano in a nightclub.

‘A friend of Françoise?’ he asked, standing at the side of László, though not too close. László got to his feet.

‘To me,’ said the man, gazing up at Lenin, ‘he always looks as if he’s hailing a taxi. But he won’t get one here. Not for a long time.’

‘Where does it go now?’ asked László, nodding to his bag.

‘A little farther,’ said the other. ‘But your part is done. Any trouble?’

‘I don’t feel I’ve done anything at all.’

‘That’s how it should be.’ He put his bag next to László’s. ‘You know, they could plant something here. Grow roses on him. Or is that a very romantic idea?’

‘It’s a good idea,’ said László. ‘But we’ll have to put it to the committee.’

The man chuckled. ‘Of course, Comrade. We must go through the proper channels.’

He reached down and swung László’s bag on to his shoulder.

‘It’s heavy,’ said László.

‘Good. You have a car?’

‘Yes.’

‘You go first.’

‘Do we shake hands?’

‘It’s quite optional,’ said the man. He held out his hand. ‘Until next time.’

In the carpark, Tibor was sharing a story with the driver of the tour bus. The only other vehicle was a small, slightly battered Toyota that presumably belonged to the contact.

‘The heat bothering you?’ asked Tibor, opening the rear door.

‘A little,’ said László. His shirt was stuck to his back, and from his chest he thought he could hear a distinctive wheezing, like those poor asthmatics he sometimes came across in the street or the Metro, fumbling in their pockets for an inhaler. More of them all the time, it seemed. A sly epidemic.

Tibor started the engine. The air-conditioning came on. ‘Where to?’ he asked. ‘Back to the hotel?’

‘No,’ said László, after a pause. ‘Drop me by the Gellért. I’ll walk the rest of the way. It’ll do me good.’

‘You’re the boss,’ said Tibor, and he bounced the car on to the road, the rear wheels kicking up a cloud of dust that hung for several seconds in the air behind them.

By the terrace café outside the Gellért Spa, László settled his fare, then set off towards Petofi bridge, turned right on Lajos ut, and entered the grounds at the back of the Technical University, where students, relaxing in the sunshine, sat on wooden benches, or lounged in small groups on the grass, reading, talking, flirting.

It was here that Péter had studied in his first year of training to become an electrical engineer. László had often visited him, and had memories of tall green corridors, the smell of soldering irons, the whirr of the machinery in the demonstration rooms. Péter had even tried to persuade László to join him at the school, but László had had quite different ambitions. A sharp-looking, sharp-minded young man, vain and shy and talkative, he had harboured immoderate dreams of artistic glory. He thought he might be a great film director (he was a regular at the Corvin Film Palace), or some kind of Hungarian Picasso. He wanted to live freely, have a lakeside villa at Balaton, perhaps even work in Hollywood like Mihaly Kertesz. For that one summer of his life – before anything had been attempted, anything failed at – everything felt possible. Why not? He was seventeen, fired by love, and all around him, as though history were rooted in the excitements of his own heart, his country, frozen for so long like a kingdom in a fairytale, was beginning to thaw.

In July ’56, First Secretary Rákosi, the arch-toad, the arch-Stalinist, was dismissed on the orders of the Moscow Politburo. In October, they exhumed László Rajk, hanged after a show trial in ’49 (his old friend Kadar had persuaded him to ‘confess’), and reburied him with state honours at the Kerepes cemetery. In Warsaw the Poles defied Krushchev, and across Budapest, as the weather turned crisp and hoar frost glittered on the trees along the Danube, the first mass meetings began. Here, at the Technical University, the evening of the 22nd, Jozsef Szilágyi and István Marián spoke of ‘the sunrise of modern Hungarian history’, and the next day a crowd of students and workers (many of the latter still in their overalls from the factory floors) marched to the statue of the Polish hero, General Bern, and crossed the bridge to Parliament Square. ‘Now or never!’ they chanted. ‘Russians out! Nagy into government!’

From believing they could do nothing, the people were suddenly convinced of their power. Changing the world might, after all, require nothing more than the belief that change was possible. In the space of a few hours, thousands of minds blossomed with the same remarkable idea: freedom. On a rooftop by the square, László saw a young woman waving a Hungarian tricolour with the Soviet insignia torn from the middle. By nightfall the bronze Stalin at City Park had been toppled and the radio station was under siege. The government panicked; threatened crackdowns; appealed for calm; offered amnesties; but nobody was listening to them any more. Bookstores were raided and Russian books burned on bonfires on the streets. Councils were formed. Armouries looted. On the boulevards, Russian tanks, twitching on their own fuel slicks and belching clouds of diesel fumes, hunted their invisible enemy. Everywhere, rumours of fresh fighting, of massacres, of victory. And under the dust from shelled apartment blocks and burned-out shops, under the tangled tramlines and the red and golden leaves of shattered trees, corpses lay in postures exclusive to the dead, many of them Red Army conscripts no older than László, boys from Kharkov and Kiev, who must at the end have wondered how they had earned such hatred, why children were killing them.

