The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

WODWO

It is late afternoon on Christmas Eve and the predicted snow has begun, a long front of white teeth sweeping down the weather map of the Baltic and fastening itself into the curved rump of England. Kelmarsh, Clipston, Sibbertoft: red sandstone and rolling green hills, thatched roofs, cattle farms and boxy Saxon churches. Scattered flakes at first, whiter than the darkening sky behind them, that magical childhood silence settling on everything, only the peal of church bells and the chatter of distant trains being carried in the cold, clean air.

Madeleine Cooper is cooking a smoked salmon quiche with honey-glazed carrots and broccoli, getting everything ready for the final bake and steam when the three children and their respective families have safely arrived. There is a chocolate and raspberry pavlova in the fridge.

Her husband, Martin, has completed his allotted, minimal task of setting the table and is now sitting in his study listening to the St. Matthew Passion (the 2001 Nikolaus Harnoncourt recording) and reading Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521–1580. He has set the table wrong, laying nine places instead of ten. It is a drama they play out so often they hardly notice anymore: his feigned incompetence followed by her feigned exasperation (“Can you honestly not count the members of your own family?”) which makes her feel more important and him more justified in not providing any further help. He retired two years ago after thirty-six years of neurosurgery, at St. George’s, Tooting, then Frenchay in Bristol, then out into the sticks for a final few laps at Leicester Royal Infirmary. She worried about him falling to pieces in the time-honoured manner of returning Vietnam vets now that no lives were on the line but he applies to books, music, golf and grade 5 piano the same unsentimental rigour he previously applied to leucotomies, aneurysms and pituitary adenomas.

Madeleine worries about most things. She has been anxious for the greater part of her adult life. She rarely talks about this to anyone, though it is obvious to those around her, Martin included. He believes that she suffers from a basic flaw in her psychological make-up which has been exacerbated by a life in which she has taken very few risks and spent too much time in her own company. It being something he is powerless to change he sees little point in discussing the subject.

Just after four o’clock their eldest daughter, Sarah, and her husband, Robert, arrive. Sarah is the service manager for business development at Hampshire County Council, a job which used to involve building children’s homes, rolling out broadband and getting social workers into GP surgeries but which now mostly involves sacking employees, closing down projects and saving money. Robert is the fund manager for Appalachian, a small wealth management company he set up three years ago with two escapees from Deutsche Bank, which they run from an office in Reading to which he commutes from Winchester three days a week.

They have one child, a teenage daughter, Ellie, who is spending Christmas with her boyfriend’s family in Winchester because she and Daniel are still in the honeymoon period and his parents are “so, so, so much more relaxed than you,” meaning, presumably, that she has not yet had a meltdown in their presence.

Sarah is bloody hard work. That’s her father’s blunt diagnosis. Sarah puts it down to her being a woman and, unlike her mother, having a job and opinions, some of which are not the same as her father’s.

Robert likes the fact that Sarah is argumentative and opinionated, though this is made easier by the fact that he agrees with most of those opinions and most of the arguments are therefore had with other people, but he dislikes visiting his parents-in-law in whose presence Sarah can sometimes regress to the teenage girl he guesses she once was, a teenage girl not unlike their own teenage daughter in her less charming moods. It is a subject he has tried to broach with Sarah. It is not a subject he is going to broach again. There is a constant and generous supply of alcohol at the Rookery, however, which he treats as a medical necessity, like a morphine drip on a low setting.

“Hello, darling.” Madeleine hugs her daughter.

Robert gives Madeleine their traditional uneasy embrace. There is a surge of choral music (“…Ich will dir mein Herze schenken…”) and Martin appears from the opened study door for the golf-club handshake which always strikes Robert as too muscular for a man who previously worked inside the brains of living human beings. He waves the cordless in his free hand. “That was Leo and Sofie. They’ll be here in twenty minutes.”

“And Gavin?” asks Sarah.

“No news yet,” says Martin.

“So,” says Sarah, “if the weather keeps up…”

“Now now,” says Madeleine, “don’t start before he’s even got here.”

“He was an arse last year,” says Sarah, “and I’m sure he’ll be an arse this year.”

Martin looks at Robert and rubs his hands together. “Drink?”

The sky is blacker now. Snow deepens in sheltered corners and on the windward side of walls. It lies in Advent calendar curves on windowsills. It blots and softens the top of every object like icing on a plum pudding. Hedges, telegraph wires, cars, postboxes, recycling bins. The world is losing its edges. Look upwards and it seems as if the stars themselves are being poured from the sky and turn out not to be vast and fiery globes after all but tiny, frozen things which melt in the palm of your hand.

Martin tells Madeleine to stop fretting and insists that Gavin and Emmy will be fine, because it is one of his guiding principles that everything is always fine until occasionally it isn’t and you should therefore save your energy for coping with that rare eventuality. In the back of his mind he ponders the satisfying conundrum of what he would do if he were stuck in a car overnight in weather like this. How long would the engine run in neutral to power the heating system, for example? The snow would act as an insulator of course, but you would have to be wary of carbon monoxide poisoning.

A green VW Touran turns off the main road, two cones of halogen light swinging through the slowly falling flakes. The car slides briefly sideways then finds traction again, compacted snow squeaking as the tyre treads bite. Leo, Martin and Madeleine’s younger son, is driving. His wife, Sofie, is in the passenger seat and David (eleven) and Anya (ten) are in the back. Leo decides against attempting the potentially ruinous bottleneck of the stone gateposts and leaves the car at a jaunty angle halfway over the hidden kerb. He rests his head on the steering wheel. “Jesus. I am knackered.”

He teaches history at Durham. When he was a small boy he wondered regularly whether he had been adopted and the suspicion has never entirely gone away. Family gatherings of all kinds are purgatorial, leaving him longing for a solitary walking holiday in some remote corner of the earth. In truth he is like his mother, or like the person his mother might have been if she were not warped by the deforming gravity of the husband around whom she has orbited for nearly all her life. He listens more than he talks. In most rooms he has a good sense of what other people are feeling, and if any of them are uneasy he cannot help but share that unease. A family Christmas is a guaranteed generator of unease.

Sofie translates from Icelandic and her native Danish, mostly business, a bit of crime writing over the last couple of years. She feels no closer to Leo’s family than he does but she keeps her distance by pretending to be more foreign and less intelligent than she is, misusing words and faking bafflement at quirky native customs, and is both insulted and relieved that none of them see through the blatant subterfuge.

Anya is going through a period of ferocious conformity that both Leo and Sofie find deeply dispiriting (Sims, Frozen, One Direction) though not as dispiriting as David’s rank oddity which Leo, in particular, fears may be an expression of the same car-crash genes which have yo-yoed Sofie’s uncle in and out of a psychiatric hospital in Augustenborg for his whole adult life. All the books Leo has read on the subject suggest that psychosis only rears its ugly head in the late teens for boys, which is some reassurance. Still, it’s hard not to be disturbed by the collection of dead animals (crow, mouse, stag beetle, toad) that he keeps wrapped in tissue paper in a line of cardboard boxes on his bedroom bookshelf like so many little coffins, and by the incomprehensible language in which he talks to himself sometimes, which he claims to be Tagalog but isn’t because Leo has checked.

They take their luggage from the boot. Anya has a yellow, black and white rucksack in the shape of one of the Minions from Despicable Me. David has an antique leather satchel given to him by his Danish grandfather which he dubbins regularly and which gives him the air of a tiny Renaissance clerk.

Leo stops and looks around at all this crystal, blue-black darkness and listens to…absolutely nothing. Apart from his son and daughter arguing about who knocked the bagged-up duvet into the snow the silence is fathomless. He forgets it every year until some detail brings it back (the eggshell glass of a broken bauble, a Salvation Army brass band playing “I Saw Three Ships,” thick snowfall…), how extraordinary Christmas once was, how extraordinary everything once was all year round, each individual moment a thing to be swallowed or solved or suffered. But now…? So much coasting, so many blanks, as if there was an infinite supply of time and those same seconds could be brushed from the table like spilt salt.

“I know you’d like to spend all night standing out here.” Sofie touches his arm. “But it really is very cold.”

They trudge up the drive into the sudden glare of the intruder light. By the time they reach the porch Sarah is opening the door with its two stained-glass panels (a shepherd on the left, three sheep on the right). “Hey, little brother.” It is a thing she does in one way or another every time they meet, gently but firmly asserting her superior place in the pecking order, but with enough warmth to make a complaint seem churlish.

Deep breath. Ten seconds down, thirty-six hours to go. “No Gavin yet?” says Leo. “I didn’t see the car.”

“With any luck they’ll be spending Christmas in a Travelodge on the M1.”

Sofie stamps the snow off her boots while Sarah gives the children mock-regal handshakes. “Anya…David…”

“I greet you in the name of the seven kingdoms,” says David. “I feared that we would not make it through the mountains.”

But Sofie is looking over the top of his head. “You spoke too soon.”

They turn as one to see Gavin and Emmy walking up the drive and even in the dark it is possible to tell from her weary, Scott/Shackleton gait that they have been forced to leave the car some distance away.

“Ahoy there,” shouts Gavin. “I hope you have a blazing log fire and large whiskies waiting.”

Gavin is an extravagantly gifted man whose critical shortcoming, aside from his monstrous ego, is that he has never been struck by a passionate interest which will direct his manifold talents and offer him the prospect of achieving something which matters more than achievement itself.

Leo’s theory is that since his preternatural growth spurt at twelve a natural magnetism has made him, always, the centre of a group of people who want to be in his presence and he has never been sufficiently free of their noise to hear what is going on inside his own mind, nor bored enough to discover what genuinely pleases him.

Deep down Gavin believes that he should now be head of the family — Sarah’s gender disqualifies her so completely that he never thinks of her as his older sister — and he resents the fact that his father has not ceded his position by dying or slackening his mental grip on the world. The simple fact of driving to his parents’ house at Christmas is an act of obeisance which he finds demeaning and which the inclement weather has only made more irksome.

Eighteen years ago he got a rugby Blue at Cambridge, played briefly for the Harlequins, had his jaw shattered in his seventh game and experienced a rare moment of revelation lying in St. Thomas’ Hospital, to the effect that he would never get an international cap and should therefore take the job Ove Arup had offered him four months previously. He got back in touch and, being a man into whose lap so many things simply fell, it seemed only natural that the woman who had taken the job he spurned had been killed in a light-plane crash on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast only the week before and that his prospective departmental boss was a rugby fan who bore no grudge for Gavin’s initial rejection.

The company, which had worked on the Chinese National Aquatics Centre for the Olympics and the new Terminal 5 at JFK, however, assigned him to the A8 Belfast to Larne dual carriageway and he was soon champing at the bit. Thankfully the benign fates arranged a meeting with an old friend from Peterhouse which led to him doing a few slots of commentary and interviewing for Sky. He was articulate, quick-witted and wholly at ease looking into a camera through which three million people might be looking back at him. He expanded sideways from rugby into athletics and cycling but soon became bored, again, with what he saw as the unchallenging nature of the job, and hungry for more prestige, at which point those same benign fates came to his aid for a third time and placed him and the head of factual programming for BBC4 at adjacent urinals after the Royal Television Society Awards, which led, by a somewhat drunken and circuitous route, to a heated argument about the respective merits of the wealthy, self-promoting Brunel and the lower-class, self-effacing Stephenson and from there, by a less drunken but equally circuitous route, to Gavin presenting a TV series about ten outstanding feats of British engineering (the Thrust SSC racing car, the East Hill funicular in Hastings, Pitstone Windmill…). He wrote the accompanying book without the help of a ghost and began a regular technology column for The Times, the guiding principle of which was that he would write about nothing that had either a keyboard or a screen. He took lucrative speaking engagements and, while filming a further series about great bridges of the world, met and married Kirstin Gomez. She was not, it’s fair to say, the sharpest knife in the box. If she were she might not have married Gavin. But she was cartoon-sexy and one of very few people who were genuinely rude to him. They bought a house in Richmond and had a son, Thom, now eleven years old. He was a surprisingly good husband and father, certainly better than many of those who knew him predicted he would be, until yet again he became bored with what he saw as the unchallenging nature of the job which, in truth, he had only ever done part-time, and Thom now lived with his mother ten thousand miles away within sight of the bridge whose 503-metre arch span had been the cause of their parents’ meeting.

