She touched his shoulder. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I know you.’ Her face was white, the lips too, and with anger as much as fear. ‘How dare she bring him here and leave him with two children?’

James hadn’t the spirit to feel offended. ‘Is he – is he dying?’

‘He’s asleep,’ said his mother and she put her hand on Oliver’s head. It was quite cool, the sweat had dried. ‘At least I suppose he is. He could be in a coma, for all I know.’

‘It will be the end of me if he dies.’

‘James, oh, James . . .’ She did something she had not done for a long time. She put her arms round him and held him close to her, though he was half a head taller than she.

‘There’s the ambulance,’ said James. ‘I can hear the bell.’

Two men came up the stairs for Oliver. One of them wrapped him in a blanket and carried him downstairs in his arms. Rosamund was sitting in the hall with Palmerston on her lap and she was crying silently into his fur. It seemed hard to leave her but someone had to wait in for Mrs Hodges’s daughter. James and his mother got into the ambulance with Oliver and went with him to the hospital.

They had to sit in a waiting room while the doctors did things to Oliver – pumped his stomach, presumably. Then a young black doctor and an old white doctor came and asked James a whole string of questions. What exactly was the stuff Oliver had drunk? When was it made? How much of it had been in the bottle? And a host of others. They were not very pleasant to him and he wanted to prevaricate. It would be so easy to say he hadn’t known what the stuff really was, that he had boiled the thornapples up to make a green dye, or something like that. But when it came to it he couldn’t. He had to tell the bald truth, he had to say he had made poison, knowing it might kill.

After they had gone away there was a long wait in which nothing happened. Mrs Hodges’s daughter would have come by now and James’s father would be home from where he was teaching at a summer seminar. It got to five-thirty, to six, when a nurse brought them a cup of tea, and then there was another long wait. James thought that no matter what happened to him in years to come, nothing could actually be worse than those hours in the waiting room had been. Just before seven the young doctor came back. He seemed to think James’s mother was Oliver’s mother and when he realized she was not he just shrugged and said as if they couldn’t be all that anxious, as if it wouldn’t be a matter of great importance to them:

‘He’ll be OK. No need for you to hang about any longer.’