László pushed the sweat from his eyes, and walked along the drive to where it was crossed by double rows of squat stone pillars that carried a passageway to one of the outbuildings. He put down the bag and squinted ahead: the drive curved towards a second gate, hidden from the pillars, then as now, by a line of trees. He could not quite believe he was back. Was there some buried fragment here – a scrap of cloth, a cartridge case – that would prove it? But this was it all right. This was where he had stood in the grey of a November afternoon, waiting for Péter and Zoli to return. They had taken the Skoda – the old black ‘Spartak’ – to the Szentkiralyi barracks to bring back ammunition. The rest of the gang – Feri, Joska, Karcsi and Anna – were in the college print room, running off another batch of proclamations and demands, to be fly posted around the city after dark. László was on guard duty (it was merely his turn), patrolling between the pillars in leather cap and belted jacket, his nose and ears ringing with the cold. He had been given the precious tommy-gun, and Feri, the old man of the group at twenty-two, the only one who had actually done any military training, had explained how to use it.

‘Don’t shoot like a gangster, Laci. Fire from the shoulder. Short bursts. You’ve got seventy-two bullets in the magazine. That’s enough to hold off a battalion. And if it jams for Christ’s sake don’t look down the barrel or you’ll blow your head off. Got it?’

Got it.

He had not expected to use it. Thus far he had avoided even handling a gun – there were always plenty of others who couldn’t wait to get hold of one – keeping himself useful with driving and stretcher-bearing and running errands. But when he heard the car, and knew from the speed at which it was coming that something was wrong, he dragged the weapon from his shoulder, pushed the safety off, and thought himself ready. From the gates on Budafokí ut there came the smack of metal on metal, and seconds later the Skoda swung into view, Zoli at the wheel fighting to keep control but coming much too fast, swerving to avoid the trees but somehow bouncing off the side of one and toppling the car on to the driver’s side, where it spun in a sheet of sparks before coming to a stop.

Almost immediately, Péter was hauling himself from the shattered passenger window. He saw László, shouted a warning, and pointed back up the drive, though there was no need. László had already seen the other car, a Russian military saloon pulling up twenty metres from the Skoda, three men inside (two in uniform, one in the back in plain clothes), who flung open their doors and began to shoot with pistols. Seeing it again, seeing the distances involved, it seemed extraordinary how even in the fading light they could have kept missing. Half in, half out of the car, Péter was a simple enough target, yet between them they must have fired a dozen times before they hit him. Then Péter had stopped struggling for a moment and became utterly still, as though the bullet were a thought, an idea, the most extraordinary he had ever had. The second caught him as he slithered down the blackened underside of the car. He cried out. A shocked, aggrieved sound. A sound of appalled protest at the realization of what was happening to him. The third dropped him on to his knees, though even then he didn’t stop, but kept crawling towards the shelter of the pillars.

All this László saw through the loop of the tommy-gun’s forward sights. He had raised the gun and pressed it to his shoulder, just as Feri had instructed him. He had drawn a line over Péter’s head to the plainclothes man, the most dangerous of the three, the one who fired with the greatest deliberation. And so intent were they on murdering Péter, such an appetite, they had not even noticed László, braced in the shadows, dark beside the dark of the stone. But as his finger touched the steel kiss-curl of the trigger, he knew that he would never pull it. Whatever it was a man needed in his nature to destroy another, he simply did not possess it. The act was beyond him. He could not kill. Could not. And this he learned about himself at the very moment when the human being he adored most fervently of all was gunned down by men who ought to die, but whom he could not bring himself to harm.

How long did it last? As long, he thought, as it took to tell it. Long enough. Then the crack! crack! of a rifle from one of the ground-floor windows to the right, the plainclothes man slumping against the car, the uniforms bundling him on to the back seat, and the big car reversing at speed, swaying its plated flanks like some ungainly animal startled at a water hole. Feri sprinted from the double doors behind László, wrenched the gun from his grip, and set off in pursuit, shouting wildly and firing from the hip, gangster-style. At the wreck of the Skoda, Karcsi and Joska knocked in the windscreen with rifle butts and dragged out the unconscious Zoli. Anna, crying his name, ran to where Péter lay between the car and the pillars, his jacket torn open beneath his ribs, and so much blood, and such a smell of blood, one of the bullets must have burst his liver. She knelt beside him, pressed her cheek to his lips, then turned to László, gazing up at him with such mysterious intensity that he realized – sudden shock of embarrassment and gratitude – that she knew everything, knew exactly what Péter had been to him, and had guessed it long ago. Their secret! Had she also, then (this girl majestic in the presence of death), understood why he had not pulled the trigger? Why he had abandoned his friend to the killers?

When Feri came back they wrapped Péter in a tarpaulin and carried him, all five of them, into one of the classrooms, and laid him on the table. Nobody reproached László – if nothing else, the utter dumb misery on his face would have made accusations impossible – but he spent the night apart from them, curled in a ball under his coat, shivering, while in the distance scattered gunfire played out the last hours of the revolution. Nagy was gone; General Maléter a prisoner of the Russians; and though the radio continued to broadcast appeals, the world had its eyes elsewhere, and there would be no help for Hungary, no miraculous intervention. In the fighting by the Killian barracks the next evening, Feri was killed by a grenade blast. At the end of November, Joska and Anna were arrested, beaten for days, and sent to Tokol internment camp on charges of armed conspiracy. Zoli went into hiding. Karsci fled the country. Two hundred thousand that year, László among them, crossing the winter marshes with their suitcases, their parcels, their spoiled lives.

A girl with black hair and a little silver stud in her nose put her hand on his arm and asked if he was unwell.

‘It’s just the heat,’ said László.