He took legal advice about what the overexcitable young man at Dagmar-Prestell unhelpfully referred to as “the kidnap” but decided, ultimately, that he did not want to run the risk of a settlement which saw him having his son actually living with him for significant chunks of the year. The separation did not cause him the pain and distress it might have caused someone without his geological self-confidence, but there was a part of his memory which he simply did not visit, and of whose existence other people could only guess, like a locked cellar in a large house from which inexplicable noises might occasionally be heard during the quieter parts of the night, the precise nature of which were irrelevant because the door was bolted fast and only a fool would go down that narrow, mildewed staircase.

His new wife, Emmy, is an actress, and a very good one (the National, the Donmar, some TV, a little film, but still mainly, and passionately, stage), who possesses precisely what he lacks, a commitment to a project larger than herself, and who lacks precisely what he possesses, that solid sense of self whose absence leaves her feeling lost between the job of being one imaginary person and the job of being another imaginary person. He likes her arresting good looks—“Bond Villain’s Assistant” is Sarah’s less than generous description — and the reflected glory therefrom, but in truth it is the mutual absences which have kept their two hearts fond over these last three years. Indeed, thanks to Henrik Ibsen and Gavin’s work schedule this is only the fourth evening they have spent together since early November.

They are sitting now in his parents’ kitchen drinking mugs of tea and wearing makeshift skirts of clean towels while their sodden jeans tumble like acrobats in the dryer. Gavin is feeling jovial. He enjoys a bit of adventure (he is in the process of trying to sell the BBC a documentary series in which he walks the Silk Road) and would happily have trudged five times the distance through snow twice as deep. And if Emmy is not feeling jovial she is warm at last and greatly relieved to have survived Gavin’s overconfident driving.

The good mood continues into and throughout the meal, helped partly by the exceptional quality of the quiche and the pavlova, partly by Gavin’s good humour and partly by the fact that Emmy recently had a very small role in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and is therefore possessed of scandalous gossip about a group of famous actors, some of whom are refusing to age gracefully, and everyone, including Martin who professes to float at some Olympian height above such vulgar tittle-tattle, is agog.

At the end of the meal Sarah insists that her mother stays seated while she clears the table with help from Emmy and Sofie. It is an unspoken tradition that they comply with old-fashioned gender stereotypes while they are here, making a little pantomime of it to show that this is, of course, not how they act at home. They put the kettle on, scrape the leftovers from plates into the green bin below the sink, fill the dishwasher, set it going and return to the dining room with a pot of coffee and two peppermint teas, a small box of which Sofie has brought with her from Durham. They leave the cheese plate in the centre of the table in case the men want to continue grazing.

They take the second set of smaller wineglasses from the cabinet and hand them round. There is brandy, there is Sauternes, a ninety-pound bottle of Château Suduiraut courtesy of Gavin who gets a perverse pleasure from the knowing that no one apart from his father appreciates the extent of his largesse. There is also a three-quid box of After Eights brought by Sarah so as to deliberately undercut the grander gesture she knows her brother was guaranteed to make.

Martin would like some entertainment. It has become a regular thing, a regular thing in which everyone takes part under various levels of duress, a ceremony which dramatises Martin’s dominion over this little court. Reading from a book is acceptable but generally considered a poor effort. Reciting from memory is better. Performing something of one’s own creation beats both if one’s own creation passes muster. Only Sofie is exempted on condition that she does pencil sketches of other family members performing, some of which have been framed and now hang in the hallway beside the downstairs toilet. Emmy never acts because she is too good an actor and no one is allowed to steal Martin’s show. Instead she does low-rent magic tricks, a skill she picked up while performing in an experimental production of The Tempest at the Edinburgh Fringe many years ago (David and Anya still talk about the twenty-pound note which vanished and reappeared inside a mince pie Grandpa was eating). At a low point in diplomatic relations some years back Sarah recited a poem by Sharon Olds which contained the word “cunt,” but her father caught the ball and belted it straight down the pitch into the back of her net by saying he thought it was fantastic and whose turn was it next?

This year marks a period of détente in that department and tonight’s event promises to pass off smoothly. Anya has brought her violin and is planning to play an unaccompanied piece by Leclair which she is learning for her grade 4 exam while her grandfather is planning to play the allegretto con moto from Frank Bridge’s first set of “Miniature Pastorals.” There will be some Tennyson and some Carol Ann Duffy. Emmy will do some mind-reading.

“So,” says Martin, “who is going to get the evening rolling?”

And Sarah says, “Christing shit!” which are very much not words anyone is allowed to say in this room.

In unison they follow her eyes to the French windows, outside which the intruder light has snapped on to reveal a tall black man in a black woolly hat, sporting a big salt-and-pepper beard and wearing a long black coat over camouflage trousers and big black boots. He is looking in at them all as if they are exhibits in a zoo. Or perhaps it is the other way round.

“Who in God’s name is that?” says Gavin.

“I have absolutely no idea,” says Martin, sounding more intrigued than startled.

“Is he a neighbour?” asks Sofie.

“Of course he’s not a bloody neighbour,” says Gavin.

“Why is that a stupid question?” asks Sofie.

Leo puts a consoling hand on Sofie’s back. He has tried to stand up for his wife in the face of his brother’s rudeness before and it has never turned out well. “Is someone planning to let him in?” he asks.

Madeleine says, “He does not look like the kind of man I want inside the house.”

The stranger knocks twice on the glass, slowly and deliberately.

“Nor,” says Martin, “does he look like someone you’d want to leave standing in your garden.” He does not recognise the man. He has dealt with a good number of eccentric, difficult and unpredictable people in his time, some of them patients, some of them family members of patients. He has on a small number of occasions been threatened. Brain surgery is a risky business and desperate people do not handle statistics well.

“I’m actually quite scared?” says Anya. The question thing is something she has been doing for the last few months, not wanting to be assertive or seem needy.

“It’s all right.” Sofie strokes her hair. “He’s probably just cold and hungry.”

“Grandad is going to kill him,” says David, as if this is obvious and unremarkable. It is precisely this kind of comment that makes his father worry that his son will spend a significant part of his adult life in mental institutions.

“Let’s see what he wants.” Martin gets to his feet.

Madeleine says, “Do not let him in.”

Her husband pauses. “I’m not sure sitting here watching him is a long-term option.”

“Perhaps we should call the police,” says Madeleine.

“And say what?” asks Gavin. “ ‘There’s a black chap knocking on the French windows’?”

“In the absence of any better ideas…” Martin unlocks the door and swings it open. A great belch of snow and freezing air enter the room. A couple of cards fall from the mantelpiece, clattering softly onto the log basket and from there to the floor.

“What can we do for you, sir?”

“Are you not going to ask me in?” The man has a breathy tenor voice. They’d expected Trinidad or Hackney but the accent is from some less obvious third place.

“I wasn’t planning on it, no.”

“It’s bitter weather out here, and I’ve come a good distance.”

“I’m less interested in where you’ve come from,” says Martin, “and more interested in what you’re doing in my garden.”

“That is a poor welcome on a cold night.”

“I think it’s a pretty decent welcome in the circumstances,” says Martin.

“This is freaking me out quite a bit,” says Sarah.

“Better than listening to Leo reading Seamus bloody Heaney again,” says Gavin, just loud enough for Leo to hear.

“Do you want money?” asks Martin.

“I was hoping for hospitality.”

“Let the chap in,” says Gavin.

“Gavin, for God’s sake,” whispers Madeleine.

“Give him a glass of brandy and a mince pie so he can warm up and tootle off on his merry way,” says Gavin. “Spirit of the season and so forth.”

Leo says, “Gavin, I am really not sure that’s a good idea.”

Anya shifts her chair next to her mother’s chair and squirrels under her protecting arm.

“Five minutes,” says Martin.

The stranger steps inside. He wipes his feet in the same slow, deliberate way in which he knocked on the glass, like someone demonstrating the wiping of feet to people who have not seen it before. Martin closes the door behind him. The stranger takes off his woolly hat and dunks it into a pocket.

They can smell him now, more agricultural than homeless. Leather, dung and smoke, something very old about it, Mongol horses on the high steppe. Yurts and eagles. His greatcoat is Napoleonic, scuffed black serge with actual brass buttons and a ragged hem. Snow melts on his shoulders.

“Compliments of the season.” Gavin hands him the promised victuals. “Made by my mother’s own fair hand. Five stars. Lots of fruit in the mincemeat.”

“Please, Gavin,” says Leo quietly, “don’t be a twat.”

The stranger sips the brandy, savours it and swallows. He takes a bite of the mince pie. He closes his eyes. To an outside observer it might look as if the family were waiting for a score out of ten.

Martin is turning over old memories. If the man had shorter hair and no beard…

The stranger nods. The mince pie is good. The room relaxes. He takes a second sip of the brandy and steps forward to put the glass and the mince pie down on the table. Emmy and Sofie scootch their chairs back a little to avoid being touched. The damp hem of the stranger’s coat brushes Emmy’s knee. He steps back into the centre of the room. There are pastry crumbs in his beard. “Who wants to play a game?”

“None of us want to play a game,” says Martin firmly. “We want to get on with the pleasant evening we were having before you arrived.”

The stranger ignores, or perhaps fails to hear, the edge in Martin’s reply. “Surely someone wants to play a game.”

“You’ve had something to drink,” says Martin. “You’ve had something to eat. I think that now it might be a good idea if you were to continue with your travels.”

“I was on my way here,” says the stranger.

There is a short silence while everyone digests this, then Gavin says, “Stop dicking us around, all right?”

“Gavin,” hisses Sarah. “Jesus Christ.”

The stranger opens his greatcoat. There is a deep poacher’s pocket on the left-hand side which sags open with the weight of a sawn-off shotgun. Anya’s intake of breath sounds like a hiccup. David says, “Wow.” The stranger lifts the gun out of the pocket, pushes the After Eights and the cheese plate to one side, slides the spare wicker mat into the cleared area and lays the gun gently on top of it so that it doesn’t scratch the polished walnut veneer.

“Oh my God,” says Madeleine.

Leo’s mouth hangs open.

Anya begins to cry.

“Is that a real gun?” asks David.

“Let’s assume it is, shall we?” says Martin.

But David’s question is apposite, because there is something odd about the gun, a hint of steampunk about it, the faintest possibility that it could be a theatrical prop, despite the weight everyone could sense when it touched the surface of the table.

“Oh my God,” says Madeleine again. She is hyperventilating. “Oh my God.”

“Someone really, really needs to call the police,” says Sofie.

