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

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