‘Sit in the shade,’ she said, leading him to a bench under the trees. ‘I thought you were going to faint.’

‘I just need to breathe,’ he said. ‘Really, I’m feeling much better already.’

‘Shall I fetch you some water?’

‘I’m fine now,’ he said. ‘You’re very kind.’

‘Sure?’

‘Thank you.’

They smiled at each other, and she left him on the bench. For a last time he looked to where, beyond the pillars, a breeze was pooling the heads of the chestnut trees. It was done. He had come back and stood as a penitent. He had paid his dues of memory and love. He had done what was possible. And though he knew he could never entirely forgive himself for Péter Kosáry’s death, and certainly could not put it right forty years after the fact, could not now pull the trigger, he wanted his freedom. One fatal moment had held him captive for two-thirds of his life, and it was time for that to stop.

He joined his hands like a Buddhist and bowed his head. The gesture somewhat surprised him. Had he seen Kurt do it during his yoga practice at the apartment? But the impulse was honest, and the occasion demanded its ritual. Then he stood, shouldered the bag, waved to the girl on the grass, and returned to the road, seeing, in the oracle of his imagination, the other bag, the heavy one, already being handed on (another meeting, another dry exchange), until it reached the men in the smoked-glass BMWs, the new kingmakers of the old Soviet empire, and a deal was struck, so that on some moonless night Emil Bexheti and his friends could come down from the mountains and cross the border in hushed columns. In this at least he had played his part. Who knew what else he might do? Strange how a little faith may strike a man so late in life, how bad beginnings can at last be overcome. László the Bold? It amused him to think he might now die an idealist, a man of action, and he crossed the Szabadsag bridge to Pest, his shadow on the brown water striding behind a nexus of spars, unhindered.

15

All morning there were flowers, bouquets that arrived from Interflora or were dropped off by friends who said, ‘I won’t come in just now.’ When Larry answered the door they reminded him of their names and said how nice it was to see him again, what a comfort it must be for Alice to have him home. ‘Give her our love.’

‘I will.’

‘And tell her we’re all thinking of her.’

‘I promise.’

There weren’t enough vases for so many flowers. They used buckets, saucepans. Even the washbasin in the downstairs toilet, a spray of lilies.

In the kitchen, Ella and Kirsty baked a cake. They wrote ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRANDMA’ in pink icing, and dotted the ‘i’ with a candied lemon diamond. Mrs Samson arrived at midday. She put on an apron, rolled up her sleeves, and made watercress sandwiches and a batch of scones to be eaten with clotted cream and the last of last year’s bramble jelly. When she worked she liked to have the radio on, a station with sing-along music and the local news. The weather forecast was for skies clear all day, temperatures in the mid-seventies, a small chance of rain after dark.

Alec and Larry carried the trestle table from the workroom into the orchard. They set it in its usual place – the bulbs were still strung overhead, pointlessly – and spread it with darned white cloths, then brought out chairs from the dining room, the dark wood and dark leather a little strange and comical in the brightness of the garden, like the men in their frock-coats in Déjeuner sur I’herbe. Larry lit a cigarette and sat at the table. He had been drinking, but not heavily. Alec sat opposite him.

‘The big day,’ said Larry.

Alec nodded. He was dressed in black chinos with a dark collarless shirt. He had his glasses on with the sunshade attachment clipped to the front.

‘Come to America,’ said Larry.

‘OK,’ said Alec.

‘I mean it.’

‘OK.’

‘Stick with family. You could learn to surf. Take yoga classes.’ He chuckled. ‘Ella would love it.’

‘And what would I do there?’

‘The same as here. I doubt you’d even need a green card. You should think about it.’

‘OK.’

‘Seriously.’

‘What about you?’ said Alec. ‘What’s to stop you coming here? You’re not doing the show any more.’

Larry shook his head. ‘I’ve got a couple of other projects cooking.’

‘What sort of projects?’

‘Anyway, I wouldn’t fit in here.’

‘You used to.’

‘I remember.’

‘You used to fit in perfectly.’

‘A thousand years ago.’

‘I thought things were difficult for you over there. I thought that was the point.’

Larry made a face. ‘I’ve thought about it once or twice. But it’s too late for all that. All that coming back shit. I’ve got a house out there. A family! And coming back now would be like saying I’d been wrong all along. That it had all been a mistake.’ He flicked his cigarette away. ‘America’s the only big idea I’ve ever had. If I stop believing in it it’s like I stop believing in happiness or adventure or fuck knows. Great cars, great sex. Love.’ He leaned across the table. ‘America’s my optimistic heart. Do you see?’

Alec nodded, but Larry reckoned he had heard no more than one word in three. There were changes in his brother, certain unsettling alterations that dated from that fuss between them in the kitchen. It wasn’t just the distractedness, the sense of him looking in all the time at some demanding secret; there was a new control, a self-discipline that seemed at times to verge upon the manic, but which was nonetheless somehow effective. The little-boy-lost look was gone, that air of helplessness and incipient panic that had been so obvious at Heathrow. What underlay these changes was hard to say, but the night before last, out under the stars for a smoke, trying to put his own thoughts in order, Larry had seen through the summerhouse window his brother in agitated debate – gesturing, grimacing, pressing his brow – all this despite his being utterly alone in there. A troubling sight (and a good deal more than he had wanted to see), for what question was it that needed such emphasis, such violent settlement?