“Have we met before?” Martin asks the stranger. He has decided that this is, ultimately, a medical problem and this has allowed him to step back into a role he hasn’t filled for a long time and which feels very comfortable indeed.

“Surely one of you wants to play a game,” says the stranger.

Emmy gets to her feet.

“Stay with us,” says the stranger.

Emmy sits down again. Gavin pats her hand reassuringly.

“I’m afraid you need to leave,” says Martin, “and you need to leave now.”

“Are we in a hostage situation here?” asks Gavin. “Just out of interest.”

“Are none of you brave enough to play my game?” asks the stranger.

“Fucking hell,” says Gavin. “This is not about being brave. This is about you interrupting our hitherto very enjoyable festive family meal and assuming that we want to take part in some deranged pantomime of your own creation.”

“Gavin?” says his father calmly, meaning, I’ll take it from here. He turns to the stranger. “Time’s up, I’m afraid.”

The stranger smiles. He looks slowly around the room, as if assessing each of them in turn.

Sofie squeezes Anya’s hand and says, “It’s going to be OK, darling.”

“That’s it,” says Gavin, getting to his feet, irked not just by the stranger’s intrusion but by the way his father’s relaxed competence has placed him in a subordinate position.

“Gavin,” Sarah half growls under her breath.

Gavin picks up the gun.

“No,” says Emmy. “Gavin, please.”

Gavin steps away from the table and pushes his chair back under.

“Holy fuck,” says Leo, putting his face in his hands.

Gavin himself has not thought about what he will do with the gun, only that it is the source of power in the room, the sceptre, the conch. Now that it is in his hands, however, he is less sure about this. Should he hand the gun back to the stranger and order him to take it away? Should he confiscate it? Should he use it to threaten the man? “Time to go, I’m afraid.”

Martin has been wrong-footed. The most dangerous person in the room is now his older son. He was not expecting this and is not immediately sure what to do about it. Family has always been so much more complex than work.

The stranger smiles. “So you are willing to play my game?”

“What, precisely, is this game you want us to play?” Gavin does not want to be asking questions, he wants to be giving orders, but he is being outplayed.

“Shoot me,” says the stranger.

Madeleine yelps, the kind of noise you might make if you fell down a flight of stairs.

Gavin laughs. “Oh, I don’t think that’s going to happen.” How odd it is to be holding a weapon yet to have no control over the situation.

“Gavin,” says his father, “I think it might be a good idea for you to put the gun down.”

He agrees with his father and he would very much like to put the gun down but he does not want the stranger to see him doing something his father has asked him to do.

The stranger walks very slowly towards Gavin. He seems utterly unbothered by the gun. It is the most menacing thing he has done since his arrival.

“Whoa,” says Gavin. “Whoa, whoa. Stop right there.” His voice is not as low or as calm as he would like it to be.

The stranger comes to a halt a couple of metres away from Gavin. They are two magnets of identical polarity pressed into close proximity. You can almost see curved lines of force penned on the air.

“No closer,” says Gavin.

“Gavin,” says his father, “you need to be very careful.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” says Gavin.

The exchange makes both men seem smaller.

The stranger makes the tiniest of moves, perhaps no more than shifting his weight from one foot to another. Gavin responds immediately by raising the gun. He is not aware of having taken this decision, only that it has happened and that he cannot now undo it.

“Oh fuck,” says Sarah. “Fucking fuck.”

Gavin is now pointing a gun at another human being. He has occasionally imagined doing such a thing but he has never imagined it coupled with this level of anxiety and unease.

Anya gets up and runs from the room. No one follows her for fear of doing even more to upset the precarious balance upon which everything seems now to depend. David has no thought of leaving. He is gripped. He senses no danger. He wonders if it is all part of Grandpa’s Christmas extravaganza. Perhaps the stranger is a friend of Emmy’s. Later on, when he gets up to his room and digs out his phone he is going to have the most amazing story to text to Ryan and Yah ya.

“You’re going now,” says Gavin to the stranger.

It is quite obvious to everyone that the stranger is not going.

Leo softly pushes his chair back, half stands and reaches out towards Gavin, intending to nudge the barrel of the gun towards the carpet. But Gavin swings the gun towards Leo. He does not think about how the gesture might be read. It seems obvious to pretty much everyone in the room that it means I could shoot you, too. Leo sits back down.

Martin can think of nothing more that he can contribute. He would rather David, Sofie, Sarah, Emmy and Madeleine were not in the room but otherwise he finds the situation perversely fascinating.

“Pull the trigger,” says the stranger.

“This man is not well, Gavin,” says Leo. “Gavin? Listen to me.”

“I don’t think it’s a real gun,” says Gavin. “That’s why our friend is so relaxed.” He doesn’t quite believe this. The gun feels real. He simply needs something to say. If he keeps talking then maybe he can find a way to get a grip on the situation.

The stranger says nothing and does not move.

“Put the fucking gun down, Gavin,” says Sarah, “and stop playing this stupid, bloody childish game, all right?”

“I don’t think shouting is helpful,” says Emmy.

“Well, gentle persuasion is not working out terribly well,” says Sarah.

Gavin steps forward and pokes the stranger in the chest with the barrel of the gun.

“Brilliant,” says Sarah.

Madeleine’s face is white. Sofie’s hand is over her mouth.

“No, no, no, no, no,” says Martin quietly, holding his index finger up, like a schoolteacher wanting a pupil to pause so he can redirect them towards the correct answer. “That’s a very bad idea, Gavin.”

Emmy says, “Gavin, this is really scaring me. This is really scaring all of us.”

Martin reaches towards his son. And this is when it happens. Everyone’s attention is momentarily distracted by Martin’s movement. Everyone, that is, except David who has no interest in his grandfather and eyes only for the gun. So it is only he and Gavin who are looking directly at the stranger when he is hit in the chest at point-blank range by two barrels of shot. He has no memory of the noise because the sight is so extraordinary. It is like a huge, invisible airbag going off between the two men, lifting them and hurling them away from each other, the stranger’s torso propelled by the shot, Gavin’s torso propelled by the butt of the gun which punches him hard in the ribs. He has seen this kind of image in films. What he has never seen in a film is the way the spray of shot passes instantly through the stranger’s chest, shredding and liquidising its contents and splashing them all over the curtains and the grandmother clock and the hand-coloured map of Bedfordshire while the stranger himself is still airborne.

Then the stranger is no longer airborne. He is lying on the floor on his back, his head hard against the base of the clock which is still rocking from the impact, his greatcoat spread to either side like a great pair of bat wings. Mirroring him on the opposite side of the central rug Gavin, too, lies on his back, arms thrown to the side, unconscious but with his eyes and mouth open as if he has just noticed the amazing pattern of blood on the ceiling. A fat S of sulphurous grey smoke disperses slowly in the air between the two men.

Madeleine screams, stops to catch her breath then screams again as if she is in a screaming competition.

“Gavin…?” says Emmy, but she is wary of getting too close. “Gavin…?”

There is blood on the sofa. There is blood on the standard lamp. There is a growing pool of blood beneath the stranger’s body. It is viscous with a plump, rounded outline, the colour of good port. There is blood on three of the dining chairs. There is a thin lasso of blood across the dining table, bisecting the cheese plate exactly. There is a little marble of blood sinking very slowly in a glass of Sauternes. Sofie has blood in her hair. She is wiping it robotically with a napkin, keeping her eyes fixed on the light switch on the far wall.

Anya appears at the doorway. Granny is screaming. She sees two men lying on the floor. She sees oceanic amounts of blood. Her assumption is that the stranger is killing everyone in the house. She turns and runs, as quietly as she can, upstairs and into the guest bathroom on the second floor. She has imagined this happening many times. She thinks, often, about the car crashing, about bombs on the train, about tsunamis, about volcanoes, about ISIS, about Boko Haram. Whenever she finds herself in a new building she works out escape routes and hiding places. She finds it comforting, imagining the jackboots on the floorboards overhead and the sad cries of the foolish children who have failed to plan for this eventuality. It’s not comforting now that it is happening in real life but at least she is prepared. There is a panel beside the bath. She slides her fingernails under the rim, pulls it away and squeezes through the hole into the little loft above Granny and Grandpa’s bedroom, pulling the panel back into place behind her. The cramped, triangular space between the water tank and the roof is thick with cobwebs. It is also shockingly cold. She has only been in here once before, at the height of summer two years ago when she read an entire Tracy Beaker by torchlight. She had assumed it would be the same temperature all year round but she is sitting on the insulation which keeps the rest of the house warm. She should have grabbed a coat or a jumper. It is too late now. She hugs herself and starts to shiver.

Downstairs, Martin puts his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “You need to stop that now. Go into the kitchen and take some diazepam.”

She does not hear her husband. She hears a doctor talking. She stops screaming, gets automatically to her feet, walks into the kitchen and takes the foil pack from the shortbread tin behind the chutney. She pops out three 2mg tablets and swallows them with a glass of milk. She wonders if she has woken from a particularly vivid nightmare. She will sit and wait for someone to come and find her and tell her what is going on.

In the living room Gavin groans, rolls onto his side and contracts slowly into a foetal curl, nursing what will turn out to be two broken ribs. Emmy kneels beside him and rubs his shoulder, alternating between relief that her husband is still alive and horror at his having shot someone.

“Dad?” Leo pushes the abandoned gun to the skirting board with the tip of his right shoe. “You’re a doctor. You need to do something.”

Martin is looking down at his older son. His older son has killed someone.

“Not for Gavin,” says Leo. “For him.” He points at the stranger but can’t look at the body directly.

Martin walks over to the stranger. He stands beside what remains of the man, hands in the pockets of his racing-green cardigan. The man’s chest cavity has been hollowed out and is now a rough bowl of red mush, torn membranes and the jagged ends of shattered bone. Martin hasn’t seen anything like this since he was a junior doctor, perhaps not even then. He remembers a motorcyclist who’d gone under a lorry but that was just a crushed pelvis and a missing leg. What was the point of showing anyone in this state to a doctor?

“Can’t you do CPR?” asks Leo.

“No C, no P,” says Martin. “Which makes the R impossible.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Leo.

“No heart, no lungs,” says Martin. “Cardiopulmonary. CP.”

Emmy vomits into her cupped hands. Leo hands her a napkin and she runs to the toilet in the hallway.

Gavin puts the flat of his hand on the floor and pushes himself slowly up into a sitting position. He rubs his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his free hand. He has the fuzzy, pained look of someone waking to a heavy-duty hangover. He looks over at the stranger’s body. He says, “It just went off.”

“You killed him,” says Sarah. “You’ve fucking killed him.”

“That’s not going to help anyone,” says Martin.

“I’m not thinking about helping anyone,” says Sarah. “The only person who needs help is fucking dead. I’m just getting it off my chest that my fucking brother acted like an arrogant fuckwit, as per usual, except this time he actually ended up murdering someone.”

Robert touches her arm. “Hey, hey, come on.”

“Get the fuck off me,” says Sarah. “I’m right. He knows I’m right. Everyone knows I’m right. So don’t you dare try and shut me up.”

Robert makes the universal gesture of surrender and sits back in his chair.

Sofie is trying to hustle David out of the room but he is refusing to go, shaking her hand off his shoulder. He is pretty sure now that the man was not one of Emmy’s friends. He feels sick and frightened but he wants to be able to say, “My sister ran away, but I didn’t.”

