‘You can go to the call box now.’

‘That means you’ll have to stay with him.’

Rosamund’s lip quivered. She looked at the little boy who was lying on the floor now, his eyes wide open, his thumb in his mouth. ‘I don’t want to. Suppose he dies?’

‘You go,’ said James. ‘I’ll stay with him. Go to the call box and dial nine-nine-nine for an ambulance and then go into the village hall and fetch mum. OK?’

‘OK,’ said Rosamund, and she went, the tears running down her face.

James picked Oliver up and laid him gently on the bed. There were beads of perspiration on the child’s face but that might have been simply because he was hot. Mirabel had wrapped him very warmly for the time of year in a woolly cardigan as well as a jumper and a tee-shirt. He had been thirsty, of course. That was what ‘ink’ had meant. ‘Ink’ for ‘drink’. Was there the slightest chance that during the year since he had made it the datura had lost its toxicity? He did not honestly think so. He could remember reading somewhere that the poison was resistant to drying and to heat, so probably it was also resistant to time.

Oliver’s eyes were closed now and some of the bright red colour which had been in his face while he was watching television had faded. His fat cheeks looked waxen. At any rate, he didn’t seem to be in pain, though the sweat stood in tiny glistening pinpoints on his forehead. James asked himself again why he had been such a fool as to keep the stuff. An hour before he had been on the point of throwing it away and yet he had not. It was useless to have regrets, to ‘job backwards’, as his father put it.

But James was looking to the future, not to the past. Suddenly he knew that if Oliver died he would have murdered him as surely, or almost as surely, as if he had fired at him with his father’s shotgun. And his whole life, his entire future, would be wrecked. For he would never forgive himself, never recover, never be anything but a broken person. He would have to hide away, live in a distant part of the country, go to a different school, and when he left that school get some obscure job and drag out a frightened, haunted existence. Gone would be his dreams of Oxford, of work in some research establishment, of happiness and fulfilment and success. He was not overdramatizing, he knew it would be so. And Mirabel . . .? If his life would be in ruins, what of hers?

He heard the front door open and his mother come running up the stairs. He was sitting on the bed, watching Oliver, and he turned round slowly.

‘Oh, James . . .!’

And James said like a mature man, like a man three times his age, ‘There’s nothing you can say to me I haven’t already said to myself.’