He raised an arm and waved to Una, who was coming towards them in a dress the colour of the grass. ‘Guess what?’ said Larry. ‘Alec’s going to come and live in America.’

‘Is that so?’

‘He won’t go without you,’ said Larry.

She grinned, touched her hair. ‘What time are your guests coming?’ she asked.

‘Around three,’ said Alec. ‘Though there won’t be many.’ ‘Do you think Mum can stay down for long?’ asked Larry.

‘I’d say she’d be fine for an hour. I’m going to see her now. Will you bring her down when she’s ready?’

‘Call me,’ said Larry.

In Alice’s bedroom a bluebottle flew revolutions in the shaded air. Una opened the curtains and sat by the bed, then lifted one of Alice’s hands from the covers and cradled it between her own. Though Alice had survived the fall, the shock of it had snapped something in her that would not show up on X-rays or CAT scans. A thread, or a delicate valve like the ones inside the old TV sets, something that could not be repaired and which had left her like this, struggling to live, struggling to die, waiting for the next fall, the next seizure, the next small-hours crisis.

The day after the accident, when at last she had been able to speak and make some sense, she had said, ‘Death’s taking me a piece at a time,’ and she had wept so piteously Una had had to turn away, afraid of what the words moved in her, the sorrow that burned behind her own eyes. Here, with the Valentines, she had strayed across the line. She had dropped her guard and in the end she would pay the price for it, grieving on her own without the comfort of a family around her. It was a failure they had been warned against in training. Inappropriate emotion. It was unprofessional, and it didn’t really help anyone, didn’t make her a better nurse. But how were you supposed to control it? You couldn’t give the heart orders – thus far and no farther. It wasn’t human.

She squeezed Alice’s hand and folded down the sheets to check for signs of bedsores, discovering on her back – the coccyx – a patch of irritated skin, which she treated with the Granuflex. The whole puzzle of Alice’s skeleton was visible now. The long bones jutting against her skin, her eyes sunk into the sockets of her skull. She had taken no solids since the fall, so her body scavenged on itself, eking out another week or month with scraps of protein, lipids, a last swirl of glucose. Life, which a child could dab out with the pressure of her thumb, was also mystifyingly persistent, the flesh outliving the will, all pleasure, all usefulness, going on and on in the grip of some biochemical imperative, something fashioned right at the start, before we had bigger brains or better hands. Sheer blind tenacity.

She tucked her hair behind her ears and watched the bluebottle crawl across the face of the mirror on the chest of drawers. Comfort was all that mattered now. To find among the vials and bottles something useful, something to match Alice’s suffering without making her nauseous or terrifying her with hallucinations. What else? Light a candle for her? Say a prayer? She was out of practice. Hail Mary and all that. She hadn’t prayed since she was a girl in Derry, when the whole family used to kneel in the front room at the sound of the angelus bell on the television, and her father would recite the rosary. That was all behind her now, like the sea light and the banter and the checkpoints. She had a Buddha at home, one of those hollow brass ones, part household god, part paperweight, and sometimes she put flowers next to it, though she didn’t know much about Buddhism except it seemed a kind sort of religion, less bullying than most. What she did know about was nutrition, care planning, morbidity. Whatever it was you learned about the psychologies of grief and courage sitting through the last hours of forty, fifty people. But what it all actually meant (the slow destruction of a woman like Alice Valentine) she had no idea. She was twenty-seven, for Christ’s sake. She lived on her own in a small rented flat she didn’t much like, and two or three times a week she took Temazepam to stop the dead visiting her in her sleep.

Kirsty came up to help with the dressing (the young women liked each other and worked well together), and though there was very little from among her clothes that Alice could still wear, they found a summer frock of blue-and-white cotton, and a woollen shawl, cream-coloured, to wrap about her shoulders. As they dressed her, gently rolling her between their hands, Alice dozed and muttered, and on waking seemed surprised to find herself transformed, her hair brushed out, the big white trainers on her feet. Kirsty kissed her cheek and ran downstairs to call for Larry.

‘You don’t have to go out, Alice,’ said Una. ‘Not if you’d rather stay up here.’

‘Out?’ said Alice, her eyes widening. ‘Where?’

‘Into the garden. For the party.’

Alice nodded. ‘Who’s in charge?’ she asked.

‘Well. Would you like Alec and Larry to be in charge?’ ‘Write,’ said Alice, holding out a hand.

Una took the felt-tip she used for her notes, tried it first on her own skin, and then wrote across Alice’s palm: Alec and Larry in charge.

‘How’s that?’ she asked.

Larry carried his mother down the stairs and settled her into the wheelchair at the bottom, lifting her feet on to the hinged rests, then steering her through the living room into the kitchen.

‘Happy birthday, Mrs V!’ said Mrs Samson, touching for a moment Alice’s shoulder and leaving a faint row of flour prints on the blue of the dress.

Alice showed her hand.

‘That’s it,’ agreed Mrs Samson. ‘The boys are in charge all right.’

They manoeuvred her on to the terrace, but getting her up the bank on to the lawn was more difficult. Alec raised the small wheels at the front, tilting the chair backwards, while Larry leaned his weight from behind.

‘I can help!’ called Osbourne, hurrying towards them from the direction of the stile. ‘Many happy returns,’ he panted.

‘Where’s Stephen?’ she asked.

‘This side please, Dennis,’ said Larry.

‘Righto.’