“He was an intruder,” says Gavin slowly. “He had a gun. We got into a fight. The gun went off.”

“Shut the fuck up, Gavin,” says Sarah. “You picked up the gun. You were told to put it down. You refused to put it down. You shoved it into his chest. You shot him.”

“It was a mistake,” says Gavin.

“Oh well, that’s fine then,” says Sarah.

Martin sits down and rubs his face. He would so much rather be buried in a car overnight.

Emmy appears in the doorway, drying her ashen face with the little purple towel from the handrail by the sink, remaining just beyond the threshold like a member of the public behind the crime-scene tape.

Upstairs, in the little loft above her grandparents’ bedroom, Anya cannot stop herself shaking from the cold. She is not afraid. The possibility that her entire family may now be dead has induced a terrible calm. Slowly but steadily her core temperature falls.

Her mother is not worried about where her daughter is. Her daughter has not crossed her mind. At the moment, for Sofie, the world beyond this room simply does not exist.

“I’m calling the police,” says Sarah. She walks towards the door. Emmy steps back to let her through.

“Wait,” says her father.

She stops in her tracks. It’s one of the things which angers her most about her father, the hotline he has to some primitive part of her brain, the way she has to override her knee-jerk subservience.

“I think you’re very probably right,” says her father carefully, because he, in turn, has had to learn how to override his own automatic response to his daughter’s periodic outbursts, “but perhaps we should consider the consequences of irreversible actions.”

“Are you seriously suggesting that we don’t call the police?” says Sarah. She does the words-fail-me face where she blows up her cheeks and shakes her head. “His insides are all over the fucking ceiling.”

The last time he told his daughter to calm down she threw a dinner plate at him. He says, “Give me two minutes.”

“One,” says Sarah.

“Your brother could go to prison for a very long time.”

Gavin shakes his head. “That is not going to happen.”

His sister says, “I don’t want to fucking hear from you right now.”

He clenches his teeth and presses his hand to his pained ribs to excuse his failure to think of a decent reply.

She turns to her father. “Fifty seconds.”

“He was an intruder—”

“He was a guest.”

“With a gun.”

“Which he wasn’t even holding.”

If Martin were a lawyer he might be able to see a way out of this particularly impenetrable thicket but God alone knows what form it might take.

David wonders if he can take his phone out and get a photo of the corpse. He does not know if it would be considered more than usually insensitive because of it being a dead person or whether the extraordinariness of the situation would give him some moral wiggle room.

“You’re asking nine people to lie,” says Sarah. “And you’re asking them to tell exactly the same lie, down to the last detail, for the rest of their lives. How is that going to work exactly?”

His daughter should have been a lawyer, thinks Martin. And his son is going to prison. What a bizarre and wholly unexpected turn of events. His job will be to minimise the effect this has on Madeleine. It will be a difficult job and not one he relishes. He will start by sealing off this room and getting it cleaned and redecorated.

“Any other objections?” Sarah revolves slowly, making eye contact with all the adults in turn. They know she is right. They are also mightily relieved that she is the one who is planning to set the inevitable process in motion. But Sarah does not call the police, because the silence is broken by a loud, sucking gurgle coming from the stranger’s body. Emmy screams and does a little dance, running on the spot and flapping her hands in front of her face, which would be very funny in almost any other context.

“Emmy…?” says Martin. “Emmy?” He waits for her to calm down a little. “It’s trapped gases being released.” Also, very possibly, the man’s bowels emptying beneath him, though it seems unnecessary to add this clarification. He wonders how Madeleine is doing in the kitchen. Perhaps he ought to go and check on her.

The stranger sits up and opens his eyes.

Emmy sits down, slumps forward, headbutts her coffee cup then rolls sideways off her chair, too swiftly for Robert to catch her. Gavin makes a noise that can only be described as a dog-whimper. David is bedazzled. It is, by a country mile, the most amazing thing he has ever seen. Perhaps it was a magic trick after all.

Apart from the fact that he is missing most of his internal organs, the stranger seems in better condition than Gavin. He strokes his bloody beard back into shape and gets to his feet as if he had merely stumbled in the street. He walks across the room and as he does so everyone can hear the soles of his boots alternately sticking to and becoming unstuck from the bloody floor. He retrieves his sawn-off shotgun. He walks over to Gavin and stands looking down at him. Gavin’s whimper becomes a low keening. The stranger smiles. He has the contented look of a man who has downed a good meal in fine company.

Gavin is certain that these are the last few seconds of his life and he wishes he were able to act in a more manly fashion but the pain of his broken ribs and the emotional roller coaster of the last twenty minutes have left him too drained to do anything but close his eyes and wait for the lights to go out.

The lights do not go out. The stranger says, “I will see you next Christmas.” He slips the gun into his poacher’s pocket and buttons his greatcoat over the carnage of his chest. “Then it will be my turn.” He straightens his back and turns so that he can address his last words to everyone in the room. “I bid you all good night and a merry Christmas.”

He strides to the French windows, swings them open and walks through the resulting gust of flakes into the dark.

Gavin sits with his head in his hands, staring into the woodgrain of the kitchen tabletop, waiting for his mother’s codeine to take effect. Sarah has made a pot of tea and put out a plate of biscuits and most of them seem comforted in some small degree by a custard cream and a hot mug they can wrap their hands around. Emmy has a livid bruise on her temple.

David is finally beginning to understand the enormity of the situation. For a while he rang with excitement like a beaten gong, having sailed through a test of manhood the like of which his friends would never undertake. Disappointed that he had failed to get a photograph of the dead man, however, he sneaked into the off-limits dining room with his phone. The bloodstains themselves did not affect him, but his photograph of the bloodstains looked undeniably like the photograph of a murder scene, sad and sordid and profoundly unglamorous, and he realised for the first time that he had just watched his uncle kill someone. This fact was made no more acceptable by having watched the dead man get up afterwards and announce that he would kill his uncle next year.

Upstairs, Sofie moves from room to room in a rising panic. “Anya…?” Is it possible that her daughter was so frightened that she left the house and ran into the night? In the little loft her daughter is unconscious and unable to hear her mother calling. Eventually Sofie returns to the kitchen. “I can’t find Anya.”

“She can’t have gone far,” says Leo.

“No,” says Sofie. “Listen to me. Anya is not here.”

It takes a long moment for the penny to drop. “She ran out of the room.”

“She ran out of the house,” says Sofie.

“Oh fuck.” Leo is on his feet. “Dad. Find me a torch.”

Leo and Robert scour the garden. They check inside the shed and behind the climbing roses which cover the long wooden trellis. They look in the compost bin. They take bamboo canes from the pot beside the kitchen door and push them into drifts. Leo tries not to think that if he finds his daughter using this method then she will almost certainly be dead.

Ten minutes later, sitting in the kitchen, David says, casually, “There’s a place you can hide. In the top bathroom. There’s a kind of hatch in the wall.”

Sofie runs upstairs. At her lowest point, in a couple of years’ time, she will slap her son viciously across the face and call him an “evil little shit” for not revealing this information earlier. And when her marriage to Leo falls apart she will know, deep down, that it was her son’s fault for sitting eating biscuits, untroubled by the fact that his sister was dying upstairs.

She kicks open the bathroom door, tears the panel from the wall and pulls her daughter out through the hatch. Anya’s limbs are limp, her face grey, her flesh cold and damp. Sofie carries her daughter along the corridor to the bedroom. Martin takes charge. They undress Anya and put her into her dry rabbit onesie and lie her under the duvet. Sarah is made to sit with the hairdryer feeding hot air into the space around her shaking body. Emmy fetches her a bobble hat.

Sofie says, “She needs to be in a hospital.”

“And how would she get there?” says Martin. “This is what they would do for her in a hospital.”

Sofie says, “Will she be all right?”

Martin says, “I honestly don’t know,” and this is what Sofie will remember, not that her father-in-law helped saved her daughter’s life but his cool acceptance of the fact that he might not be able to.

Madeleine arrives with a mug of hot sweet tea in one of the spouted beakers she has saved from when the grandchildren were small. Sofie works it between Anya’s lips and says, “Come on, darling, drink.”

They call Leo and Robert. Leo returns, relieved that his daughter is alive then terrified all over again when he sees how unresponsive she is, the distance in her eyes. He leans down and kisses her. “Hey, little one.”

It is a small bedroom and filling it with useless people is no help to anyone, so Sarah and Emmy retreat downstairs and wash up while Robert does what can be done in the dining room. He wipes down the clock. He rolls and bags the blood-soaked rug and puts it in the garden. He removes the map of Bedfordshire from its soiled frame and lays it in a drawer so that the frame and the glass can be soaped clean. He sponges bodily matter from pitted wallpaper. He takes down the curtains and leaves them to soak in a bucket of water. He turns off the light, closes the door and puts a symbolic chair in front of it.

Throughout all of this Gavin sits at the kitchen table saying very little. He is not greatly troubled by the pain. There is a rough-and-tumble, tree-climbing, small-boy part of him which enjoys physical discomfort. Nor is he troubled by what has happened and what might be happening to Anya. He has always possessed the ability to ignore things to which he is not immediately connected. What troubles him is that he cannot see a way in which these events might be turned to his advantage, and this is a situation he has not been in before.

Emmy hovers nearby, drying pans and casserole dishes. She longs to be back in London, stepping out of her mundane self every night and into that pretend sitting room with its view of the rainy fjord to greet Pastor Manders—“How good of you to come so early. We can get our business done before supper…” Because it was Gavin’s invulnerability, above everything else, which drew her to him and counterbalanced the arrogance and insensitivity. She knows now that he can be broken and she cannot shake the suspicion that she has climbed into the wrong lifeboat.

Only Madeleine sleeps, and she does so only until 4 a.m. when the bloody images begin to sharpen in the clearing diazepam fog. Leo tells Sofie to take a rest but she can’t until she sees Anya up and walking and, in truth, he feels the same way. Sarah is too angry to sleep and Robert’s job is clearly to remain awake in order to absorb, defuse and deflect some of his wife’s anger so that she doesn’t complicate an already difficult situation.

As for Martin it is the stranger’s resurrection which keeps him awake. The man was dead, then the man was not dead. They have been the victims of an extraordinarily sophisticated trick. But how was it done? By whom? And for what reason?

David cannot sleep because when he went upstairs to see how his sister was doing his mother hissed at him to stay away, a note of unmistakable hatred in her voice. His father came out into the corridor and said that Mummy was feeling very tense, but an apology on someone else’s behalf wasn’t a real apology. Everyone knew that.

He forgot about Anya’s hiding place. Then he remembered. Why is he not being congratulated? The answer is the same as it has always been. Because Anya was premature, the fairy child, the blessed one, who only just made it into the world. And sometimes he does wish she were dead, because everyone tells you to be good and look after yourself and not make a fuss and remember how lucky you are because Mummy and Daddy have a lot on their plate right now, so you are good and you look after yourself and don’t make a fuss and your reward is to be ignored.

He dreams sometimes of having a terrible disease. He dreams of being crippled in a car accident. Sometimes he leans a little too far out of windows. Sometimes he pushes the tip of a penknife into his wrist till blood comes out. Sometime he googles fatal doses.

And here he is again, standing in the wings of “The Anya Show.”

Gavin lies under the duvet for the latter half of the night, so as to rest if not to sleep. The daylight, when it comes, restores some of his self-belief and lends the events of the previous day an otherworldly cast which allows him to frame and neuter them. He asks Emmy to fetch him more codeine, strong coffee and toast, and when the analgesia kicks in he showers slowly and carefully, comes downstairs and suggests a preprandial family walk.

