He laid a blanket over his daughter’s legs and reclined his seat. He was tired again, physically sluggish, but agitated by what seemed like a great backlog of thinking. He could not decide whether there were a great many decisions to be made, or none at all; whether his situation warranted some explosion of energy, some drama of action, or if he should simply wait and see; if indeed there was nothing he could do that would make the slightest difference. He could not save Alice – what manner of angel could? It seemed unlikely he could save his own marriage. And if that should fail, he did not, in all honesty, know if he would have the mettle, the knowhow, to save himself.

He took the earplugs from their bag and sealed off his skull from the sighs and little disgruntlements of his fellow passengers. He closed his eyes and made an effort to focus on transience, but it was too harsh a lesson. He was a child still, and like everyone else, with the possible exception of Mr Endo, he was swimming against the current and would be swept away. At the back of this was the spectre of an overwhelming loneliness, of a place where nobody would stay with you because nobody could. And this was what he was supposed to accept? Where was the comfort in it? What kind of courage did this letting go require? Clearly more than he had to offer. He would have to rely on quite different weapons – weakness for example – and, as he fell, not into sleep but into some parallel condition unique to the long-haul passenger, he began to imagine, and even to believe, despite the fact that in such a dearth of good air one could not entirely trust such ideas, that the last good road left open to him was failure itself. And this he decided to call hope.

4