They gathered around the chair, lifting it up the bank like Sicilian villagers struggling out of the sea with a seated Madonna in re-enactment of some half-remembered miracle. Ella watched from the top of the bank, a scarlet balloon in her hand.

In the orchard the tablecloths were patterned with the shadows of the leaves. Larry wheeled his mother to the head of the table. Una came out with a sunhat she had found in the hall, a large straw affair with a wide ribbon that tied under the chin. In the shade of the brim Alice’s face was hardly visible. A butterfly settled for a moment on the stillness of her arm, then went on, drunkenly, across slabs of green light.

‘Someone’s here,’ called Kirsty.

It was Judith and Christopher Joy, who had strolled from their cottage in matching linen jackets and panama hats. They carried gifts: a pot of luxurious hand cream from Jolly’s in Bath and, from a beach in County Galway, a large pebble that Judith Joy had painted in healing colours. Next to arrive was Mrs Dzerzhinsky. Her present was an illustrated calf-bound edition of Gibran’s The Prophet, and as she put it into Alice’s hands Alec overheard her murmur words in a language that was not English, a blessing perhaps, or a piece of folk wisdom from the old country, wherever that was. He had noted this recently, how people needed to communicate to Alice something intense and private, to give voice to the seriousness she provoked in them, as if her affliction flushed out the trivial from their lives and made them all mystics and philosophers.

The last of the guests was the art teacher, Miss Lynne. She said it looked like a scene from one of those endlessly long but delicious Italian films. She tucked her head under the brim of Alice’s hat to kiss her. She said she’d love to paint it all.

Mrs Samson brought out a tray with two large teapots on it. Larry carried the sandwiches and the scones. On Alice’s right, Una sat with a box of tissues on her lap, wiping Alice’s chin when the juice she sipped through a straw spilled from the slack of her mouth. Behind them, the oxygen bottle lay in the grass like an unexploded bomb.

When the scones had been eaten, Ella and Kirsty went to the kitchen and came out with the cake. Larry used his Zippo to light the candles – one for every ten years of Alice’s life – and while the candles burned they stood up to sing ‘Happy Birthday’, finishing the song with a burst of applause. Ella blew out the candles. They clapped again and took their slices of cake, and after trying a few forkfuls of sugary sponge and praising it, the guests began to take their leave.

Mrs Dzerzhinsky blamed her tears on hay fever (‘Worse every year!’). Miss Lynne knelt by the side of the wheelchair, then went, with a hurried wave, through the trees to her car. Christopher Joy, sweeping off his hat, kissed Alice’s hand in a gesture that was genuinely gallant. Osbourne said he would volunteer for the clearing-up detail, and in the kitchen, his jacket dropped over the back of a chair, he tried to make himself useful by passing absorbent paper towels to Mrs Samson, who wept openly and noisily as she wrapped the leftover sandwiches in clingfilm.

Una moved Alice into the shade and untying the sunhat gave her a few minutes with the gas bottle. Alec, coming out for the last plates, stood unobserved under the trees, studying them as though one day he would be called on to recite the details. The wasps dancing around the cake crumbs. The silvery tracks of the wheelchair in the grass. The cat padding through a private corridor of air. And at the heart of the picture, his mother, her eyes shut above the plastic mouthpiece, her eyelids grey and flat and leaden. Would he have pitied her more if she had been a stranger? Some woman whose name he did not know and to whom he owed nothing but an ordinary debt of compassion? Then at least he would have felt something manageable, not this tangle of pity and fear; this childish revulsion like a weapon he did not know whether to turn against himself, or her. So why not leave like the party guests? Take the car. Get out. He had done it before, running from that gulag of a school he had taught in (thirty-five fourteen-year-olds, some almost savage); a week’s fugue of which he could remember very little other than a noise in his head like the hissing of pylons, and an image, strangely beautiful, of the lights from the esplanade reflecting on the wet shingle he was walking on. No one would be surprised if it happened again. They would be expecting it.

‘Who’s there?’ asked Una, shading her eyes.

‘Just me,’ he said. He came forward and started to stack the plates. She was squinting at him, smiling, and he saw that the sun had brought out a dozen freckles on her nose and cheeks, which made her look younger and somehow carefree.

He put the wicker tray on the table and quickly loaded the last of the crockery. He didn’t want to disturb them – didn’t think he should be there with them at all – but as he moved away Alice opened her eyes, tugged the mask from her face, and called out after him, a single garbled word of protest that froze him in mid-stride.

‘Mum?’

But whatever it was she wouldn’t repeat it. The effort had set her off and she needed her gas again, her oxygen. It was several minutes before Alec realized that the word had been ‘menteur', and that she had called him a liar.

At half past five, Una came to the summerhouse to say goodbye. Alice was back in bed, she said, resting. Alec thanked her for staying so long. He thought she would leave then (he could think of nothing else to say to her), but she stayed, looking round as if she had never been in the place before.

‘I wouldn’t mind a hideout myself,’ she said. ‘Somewhere like this.’ She stepped up to where he was sitting and reached past his shoulder to open the manuscript on the desk.

‘It’s funny,’ she said, turning over the pages, ‘how this makes sense to you and none at all to me. What’s this here? This bit?’

He twisted in the seat and looked to where her finger pointed. ‘It says, Who here is cruel enough to leave a brother behind? A father underground? A sweetheart in hell?’