Sarah is speechless. How is it possible for him to ignore what happened in the next room? And why is everyone else colluding in this act of communal amnesia? She wants it talked about. She wants justice done. At the very least she wants her brother to admit that he did a dreadful, dreadful thing.

It is one of the reasons many people are attracted to Gavin and many people find Sarah difficult, one of the reasons why the universe so often bends unfairly to his will and throws obstacles in her way. He is all momentum and confidence. He is entertained by the new and the interesting and bored by the old and the difficult. And he makes this choice seem noble and right.

Madeleine’s hip is not good so Sofie stays behind to help with lunch. Anya, up and mobile now, is scared of what lies outside the house but decides to throw in her lot with the larger crowd for safety’s sake and they don Wellingtons and gloves and set off towards the church. Other villagers halloo them like fellow Eskimos across the snowy waste. A golden retriever bounces in and out of the deepest drifts, appearing and disappearing like a furred yellow dolphin.

Robert sees David trailing at the rear and senses something off-kilter, an echo from his own childhood perhaps, when he was shunted between international schools. Worthless superficial glamour and loneliness in fourteen languages.

“How’s it going, buddy?”

David stares at him with the utter contempt of the young, and the image that comes to Robert is that of a child who has fallen down a well, so that any conversation they muster is pointless because the shaft is deep and there is no ladder. It is a moment that will haunt Robert over the coming years when he hears, periodically, about the successive downward steps of David’s long descent. And deep snow will always come overlaid with this faint image of his nephew’s sour little face and the parents who didn’t realise which of their children was in danger.

Exercised and de-booted, everyone arranges themselves around the kitchen table for a stripped-down Christmas lunch to suit the less-than-festive mood, the younger and more limber perching on stools or sitting on the washing machine and eating on their laps. The turkey is good, and only Martin complains about the absence of swede and Brussels. The mincemeat tart and custard are even better and everyone is quietly pleased to finish the meal without feeling bloated for once, and while no one wishes to tempt fate by referring, even indirectly, to the reason why they are eating in this unorthodox manner it is tacitly admitted by the majority of the family that it is a very nice Christmas lunch.

Gavin raises his glass of Malbec. “God bless you one and all.”

After lunch gifts are handed out and what is sometimes a rather tense affair goes off without a hitch (last year Gavin’s present to his father of two walking poles was considered insulting and unsubtle). David gets the latest edition of FIFA. Martin gets a box set of the complete Beethoven sonatas for piano and violin by Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov. Sarah attempts yet again to broaden her mother’s cultural horizons by buying her a contemporary novel by a woman which will be shelved, unread, along with the others in what Gavin refers to as “the Black Lesbian Fiction Section” behind the gramophone. Leo and Sofie, in contrast, have brought many jars of blackberry jam from their allotment, ornately hand-labelled by Anya, which seem parsimonious at the time but are consumed more completely and with more enjoyment than any of the other gifts (Martin never reaches disc four of the Beethoven).

The wrapping paper is cleared away and cake served. In other circumstances they might watch Skyfall but the television is anchored to the aerial socket in the dining room. Consequently the events of the previous evening begin to rise up in the absence of commensurable distraction. While the others play Monopoly Leo and Robert escape the house to retrieve Emmy and Gavin’s suitcase and discover that their car is parked on a road which has, miraculously, been snow-ploughed and gritted. Within the hour, Monopoly has been abandoned and Gavin and Emmy are heading south on the M1, Emmy at the wheel, Gavin reclined and semi-conscious in the passenger seat.

Her brother gone, Sarah expresses her feelings about him loudly and at length. Her father asks why she has saved her anger precisely for the people who do not deserve it. This does not go down well and she exits in high dudgeon shortly thereafter taking Robert with her so that, come eight in the evening, Leo, Sofie and the children are the only remaining guests, and when Anya says that she won’t be able to sleep in the house Leo and Sofie seize the opportunity with poorly disguised relief, and set off on a night drive to Durham.

By ten o’clock Martin and Madeleine are alone and about to experience a night of such profound ill-ease that they will spend the next seven days in a damp little holiday cottage in Shropshire, Martin arranging from afar for Andrezj, the Polish builder who did the conservatory after the alder fell on it, to return the dining room to the condition it was in before “a very troubled ex-patient forced his way into the house and tried to take his own life.”

Gavin and Emmy spend the evening of Christmas Day on hard plastic chairs in the A&E department of the West Middlesex Hospital, waiting for an X-ray. “Last Christmas” by Wham! comes round seven times on the PA before Gavin gives up counting.

On Boxing Day Gavin asks a friend at the BBC to dig up any information about a rumoured shooting in his parents’ village. A blank is drawn and he puts the matter from his mind.

Emmy suffers occasional post-traumatic flashbacks over the next few weeks (the glutinous line of blood across the cheese plate, the gurgling noise…) but Gavin seems untroubled and this calms her. She wonders, sometimes, if it really happened and is reassured by her uncertainty, a sign that the event is rolling into the long grass at the edges of her memory.

One night in late January, however, Gavin is woken by a gunshot. He opens his eyes and sees a ragged splash of fresh gore on the ceiling above the bed, little stalactites of blood turning, one by one, into drops which fall in slow motion towards the bed. He puts his hand to his chest and feels…absolutely nothing, lungs, heart, stomach, all gone. Something moves in the corner of his eye. The stranger is standing in the doorway, same camouflage trousers, same brass buttons, same insolent smile, preposterous steampunk weapon smoking. An eagle turns on the wind coming off the mountains. Smoke and dung.

“Gavin?” Emmy is shaking him. “You’re safe. Please. Stop shouting.”

This is how the unravelling begins.

He remains awake for the rest of the night. He reads more of The Silk Road: A New History by Valerie Hansen. He googles locations in and around Kashgar. He sacks the graphic designer who has failed to come up with a decent identity for the production company he and Tony Weisz are setting up. The following morning he drives to the Standedge Tunnel near Huddersfield where they are filming the second season of Isambard’s Kingdom. He manages not to think about his nocturnal hallucination until the middle of the afternoon when Annie, the director, sits beside him and says, casually, “You look exhausted. On camera. Which is not good.” She affects a swagger he would accept in a man but finds grating in a woman. She is very possibly a lesbian though they are unlikely to have the kind of tête-à-tête in which such intimacies are shared. She is certainly immune to his charm in a way that puzzles and irritates him. He counts to three in his head, the way Tony has advised him to do. “I broke two ribs at Christmas. I’m still in some pain. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

Nor does he sleep the following night at the hotel, despite Hellboy on the Mac, two Paracodol and three whiskies from the minibar. He stares into the grainy, monochrome dark, listening to the low, irregular timpani of the heating pipes, unable to let go of the world. He knows that if he falls asleep the stranger will enter the room and slaughter him. It is more than simple fear, however. He has never really thought of himself as possessing an unconscious. He has seldom looked inwards and has seen little on those rare occasions. He loves busyness, company, tasks, exercise. Belatedly he is realising that there is a vital part of the mind which can go badly wrong but which cannot be easily accessed. He is forty-one years old and only now becoming aware of a problem his less confident contemporaries were grappling with on the windswept edge of the playground at St. Aloysius Primary School.

The following afternoon Veronique, the executive producer from Palomar, pitches up and makes polite enquiries into Gavin’s health. He forgets to count to three and uses the phrase “the fucking matriarchy.” He is told to take four days off while the crew shoot background footage in Manchester and Edinburgh. “Yoga, sex, pills, whatever. Get some rest. You look like the walking dead.”

Tony’s advice was intended to apply only to work situations, but when Emmy tells him to go to the doctor Gavin yet again fails to count to three, the upside being that Emmy moves into Pastor Manders’s guest room in Chiswick for a week “to make sure two careers don’t go down the tube,” and he is able to jam chairs under the handle of the bedroom door, sleep with the light on and leave Radio 4 chattering through the small hours.

After four days he returns to Huddersfield and maybe he isn’t as sharp or as energetic as he was before but Annie says nothing and he makes it through the rest of the filming without medical assistance, which seems to him to be the most important thing of all, to have been his own saviour.

But the week Emmy intends to spend sleeping elsewhere so that she arrives fresh onstage every night becomes two, then four. In week number six the much-delayed Fog finally opens. It is a low-budget Mike Singer film, shot the previous spring on the north Norfolk coast, in which Emmy plays the mother of a profoundly handicapped boy who might or might not be possessed by the Devil. Technically horror, it is hugely affecting and very beautiful and the reviews for Emmy’s performance in particular are ecstatic. In week number ten she is offered one of the female co-leads in Lockdown, a new crime seven-parter for ITV alongside Gemma Arterton and Matt Smith.

When she meets Gavin for lunch at Honey & Co. on Warren Street the following day he seems unimpressed by her news which, in other circumstances, might offend her except that it is clearly part of some deeper problem with which he is wrestling. If only he were to ask for help, in however coded a fashion, she would find it impossible to refuse. But he doesn’t reach out, and if she has learnt one thing in their three years not-quite-together it is to say nothing which presupposes weakness on his part. So she leaves the last few forkfuls of her chestnut and rum cake, kisses him on the cheek and walks out knowing, even as she does so, that this is the unexpected minor cadence of their marriage ending.

He gets an email from Sarah. She writes, “I would have preferred not to be in contact at all,” and it is this phrase which strikes Gavin with more force than the news that their father has slipped on an icy kerb en route to the newsagent and broken the top of his right femur. He should drive up to Leicester but he cannot bring himself to obey a summons, least of all from his sister. So he rings his mother, says that he’s filming, and asks her to send his father good wishes for a speedy recovery.

Tony is having trouble finding a broadcaster for the Silk Road series. There are rumours about Gavin’s temperament but that shouldn’t matter. Viewing figures for Isambard’s Kingdom were consistently high and commissioners rarely care about interpersonal friction on set if it stays out of the papers. Two of the commissioners are new, however, and eager to personalise their fiefdoms and consequently disinclined to favour projects with which their predecessors had been toying.

“It’s the wrong part of the cycle,” says Tony. “We hunker down, stay busy, give it twelve months, repackage…”

“And that’s it?” says Gavin. “That’s your answer?”

Tony pauses and says, “Gavin. You can fuck other people off, up to a point, but you do it to me and it’s curtains.”

At which point the process of decline might still be reversible so long as Gavin tightens his belt, accepts all the public speaking engagements he’s offered, writes the text for The World’s Most Amazing Buildings, a children’s book Walker have commissioned, and does a few of the less-than-appealing adverts his agent is putting his way. Instead he does something so stupid that he will never be able fully to explain it either to himself or to anyone else.

He is in the Hospital Club in Covent Garden, the membership of which is one of the expenses he might be wise to forgo until he has a steady income again. He is sitting in the bar writing the book for Walker because he dislikes being alone for long periods, which is one of the reasons he is unwilling to forgo the membership. He is drinking, just enough to take the edge off. It is shortly before three in the afternoon.

“Gavin?”

He looks up to find Edward Cole smiling down at him. Pastor Manders, the owner of the house to which his wife fled when she left him. The man makes him uneasy. Gay men in general make him uneasy. It’s the physical aspect, of course, but it’s also a sense that he is being mocked in a language that sounds superficially like English but which he doesn’t quite understand.

“How are you doing?”

