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

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