‘You don’t like me looking at it,’ she said, standing back.

Alec pushed the manuscript to the edge of the desk. ‘It just reminds me how much I still have to do. That’s all.’

‘You’ll get it done.’

‘I’ll have to.’

‘You will.’

‘You’ve been very kind to us,’ he said.

‘I haven’t done so much.’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Really kind.’

‘It’s my job,’ she said.

‘Even so.’

‘May I?’ She gently lifted his glasses from his face. ‘I can’t talk to you with these on. You look like a hit-man.’

‘Sorry.’ He took the glasses from her and unclipped the shade attachment. Una leaned against the whitewashed wall, watching him.

‘I know it’s an awful time for you all,’ she said. ‘And people sometimes think it goes on and on for ever. Always the same. But it doesn’t.’ She paused as if to gauge whether or not she was making any sense to him. ‘People think they’ll never be happy again.’

‘Happy?’

‘Yes,’ she said, smiling broadly. ‘Remember happy?’

‘I’ve no idea what you think of me,’ he said.

‘What do you think I think?’

He shook his head.

‘Well…’ She paused. ‘I think you’re a good person.’

‘Really?’

‘A good son. Does that surprise you so much?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘It shouldn’t.’

‘Are you happy?’ he asked.

‘My father used to tell us that happiness and unhappiness are two dogs that follow each other around. When you saw one, the other wasn’t far off. He didn’t really believe in happiness. Not as something you spent your life trying to get.’

‘What did he believe in?’

She shrugged. ‘The Pope. Not getting into debt. Cleaning the heels of your shoes as well as the toes. I think he was saving the family wisdom for the boys.’ She fell silent, watching him. ‘You’re in a dream,’ she said.

‘Sorry.’

‘You want me to ask Larry to do her medicine tonight?’

‘It’s easier for me,’ he said.

‘If you’re sure.’

‘I’m sure.’

He walked to the door of the summerhouse with her. A breeze loaded with grass smells and soil smells and the warm ozonous whiff of the air itself blew the fine ends of a dozen hairs across her cheeks.

‘You know how to get hold of me,’ she said. ‘You’ll be all right?’

When she had gone he lingered in the doorway a moment, then went quickly to the table and opened Oxygène to the last page (Hammer blows, steel on rock…), where a twist of newspaper was Sellotaped to the inside of the card binding. He unpicked the tape with his nail, unwrapped the capsule, and rolled it into his palm. He heard Ella’s voice, and looked up to the window in time to see her go by, hand in hand with Kirsty. They were a good thirty feet away, and he didn’t think they could have seen anything. What could they have seen? They were probably planning to water the garden together, now it was cooler.

He placed the manuscript back on to the shelf beside the dictionaries and briefly laid his head against the spines of the books, as if the mere touch of them were helpful in some way. Consoling. Everything was in its place now. In his hand he held the thread that ran through the labyrinth; he had only to follow it. There were no more decisions to make or to unmake; no more of the vile anticipation. He felt a calmness, a quietness on the far side of thinking, that was immensely restful. He looked at Lázár, who stared back from his winter’s day in the Luxembourg. Would he understand all this? How nobody could be expected to be weak all the time. One day, thought Alec, he would confess it to him in some Paris bar or London hotel, then see how this man who had handled tommy-guns reacted.

Going into the house, he met his brother coming out.

‘Seen Kirsty and Ella?’

‘Bottom of the garden,’ said Alec. He saw that Larry had put on a clean shirt, and carried, almost hidden behind his thigh, a posy of a half-dozen small blooms and herbs – honeysuckle, lavender, rosemary – the stems wrapped in a scrap of baking foil. He looked chastened, excited.

‘Catch you later,’ he said, grinning, and they crossed, one brother stepping out into the light of the terrace, the other going into the house, going up the stairs, and opening the door to his mother’s room.

16

So what was left to be done? Lâszlô had returned to find himself forgiven, understood, well loved, an Odysseus with bloodshot eyes and no rivals to scatter. Of his adventures he had told whatever could be safely told, and answered, honestly, the few questions Kurt had put to him. He began to think he might welcome a reproach. Such largesse, such big-heartedness, was slightly daunting. To be so trusted! Was he not escaping too lightly? But when he took the young man’s face between his hands, searching out some reservation, something undeclared, he found there only the clear blue depths, the eye-part of a smile.

That first night Lâszlô slept for thirteen hours and felt his life being rearranged in dreams. He was not quite familiar to himself. He was shedding a skin, discovering, in his fifty-ninth year, a self still supple with life.

The next night, a waning moon rose over a city in thrall to rhythm. It was the Fête de la Musique, and every bar, each café large and small – French, Brazilian, Arab, Russian, Vietnamese, even those little places on the side streets where a good night’s business was half a dozen glasses of mint tea or screw-top rouge – were suddenly reckless with music and dancing. Brass bands, flamenco, crooning black-eyed chanteuses, every kind of drum imaginable. No need to go anywhere to dance; enough to find space in the road and start to sway. By ten o’clock many of the roads were impassable but no one complained. The police kept out of sight, parked up somewhere, smoking and teasing their dogs. It felt like the end of a war, but more democratic, more personal, as if everyone had won a war of their own, a private war against a private enemy, emerging – for a night at least – victorious from the long campaign.