“Yeh. I’m doing fine, Edward. Cheers.”

“Emmy says she’s worried about you.”

The following day Tony will say, “You’re a public figure, for Christ’s sake,” though the more pertinent fact is that Emmy is a public figure and Gavin is particularly galled to see that every article describing the incident describes him as “the estranged husband of…”

He says, “Fuck you, Edward.”

“Goodness.” Edward raises an eyebrow. “I see what she means.”

“You have no fucking idea what she means.”

“If you want my advice,” says Edward, because if someone snaps your olive branch then you are surely allowed to poke them with the broken end, “I’d stick to Earl Grey before the sun’s over the yardarm.”

In the photo you can’t see the punch landing, which is one of the reasons why Gavin doesn’t end up being prosecuted for GBH, though there will be times, later in the year, when he thinks prison might have been the preferable option.

He spends the night in the cells at the West End Central police station and is granted bail the following afternoon. He calls Tony but doesn’t realise the depth and nature of the shit he is in till Tony throws a copy of the Daily Mail into his lap. Their relationship, personal and business, ends before they reach Richmond. Walking the last two miles home Gavin is stopped by a boy of nine or ten who wants a joint selfie. Gavin tells him to go fuck himself and the boy starts to cry. He realises that the boy knows nothing of what happened the day before. The boy’s father says to Gavin, “What is wrong with you?”

His financial adviser is “tied up with other clients” so he sits in one of the smaller meeting rooms at Crace & Lawner being talked at by a pustular underling who advises him to draw up a budget, liquidate some of his investments, rent out the house and move into a flat, and whose tone says, unmistakably, “We are no longer flattered by your custom.”

Martin comes out of hospital with his femur pinned. He walks slowly and will use a frame for the first few weeks. Madeleine assumes that it is the pain and the drugs he is taking to dull it which are making him blurred and unmotivated, but when the dosage comes down and he begins walking unaided she can see that the fall has shattered something which is not physical, and that his redoubtable grip, on himself, on his family and on the world, had been a prolonged act of will he no longer has the energy to repeat.

In Durham David puts a plastic bag over his head, pulling it tight by holding the loose material at the base of his skull like a ponytail. If he rides out the automatic reflex to uncover his mouth and nose he enters a place of great calm. He begins to feel woozy, his fist uncurls, the bag comes loose and he starts to breathe again. He does this often. He imagines his parents finding his body on the bedroom floor. He imagines a dog walker finding his body on nearby waste ground, decayed and bloated after a week’s search. He imagines being in a persistent vegetative state. All these things comfort him in different ways.

Gavin remains drunk for most of the next three months, never blind, never stumbling, but starting with a whisky at breakfast and maintaining a modest but steady intake during the day so as to keep the world at two or three removes.

When the Hospital Club withdraws his membership he transfers his custom to a string of less salubrious establishments in Covent Garden and Soho, moving on each time friendly advice is offered concerning his health and welfare.

He does not open his post. He does not answer the phone. He does, however, open an email from Kirstin in Sydney. It says, “You forgot Thom’s birthday. I reminded you and you still forgot. If I write any more I will just get angry and I’m tired of being angry. Please don’t contact us again. Thom has a new father now. He is kind and generous and reliable. There is nothing good you can add to his life.”

Every night for the next week when the stranger appears he is holding Thom by the scruff of the neck, pressing the barrel of the shotgun to the side of the boy’s head. Gavin tries to reach them but the intervening air is viscous and obstructive, the way it is in dreams, and the stranger pulls the trigger before he is halfway across the room so that Thom’s head becomes a spray of wet, red vapour.

He is sitting in the Mem-Saab on Stukeley Street pretending to eat chicken tikka shashlik. It is the price of spending several hours in the warm human buzz, drinking his way through four bottles of Cobra. He has a ring-bound notebook with him and a big Phaidon volume on the architecture of Alvar Aalto so as to look and feel purposeful.

Amber, whose name is very possibly not Amber, would have rung alarm bells three months ago: the confidence which doesn’t quite hide the damage, the blowsy, dog-eared glamour, a blurry tattoo swallow just below her left ear. What catches him off guard, however, is the way she sits herself down across the table and says, “I’m more of a Mies van der Rohe fan myself. Clean lines, white space. You want to be modern? Be modern. Don’t go off half-cocked.”

She doesn’t pry or criticise. She says, “Life’s a bitch,” and while she’s referring explicitly to her father, who died when she was five years old, her eyes hold his long enough to let him know that she understands that he has been through a hard time himself recently. It should worry him, the speed and ease of this seeming rapport, but he is lonelier than he dares admit.

She’s been an art student and an architecture student, though she finished neither course. She’s lived in Barcelona, Dublin, Norwich and Copenhagen. She has a pilot’s licence and knows how to build a drystone wall and the Swedish poem she recites sounds convincing to his untutored ear. The swift hop from story to story suggests that she wants none of them examined too closely but she has genuine charm, and when she disappears to the toilet and returns wiping her nose and talking too fast he is not dismissive and superior as he might previously have been.

They take a taxi to Richmond where she slips off her shoes and socks and unbuttons her jeans and says, “I suppose you’ll want to fuck me now.” She seems ten years younger suddenly, her earlier confidence gone entirely. He doesn’t know if it is a piece of play-acting, or whether she is wearily bowing to the inevitable, offering him the use of her body in return for something she hasn’t yet spelled out. He’s several drinks beyond all but the most rudimentary moral judgement and she’s naked now, scrawny with big breasts, not a million miles from Emmy, or indeed Kirstin, if the clock were wound back and they’d led rougher lives. There is a big bruise on her left thigh.

He takes the path of least resistance and they fuck on the sofa. He is inside her for a minute at most, no condom, no thought for her pleasure. Afterwards she wraps herself in the baby-blue cashmere rug he bought for Emmy’s birthday and smokes a cigarette. No one has ever smoked in the house but he says nothing and of all the day’s events it is this which most clearly marks the point past which he gives in to the momentum of the fall.

He opens a bottle of Château Puy-Blanquet. They watch Shutter Island and say very little to one another, though whether this is because of a shared shame or a wordless bond he doesn’t know. They are conspirators now and don’t need to ask or answer such questions.

In the middle of the night she takes hold of his hand, puts it between her legs and rubs herself with his fingers until she comes. She is crying as she does this. He pretends to be only half awake so that he does not have to ask what’s wrong. He falls back to sleep and dreams vividly about his son: playing chicken-in-the-waves in Half Moon Bay, the velociraptor cake Kirstin baked for his seventh birthday, reading Zagazoo together, reading Bear Hunt together. He hasn’t thought about his son this much in years. He dreams about the shouting competition the two of them had in the Malvern Hills and how neither of them could speak for two days afterwards. He knows, somehow, that he is asleep, and that when he wakes he will enter a day of harrowing loneliness. But how does one remain inside a dream?

Then suddenly his eyes are open and he can smell cigarette smoke and hear loud music coming from downstairs.

When Leo reads about his brother in the paper what he feels is schadenfreude mostly. He still blames Gavin for the problems which have plagued Anya and interrupted her schooling since Christmas — the headaches, the fatigue, the stomach pains — and for the arguments he and Sofie have about how to deal with them. Nevertheless he tries to contact Gavin in order to put his mother’s mind at rest, and it is only when he gets no response to his emails and phone calls that he becomes genuinely worried.

He contacts Kirstin and Emmy and Tony but the last reliable sighting is seven weeks old and he is haunted by the image of his brother twisting on a makeshift noose while the rest of them feel smug about his comeuppance. He should ask Sarah to go to London — she is nearer and richer — but he is not immune to the sibling rivalry he usually pretends to rise above, so he pays a king’s ransom and takes a five-hour train journey to London at the crack of dawn one Saturday in early May.

There is no answer to his knock at the door so he reads four chapters of God’s Traitors by Jessie Childs over a panini in Costa. An hour later there still is no answer and he is angry with himself for having conceived such a simplistic plan when his brother could be in Bali for all they know. He walks to Kew Gardens and back brooding on the string of insults, spoken and unspoken, which peppered his childhood in the shadow of the golden boy — the second-hand duffel coat, the afternoon he was pushed out of the tree house, the shelves his father hand-built for Gavin’s bedroom whose true purpose had nothing to do with the books and toys they were too weak to support. He receives no answer to his third and final knocking but leans over the thorny anti-burglar hedge before leaving so that he can look through the side window, half hoping now to discover, if not a body, then some demeaning squalor at the very least. What he sees instead is a woman staring back at him, wearing a Clash T-shirt which is too big for her, drinking from a racing-green mug and smoking a cigarette. She must be in her late twenties, greasy blonde hair, a sleazy, car-crash aura, the kind of person he has only ever encountered in films or TV documentaries. She does not react and he realises that she is looking at her own reflection. He backs away slowly, telling himself as he walks to the station that his brother’s life is falling apart but unable to suppress the thought that he is living out a sexual fantasy of a kind that was never available, and will never be available, to his younger, less adventurous brother.

Gavin gets out of bed and heads down to the living room intending to tell Amber that she must leave, but he can’t bring himself to do it. In spite of the music and the smoking and the knowledge that she is accelerating his descent towards some as yet undefined crash, there is sufficient consolation in Amber’s presence to make it preferable to the empty house with the menacing pile of unopened mail and the phone that rings and stops and rings and stops and the framed photographs which he has hidden in drawers.

The two of them come and go and after a couple of days Gavin realises that she has got her own key cut. He can’t remember her asking if she could do this but his memory of the recent past is increasingly fogged by alcohol and the hangovers he keeps failing to alleviate with painkillers and willpower despite the repeated promises he makes to himself.

Amber has been in residence for nearly a week when he returns from Tesco one lunchtime to find her arguing with a tracksuited man in the kitchen. He has a sinewy, underfed air and Gavin can smell both his deodorant and the sweat it is failing to disguise.

“What are you doing in my house?”

“Amber and I are talking.” The man doesn’t even turn his head.

“Amber…?”

She says, “I’m so sorry, Gavin.”

The man laughs. “She’s not fucking sorry. You’re never fucking sorry, are you, babe?”

Gavin tells himself he is protecting Amber’s honour but his anger is overwhelming and undirected and his main intention is to wipe out his shame at having allowed this whole sorry situation to happen.

He is a big man and still strong despite having done little exercise for the past three months but his smaller opponent has clearly been in fights before. They grapple briefly, falling together onto a chair which shatters beneath them. Then the man breaks Gavin’s nose with a headbutt. The shock loosens Gavin’s grip, the man gets to his feet, kicks Gavin hard in the small of the back and drags Amber from the house. Gavin does not care what might happen to her. He is not even greatly concerned with the damage to his face. Mostly he is frightened by the fact that he is now alone.

He walks to A&E where he is both relieved and distressed that no one recognises him. He returns five hours later with a bandage over his nose to find that the iPhone and wallet he left on the hall table have been stolen along with the TV, the hi-fi, his MacBook Air and his passport. He rings the bank to cancel the card but the current account has already been emptied of three thousand pounds. He rings a locksmith then has to ring back and cancel the visit when he remembers that he has no way of paying the man. He drinks half a bottle of whisky, lies down on the sofa, loses consciousness and wakes up an hour later, face down in his own vomit.