For László, squeezing with Kurt through the throng on rue Oberkampf, only one difficulty remained, one last stone in his shoe. Laurence Wylie had called while he was away, had wanted him, had said she needed him, and then, finding he was unavailable, had become angry and rung off distraught. Several times since his return he had tried to call her back but had succeeded only in talking to the answerphone, where the sound of her voice delivering the speak-after-the-beep message had pierced him. It was intolerable that such a woman should go under, intolerable and unjust and wrong. In his last message, left that afternoon, he had told them both to wait in at the apartment. He would come to them. They would open a bottle together. Stay in, go out. Whatever they wished.

Privately, he was determined to share his new energy with them, his new faith. His new manliness! And if he could get them out tonight, surely they would find themselves stepping a waltz – they had loved to dance, had been the kind of couple other dancers stopped to admire – and then they would remember laughter and lightness and the times before, and their poor bruised hearts would begin to warm.

At rue St Maur, they pushed through the ranks of a small salsa orchestra and walked to the rue du Deguerry, where they knocked for several minutes at the door of the Wylies’ apartment. László shrugged, but he was becoming agitated. Where the hell were they?

‘We could try Le Robinet,’ said Kurt. ‘If they’re out drinking they’ll show up there sooner or later.’

So they went back to the music, to streets still snug with the heat of the day, and worked their way around to the boulevard Ménilmontant, where among the couscous restaurants and sweet-pastry shops, Le Robinet, ablaze with light like a small ship on fire, was the scene of yet another impromptu party. It was not, in truth, much of a bar at all: a dozen tables, a curved comptoir to the left of the door, a cramped steamy kitchen in the back, but what it lacked in size and facilities it made up for in character, and was generally considered (by the discerning bon vivants and barflies of the Eleventh) superior to all its rivals.

‘László!’

It was Angela, the patronne, waving to him from the step beside the till, her command post. László fought his way through to her and they kissed.

‘Have you seen Laurence? Or Franklin?’

‘Not for a week,’ she said. Then added: ‘Someone else was looking for them.’ She pointed towards the back of the bar. ‘Isn’t that Whatshisname?’

At a table by the kitchen hatch, Karol was holding court among a huddle of young men and women, devotees of culture, drawn by the flame of the old writer’s promiscuous charm. He had one of the waitresses on his lap (all highly educated girls) but catching sight of László, he eased her off, stood up on stiff legs, and clasped the playwright in his arms.

‘You look different,’ he said, leaning back to scrutinize the other’s appearance.

‘Even at my age,’ laughed László, ‘I’m still growing a face.’

‘Your age,’ mocked Karol. ‘A boy!’ He turned to the group at the table. ‘Now here is a real artist. Allow me to present Maître Lâszlô Lâzâr, and his faithful companion, Herr Engelbrecht.’

They ordered a lot more wine. Space was made for Lâszlô on the banquette, and he too was lionized with a warmth that made him wonder what it was these youngsters saw, or thought they saw. It turned his head a little. Even now, after so many years, he found it hard to make the connection between what he laboured over so privately in his study and the manner in which he was received on occasions like this. Were they really interested in him? What did they want? But it was too loud for any serious conversation, and Angela, a woman Ingres might have done justice to, ordered them on to their feet. ‘Have you forgotten how to dance?’ she cried. ‘Or do you mean to talk each other to death!’

So they danced, fifty or more, crushed together in the heat and the smoke. Lâszlô found himself nose to nose, hip to hip, with a woman of Middle Eastern looks, a real beauty with a thrillingly stern expression on her face. Karol swayed with the queenly Angela, while Kurt, moving with that sweet, politely sexy style of his, was much in demand with both sexes and all persuasions. There were two accordionists installed now, a pair László had seen before playing on the Métro; children of Ceaucescu or Hoxa, who spent their days scurrying from carriage to carriage with one eye open for the patrols, one ear cocked for a cry of ‘Papers!’. They played some Piaf numbers – ‘Johnny’, ‘La Foule’, ‘Sous le ciel de Paris’ – then gypsy music. Tzigane! They knew what was wanted, and on a night like this any musician could sway a crowd to tears or to frenzy. It was exhausting, but no one wanted it to end. Why stop when there was still beer and wine and cane-liquor to drink? Why stop before the music stopped?

At five o’clock, Angela had had enough. She cleared the bar without much ceremony, though an inner circle of favourites was allowed to linger, drink coffee and regain their senses. László, Kurt and Karol were among the last to go, leaving only a serenely drunken Englishman who apparently lived in the bar, and clearly hoped the party might somehow be made to start again.

Outside, the three friends gathered under the trees that lined the central walkway of the boulevard, and breathed in air cool as tap water. László tilted back his head, sore eyes looking into the great scooped pearl of the morning sky.

‘The floating happiness?’ asked Karol.

‘The floating happiness,’ agreed László, feeling foolish at having to wipe the tears from his cheeks.

‘Once upon a time,’ said Karol, ‘I could simply miss out a night’s sleep. A “white night” hardly troubled me at all, but now…’

They made their slow goodbyes. The shutter at Le Robinet rattled down. Kurt and László seemed like the last people abroad.

‘Home?’ asked Kurt. Then seeing László’s hesitation, he said: ‘Let’s go back, have something to eat, relax a little, and phone them in a few hours. If they were out last night they won’t want us calling on them now.’