The following day he goes to the bank to get hold of some cash. He has a vicious hangover, a bandage over his face, no proof of identification and a very short fuse. He leaves before the police are called but returns to find another locksmith has come, employed by the bailiffs who have now repossessed the house. There is an envelope Sellotaped to the door explaining how he can retrieve his possessions. He tries to smash the blue recycling bin through the front window but the individual panes are too small. The glass shatters, the top of the box comes free and bottles fall around his feet, some shattering, some emptying dregs of wine and beer onto his trousers.

He has five and a half thousand pounds in a deposit account he cannot access and six pounds forty-three in his pocket. He wants a strong drink, he is hungry and he needs painkillers. He can afford only one of these things. He buys a packet of Paracodol from Boots then has to return and ask for a glass of water so that he can swallow them because his throat is too dry. He sits in the library for three hours, reading the newspaper and staring into space.

He does not consider contacting any of the people he has called friends over the past few years. It is not what the word “friend” means to him and, indeed, if they had treated him in a similar way he would have seen it as an imposition. His main concern is that other people do not find out about his present state.

When the library closes he heads up to the Star and Garter Gate and into the park. He needs to walk long and hard to burn off a churning anger. He is not homeless, he is simply without a home for the present. He has made mistakes. They can be undone. He walks for five hours and spends the night in the Isabella Plantation, sleeping in short bursts from which he is rapidly woken either by the imaginary stranger or by real animals moving through undergrowth nearby.

The following morning he returns to the bank in a more conciliatory state of mind. The woman at the counter says, “It’s Mr. Cooper, isn’t it?” She is excited for a second or so then goes very quiet. He is ushered into a private room. He explains to a man in a cheap suit that he was burgled. He recites his mother’s maiden name, his pin number and his last three addresses and walks out with an envelope containing two thousand pounds. He takes the bandage off his face and throws it away.

He calls the bailiffs who explain that it will cost seventy pounds to retrieve his possessions. He counts silently to three and puts the phone down.

If he spends the next week in a hotel he will rapidly run out of money and find himself back at square one. He needs to ration his resources and ride out this period of turbulence.

He buys a sleeping bag, a cheap one-person tent and a waterproof coat from Millets in Epsom. He buys two packs of sandwiches from the reduced section in Sainsbury’s and two plastic litre bottles of water which he can refill. People stare at him, either because of his broken nose or because they recognise him. It is impossible to tell which. If they stare for too long he stares back. If they do not look away he tells them to fuck off. He buys more Paracodol. He does not think about going to the Citizens Advice Bureau. He does not think about finding a hostel. He does not think about foodbanks or day centres. He wants nothing to do with homeless people or those who make it their business to care for them.

He sleeps in the park for a second night, camping in the trees at the end of Pen Ponds. He is woken by the police in the small hours. They are very polite. He packs his tent and makes a show of walking towards Robin Hood Gate but veers into a stand of trees when they can no longer see him. They’re less polite when they wake him the following night.

He walks upriver. Eel Pie Island, Ham Lands, Kingston, Hampton Court. He climbs a fence and pitches his tent behind the waterworks on Desborough Island. The following day he stands under Chertsey Bridge and watches heavy summer rain stipple the Thames for two solid hours. Laleham, Staines. He passes under the M25. He has now left London. Above him, one by one, planes rise from Heathrow and are swallowed by the sky. Wraysbury, Windsor.

The days are warm and long, but the path is busy so he must pitch his tent after dark and take it down soon after dawn. He camps in a little copse near the A332. He camps in a wood near Cliveden.

It is August. He does not know the precise date. A year ago he was diving in the Maldives with Emmy, accompanied by manta rays and blacktail barracuda, living a life that seems fictional now, its inhabitants as glossy and shallow as actors in TV adverts.

He is embarrassed by his filthy clothing and his unwashed smell but the dirtier and more ragged he becomes the less he attracts people’s attention and this is some relief. He does very little. He spends most of his day by the river, walking, sitting. He has never taken much notice of the non-human world. He rowed for two terms at Cambridge but the river was little more than background. He sees mink, he sees water voles, he watches iridescent-blue dragonflies hover among the reeds. He sees a shiny, black terrapin with red eyeballs sitting on a wet stone. He likes it best in the early mornings when the water is a mirror and flotillas of geese and ducks sleep in the last of the mist.

August becomes September. The weather turns. The Paracodol which previously kept him asleep till four o’clock are becoming less effective. He is wary of damaging his liver and kidneys by taking more.

He falls into conversation with a man who has already pitched his ramshackle tent in the little wood where Gavin himself was planning to spend the night. Terry has worked as a librarian and a cook and a gardener. He is reading a battered copy of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table.

They talk about the crayfish Terry has caught in the river and will be cooking for his supper. They talk about Cornelius Drebbel who piloted a submarine ten miles from Westminster to Greenwich in 1621 under the eyes of James I. Gavin asks him why he is camping rough and Terry explains that he knows the identity of Prince Harry’s real father and for this reason he is being hunted down by the security services. He weeps a little and apologises for this. “I’ve been running for a long time. It’s hard to keep my spirits up.” Gavin wishes him well and continues walking in order to pitch his tent elsewhere.

There are tiny insects of some kind in his hair. He has a rash up his right arm and over his shoulder which might or might not be scabies. He has what feels like a constant, low-level chest infection.

He discovers that staff at the Co-op in Pangbourne throw food past its sell-by date into a skip at the rear of the shop at the end of the working day.

One morning he sees a boy walking over a bridge. He is certain that it is Thom. He fights his way up a steep bank and through a hedge but when he reaches the road he can see no one. He sees the boy several more times, never his face, only ever the back of his head. He vanishes when Gavin gives chase.

September becomes October. Goring, Moulsford, North Stoke. He sees a dead dog float past, its legs in the air like a cartoon of a dead dog. He gives up buying food. He saves his remaining money for Paracodol. He doubles his dose then triples it. A security guard finds him going through the bins behind Tesco in Wallingford and attacks him with a fury out of all proportion to the offence, pushing him to the ground, kicking him repeatedly and calling him “you thieving, fucking scum.”

He understands now that taking your own life might not be a weakness. He has travelled a long way. It is a different country out here and everything looks different. To carry on living or to end one’s life in a manner of one’s own choosing? The answer is not obvious. To fill one’s pockets with stones could be a decent bet against poor odds.

October becomes November. If the sun is out he finds that he can lie on his back for hours watching the clouds move and change above him, but the sun is rarely out. Most often the sky is low and grey. For a period of two weeks there is heavy rain every day. He is caught off guard on several occasions and unable to find shelter in time. His clothing is now permanently damp.

Oxford, Eynsham, Bablock Hythe, Newbridge. There are very few people around now. He wishes he were an animal so that he could simply hunt and eat and sleep in a burrow and not have to dwell on the past and worry about the future.

He has no money left. He runs out of Paracodol. He feels constantly frightened. It is impossible to tell how much of this is due to codeine withdrawal and how much is due to his rapidly declining health. It is too cold to sleep at night. He sleeps instead for brief periods during the day. When the dark comes down he finds a wall against which he can sit, hoping that he will not be attacked from behind.

He has a low fever. His head pulses and his joints ache. He no longer has the energy or the wit to find a source of clean water. He drinks from the river. In the middle of the night he has stomach cramps followed by diarrhoea.

He has lost the tent. He has no memory of how this happened. It is possible that it was stolen, though by whom he has no idea. He is now blind in his left eye.

He cannot drown himself. He knows that the creature to which his mind is inextricably bound will fight to stay alive and he will simply come out of the water a couple of hundred metres downstream colder and sicker. So he turns and makes his way back to Oxford where he saw a train passing north on the far side of a flooding meadow some days ago.

He comes off the river at Godstow Nunnery and walks through the village before turning back onto the meadow itself. There are cows and ragged horses. The train track has been separated from the grazing land by a high metal fence he no longer has the energy to climb, so he follows it south until it disappears into an area of high scrub. He wades through the brambles and the long grass until he finds an elderly wooden fence he can climb with ease.

He sits between the small trees on the earthen bank that runs beside the rails. A train passes. Ten minutes later another train passes in the opposite direction. He thinks about his father. He thinks about Thom. He thinks about Emmy. They seem a very long way away. A third train passes.

Walking down the meadow he regretted not having some alcohol or Paracodol to provide him with Dutch courage but it doesn’t seem necessary now. Indeed with each train that passes he feels less and less comfortable sitting here and more strongly drawn to that invisible doorway only ten metres away through which he can pass into a place where there is no pain and there are no problems to solve.

He waits for another three trains to pass. When he sees a seventh some two hundred metres away he gets to his feet and walks down the little slope onto the gravel and steps over the nearest rail. He sets his feet firmly on a single black sleeper and leans forward with his hands on his knees so that the front of the train will strike his head and there will be no chance of his being thrown clear and finding himself alive and badly injured beside the track.

A hundred and fifty metres. The train horn sounds, followed by the grating skreek of metal on metal. A hundred metres. It will be over in seconds.

He sees movement from the corner of his eye, a figure moving among the trees where he was sitting earlier. Is it Thom again? He must not turn his head. He stares hard into the dirty pebbles between his toes. The horn. The skreek. Twenty metres. Ten.

A hand grabs his upper arm and roughly hauls him sideways. He thinks at first that it is the impact of the train. His head is filled with thunder. Metal hammers and flashes. He wonders why he is still thinking. He can feel his hands. He can feel his legs. He cannot be dead. The thunder stops. He opens his eyes and sees the sky. A black retriever licks his face.

“Give me your hand.” A man is staring down at him. “The police will be on their way. We need to leave quickly.”

Gavin is too perturbed to do anything but obey. The man is surprisingly strong. He hoists Gavin to his feet and lets go. He feels dizzy. He steadies himself and starts to walk. After three tentative steps, however, his knees buckle. He pitches forward and cannot even summon the energy to raise his hands to protect himself. He hits the gravel face first and passes out.

The room is warm and clean and uncluttered, a cube of three white walls, a white ceiling and a window which constitutes most of the fourth wall, through which he can see a line of trees and a featureless, off-white sky beyond. He wonders briefly if this is the laboratory to which you are returned after the experiment of your life has been allowed to run its full course. He can smell lavender fabric conditioner and an antiseptic he remembers from his childhood.

He is able to see out of his left eye. It is still foggy but he can discern colours and rough outlines. His hands look like the hands of a much older man. They have been cleaned but there is still dirt under the nails and in the deeper cracks of his skin. A rash of dry red scabs leads up his wrist under the sleeve of green cotton pyjamas. He remembers that he was homeless. He remembers that he tried to take his own life. He feels tearful but cannot tell whether this is relief or disappointment.

He rolls over and swings his feet carefully onto the bare waxed wood of the floor. His body is stiff. He has no clear sense of how long he has been unconscious. It feels like days. He stands slowly and walks to the window. He expects to see the treetops give way to roofs and chimneys and aerials but he finds himself looking instead onto rolling English farmland of the kind he remembers from his childhood, a dense wood of oak and beech to his left, a ploughed field falling away on the far side of a stone wall then rising again like a wave in a Japanese woodcut, a fringe of trees on the brow of the hill, a spire in the distance. The old comfort, the old claustrophobia. A beauty that sings to something deep inside him.

He turns. There is a white door set into the opposite wall. He has no idea what might lie beyond it. He does not want any more complications. He is already exhausted by his journey to the window. He returns to the bed, lies down, closes his eyes and slips back out of the world.

A woman is sitting in a simple chair of blond wood that wasn’t there when he last woke. It is later the same day. Or perhaps it is the following day. She has a chestnut bob. She wear jeans and a cream woollen poncho. Her feet are bare. He recognises her but is equally convinced that they have never met. Panic flutters in his chest. He wonders if he has been in this place for years and this encounter has happened hundreds of times before, only to be forgotten repeatedly.

The woman sits in silence for a long time and seems entirely comfortable with this. He says nothing, wary of popping the fragile bubble and finding himself beside the river once again. Eventually she says, “You should come and have something to eat,” and only then does he recognise the ache in his abdomen as hunger. She stands up. “I’m sure you can find your way.” She leaves the door ajar.

Through the gap he can see more wood, more light, more white paint, a narrow sliver of another big window and, beyond it, more trees. He can smell an open fire. If he leaves this room he will have to deal with things he does not have the strength to deal with. But he is wary, too, of offending his hosts, whoever they might be. He gets to his feet and makes his way to the door, pausing briefly with his hand on the frame in order to get his breath back.

The bedroom is one of seven rooms off a first-floor balcony which runs around three sides of a boxy, light-filled atrium. Below him, over the rail, is the focal point of the house, three low sofas and an open hearth where several logs are burning. In front of him is another wall of glass, two storeys high, divided into big squares so that the view of the long lawn and the small lake and the surrounding trees seems like a video projection. It is, by some distance, the most beautiful house he has ever seen, the kind of house he dreamed of living in as a teenager, the polar opposite of the Rookery, with its low ceilings and thick walls and dark corners, every surface patterned and every cranny occupied by some antique thing.

He descends very slowly to the ground floor on a staircase of open risers and wooden treads which are warm beneath his unslippered feet. The atrium, he can see now, leads to open-plan dining and kitchen areas of smaller proportions but equally filled with light. The woman is standing at the stove. She spoons porridge from a small black pan into an earthenware bowl. “Have a seat.” The same familiarity, the same unnerving possibility that this is a ritual they have gone through before, because while he would never previously think of eating porridge, as soon as she says the word he knows that it is what he wants. He sits at the table and she places the bowl in front of him. “Coffee?”

He nods. He does not want to speak out loud. There is a game being played, the rules of which he does not understand and whose stakes, he thinks, could be very high indeed.

The kettle whistles as it comes to the boil. She turns the hot plate down and pours the bustling water into a cafetière. A column of steam rises above her head as she fits the plunger into the glass jug and places it on the table. Before taking her own seat across the table she gently folds back the sleeve of his pyjamas with two fingers to examine the rash on his wrist. She nods to herself then dips her hand into her pocket and retrieves a little blue-and-white tube of permethrin cream and hands it to him. “I’ve already put some on. You’ll need to use it a couple more times.”

“Thank you.” His voice is croaky and he has to clear his throat and repeat himself. “Thank you.”

“Eat.”

The porridge is good, more milk than water. The coffee is good, too. He works his way slowly through both. There is a long painting on the wall to his right, a semi-abstract landscape from the forties or fifties, a patchwork of green, blue and grey planes, rough black lines in the foreground which could be trees or people. Just as he was with the woman he is convinced that he has seen the picture somewhere before but he cannot say precisely where. The woman is reading a book. The cover is not visible and the text seems to be in a foreign language, though having only one good eye he cannot see it clearly.

He finishes the porridge and the coffee. The tabletop is a single piece of oak. He runs his hand across its surface and feels the soft burr of the sanded grain under his fingers. He looks around. He has never lived in a house where it is a pleasure simply to sit and enjoy the geometry of the internal space. If he stayed here would it fade? Would he become blind to this room just as one becomes blind to any room one sees every day?

The woman is looking at him. He has the sense that something is about to happen and, indeed, at that very moment the light changes, a spooky dimming. Eclipse light. He turns and sees, through the window, that it has begun to snow. It is so warm in the house and he has been so comfortable in his pyjamas that he has forgotten what time of year it is.

The woman seems to know what he is thinking. Or perhaps she’s simply remarking upon the serendipity. “Christmas Eve.”

And this is when the stranger enters.

Gavin does not recognise him at first. He no longer has a beard and his head is shaved. He is wearing a tailored charcoal suit with tan brogues, an open white shirt and no tie. Padding quietly by his side is the black retriever Gavin remembers only now from their last meeting on the railway line. Gavin is struck at first only by how out of place he looks, in this building, in this landscape. At school there was one Indian boy, Rajneesh. Everyone else was white. Everyone in his parents’ village is white.

The stranger sits and pours himself a cup of coffee. “You are a very lucky man.”

It is only when he speaks that Gavin remembers the accent he could not place first time round. Lucky is the very last thing he feels. Not once in the last twelve months has he thought about the stranger’s parting promise, and only now does he begin to wonder if the detail which seemed least important has in fact been the crux upon which the whole year has turned. “Are you going to shoot me?” He hears his own voice. It sounds like the voice of a child.

The stranger considers this, or perhaps just pretends to consider it, before smiling and saying, “I think you’ve probably suffered enough.” The snow is thickening now, big white flakes against the deep green of the trees, the flakes falling nearest the house catching the peach-pink glow of the fire and the house lights. “But it is easy to forget the lessons we have learnt unless we have some permanent reminder.” His hand idly scratches behind the ears of the dog sitting at his side.

Gavin shot this man in the chest. He wants to say sorry but it seems an insultingly small word. Perhaps this is what the stranger means.

“Let’s not waste what you have gone through.” The stranger leans across the table and takes hold of Gavin’s wrists. He does not grip tightly but Gavin can feel how strong he is. His expression is calm and kind, the expression of a father holding a child who must undergo some painful medical procedure for their own good.

The woman gets to her feet, walks round the breakfast bar and opens a drawer which is too small to contain the sawn-off shotgun. Gavin thinks she is going to take out a knife but when she returns to the table he sees that she is carrying a bolt cutter in one hand and a white hand towel and a first-aid kit in the other. Gavin struggles. The stranger does not tighten his grip, neither does he let go. He looks into Gavin’s eyes and says, “This is going to happen. And you will thank me for it.”

The woman lays the towel on the table, puts the first-aid kit to one side and takes up the bolt cutter. It is an old and dirty object, wholly at variance with everything else in the house, the metal surface scratched and dented from years of use, black oil in its joints and crevices.

“The index finger on your right hand,” says the stranger.

There is nothing he can do. He curls his three other fingers into his palm and points upwards like John the Baptist in a Renaissance painting. He closes his eyes. He feels the cold weight of the metal as the woman fits the jaws around his finger between the knuckle and the first joint. There is no blade as such. It is sheer pressure which will do the work, the two plates sliding across one another.

She says, “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

He feels her adjust her position, a little rock from side to side as if preparing for a golf swing. She takes a quick, deep breath and squeezes hard. The big teeth slice through the skin but come to a halt at the bone. It is a harder job than she expected. She changes the position of her feet and shifts her hands a little farther down the handles so as to get more leverage then puts all her effort into a second squeeze. This time there is a cracking crunch as the metal shears through the bone. It is surprisingly loud. It sounds more like a thigh bone breaking. He opens his eyes.

The finger end falls onto the hand towel and blood pours from the stump. For a couple of seconds there is no pain. Then there is more pain than he has felt in his life. He feels sick with it. The stranger lets go of his uninjured hand, picks up the severed finger and throws it to the dog who catches it and trots away to chew it in the corner of the room by the snowy window.

The woman takes a length of bandage from the first-aid kit, wraps it round the stump of Gavin’s finger as a tourniquet and knots it tight. The endorphins start to come online. The pain is replaced by a giddy nausea and the room recedes a little. The woman folds a wad of dressing over the end of his finger and secures it with a strip of plaster round his palm. She adds a second dressing and secures it in the same way. The stranger wipes the blood from the table with the hand towel and drops it into the waste bin. The woman replaces the contents of the first-aid kit and puts it back in the drawer together with the bolt cutter. She returns with two pills in the palm of her hand and a small cup of coffee. “Paracetamol. It’s the best we can do, I’m afraid.”

He puts the pills into his mouth and washes them down.

“And now,” says the stranger, “it is time for us to leave.”

For a moment he thinks that they are talking about their own departure, that he will be left alone in this beautiful house, but they do not move and he realises that it is he who will be leaving. “Where am I going?”

“Come on. It’s getting late.”

They give him the shoes he has been wearing for the last seven months. They give him the coat has been wearing for the last seven months. Neither has been cleaned. They smell vile and he is amazed that he could have become inured to this.

He is ushered out of the front door and into the rear seat of a black BMW. The snow continues to fall thickly and steadily. He is starting to feel his hand again. The stranger climbs into the driver’s seat and only as they are pulling away does he realise that the woman is not coming with them. In spite of what has just happened he feels both guilty for not having said goodbye and desperately sad that he may never see her again.

It is impossible to work out where they are going. Through the windscreen he can see the constantly expanding funnel of illuminated flakes, the occasional lit window, the occasional glare of headlights from a car passing them in the opposite direction, then darkness again. They drive through a village, then another. He is no longer aware of anything outside the car. He has run out of endorphins. The pain in the stump of his severed finger is overwhelming and he must use all his energy to hold his hand as still as he can while the car bumps and twists along these country roads. He is crying. He has never cried with pain before.

He has no real sense of how long they are in the car. After a period that might be anything between half an hour and two hours they come to a halt. He had assumed that he was being taken back to the train line where the stranger had found him, but he can see lit windows on both sides of the street.

The stranger turns the engine off, gets out, comes round and opens the door. “We’re here.”

Gavin wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and climbs out. It is blisteringly cold. There are three or four inches of snow on the ground and he is surprised that they have driven so swiftly and with no obvious problems.

The stranger shuts the car door behind him. “Follow me.”

Partly it is the injury, partly it is the darkness and the obscuring snow, but he does not realise where he is until he sees that he is being led through the gates of the Rookery. He wants to turn and walk away. He does not want to see his family. He does not want to tell them what has happened to him over the previous year. It is entirely possible that they think he is dead. But he cannot turn and walk away. He knows that the stranger will not let him back in the car and he knows that he cannot survive a night out here without asking for someone’s help.

“Look,” says the stranger.

They are standing on the lawn now. In front of them are the French windows, lit up, uncurtained. He takes a couple of steps forward and thinks, at first, that his parents must have sold the house because what he sees is an old man making his way to the dining table using a walking frame. He wonders if he has been away for a fairy-tale number of years and it is his parents who are long dead. Then the man sits down and Gavin realises that he is looking at his father. Either the fall he had earlier in the year was more serious than he realised or something else has happened to him in the intervening months. He seems half the size and twenty years older.

Gavin takes another step towards the house. His mother sits at the head of the table in the seat his father used to occupy. Leo sits on one side of her, Sarah on the other. His sister seems uncharacteristically subdued. A teenage girl sits beside her, willowy, dark. He guesses that this must be Ellie. It has been two years since he last saw her. Sofie and Anya are having an animated conversation, but he cannot see David, nor can he see a place set for him.

A veil of snow swings between him and the house, breaking his concentration and reminding him how cold he is and how much his finger is hurting. He turns to find that the stranger has vanished. He is alone. He looks down at his hand and sees that the bandage is now soaked with blood which is dripping onto the snow at his feet. He needs to see a doctor. He needs warmth. He needs help of many kinds.

He turns back to the house. Another gust of wind. He takes a deep breath. He steps onto the little paved area between the potted shrubs. The intruder light clicks on. He knocks twice on the glass. As one his family turn to look at him.