The Citroën – László’s prized maroon-and-silver DS23 ‘Pallas’ – was parked outside a charcuterie on boulevard Voltaire, and with László at the wheel they headed south, passing the July column and crossing the river where the last of the night lingered in bruise-coloured shadows under the bridges.

At the apartment they drank fresh coffee and made each other laugh, wondering – in ever-wider loops of absurdity – how the Garbargs had spent the night. Then László stripped off in the bedroom, put on his bathrobe (he favoured a Japanese yukata for the summer), and went to take a shower. He had just worked up a good lather of shampoo on his head when Kurt leaned into the room. László shook the foam from his ears and turned off the shower. ‘What?’

‘Laurence. On the machine. I think you’d better hear it.’

Wrapped in a towel, László hurried to the study and stood dripping on the parquet as Kurt rewound the tape. The message was halting and mostly unintelligible, but there was no mistaking the desperation in her voice. It sounded as if some ferocious undertow was pulling her away even as she spoke. Something had happened, or was perhaps about to happen (it wasn’t clear which). Something very bad indeed.

‘When did she call?’

Kurt checked the Minitel screen on the front of the phone, then looked at his watch. ‘Just over an hour ago. What do you want to do?’

‘You try to call. I’ll put some clothes on.’

In the bathroom he rinsed off the shampoo, then dressed in the same smoky clothes he’d been wearing in Le Robinet. He was back in the study in five minutes.

‘Anything?’

‘Nothing. They’ve even switched off the answerphone.’

‘OK. Let’s go.’

They took the stairs rather than wait upon the stately descent of the elevator, then drove in silence through the littered streets, the car’s long bonnet slicing the air, the needle of the speedometer flickering at sixty as they motored on to an almost traffic-less Beaumarchais. How tender the city looked! The first of the early risers carrying a newspaper or walking a dog. The street cleaners in their green overalls hosing the pavements and opening the sluices; fresh water running in slack silver ropes around the wheels of the parked cars. Impossible to think any crisis could occur at such an hour, and when, pulling up at rue du Deguerry, there was no police van or Samu ambulance, László began to wonder whether he was overreacting, whether the call had been nothing but the sequel to another fight, and the pair of them were upstairs now, sleeping it off and snoring like ogres.

He left the car by the church, crossed the road to the street door and tapped in the code. Inside, the courtyard was scrubbed and chilly. The gardienne would not be in for another hour or two. A neat little ‘fermé’ sign hung from a nail on the door of her office.

They found Laurence in the gloom of the third-floor landing. Two female neighbours were in attendance, sombre, greyhaired women in slippers and bed-jackets. László vaguely recognized one of them. Madame Bassoul. Blumen. Some such.

‘Where have you been?’ asked Laurence. She slapped him, hard, then put her arms around his neck.

‘Is Franklin upstairs?’ he asked.

‘He has a gun, monsieur,’ said the woman László recognized. ‘Like so…’ She indicated with her hands the dimensions of the weapon. ‘We wanted to call the police, but Madame has expressly forbidden it.’

‘He pointed it at me,’ said Laurence, shuddering at the memory. ‘I had to run out of the door. He’s crazy now. Completely crazy.’

She looked very close to collapse. László stroked her hair. ‘You know he wouldn’t have used it.’

She pushed him away. ‘You think I’m inventing this?’ Her voice broke in a sob. ‘He’ll use it on himself, László. I’ve been waiting for the noise. I can’t stand it.’

The women came forward to support her, but as they gathered her between them, those sturdy attendants, she looked at László, a sudden sharp glance that made the hairs prickle on his neck, for it was precisely the look of the woman in the painting, the bride in the dress of rose blooms. ‘I still love him,’ she whispered.

‘We all love him,’ said László. ‘I’ll go up and make him see sense.’ He turned to go, but Kurt caught hold of his arm. Gently, László freed himself. ‘I won’t do anything dangerous,’ he said. ‘But really, who else is there?’

He went up the broad bare wooden stairs, acutely aware of them watching his back. He felt slightly ridiculous, like George Orwell on his way to shoot an elephant, but he could hardly turn around and say he had changed his mind. He would have to trust himself. He was not tired. And if he stayed with the others and Franklin blew out his brains? No. That was not an option. He would have to go on. Go in.

The door of the apartment was half open, and he hesitated, listening for a minute, wondering whether he should call out. He put his head around the door. The hall light was still burning, and he noticed on the tiles Laurence’s suede jacket where she must have dropped it in her flight. On soft feet he went past the empty kitchen (the old clock ticking in the silence) and along the passageway to the door of the studio, where he leaned his ear to the wood. At first, despite the intensity of his focus, he could discern nothing except the ebbing and flowing of his own body, and certain stray effects from the street. But then, from near by – close! close! – he heard the hushed complaint of a floorboard, and had a vision, shockingly clear, of Franklin Wylie at arm’s length from him on the other side of the door, wild-eyed, the little snub pistol in his fist, waiting for the moment when the door would be opened.

László swallowed. It would be sensible now to be afraid, but what he felt was excitement, the need not to let the moment be squandered. He raised his fingers to the brass of the handle, and as he touched it there came, like a message flung from out of the remoteness of his boyhood, the name of the English soccer captain in the match at Wembley. Billy Wright! He almost laughed aloud at such inconsequence, but it heartened him, and he grinned fiercely at his shade in the varnish of the door panel. Three breaths, he thought. Just three more breaths. Then I’ll go in and save my friend.