Then the house swung into view, its walls more bowed, more overrun with creepers than he remembered. A dozen of the terracotta tiles were missing from the roof at the gable end, the guttering above one of the upstairs windows had ruptured, and the wooden side gate into the garden was jammed ajar, turning it into a kind of trellis for weeds. He shook his head. ‘This place needs a lot of work,’ he said, ‘a lot of work.’ He felt quite nauseous with fatigue.

Napping in the twin room downstairs, Larry dreamed pleasantly of Sister Kim, and when he woke, half expected to see her beside him, his guardian angel, but there was only Ella, in shorts and T-shirt, sitting on the other bed, swinging her legs and watching him. She had opened one of the suitcases and Larry automatically looked to see what she might have helped herself to, but the case contained only clothes and toiletries, a couple of books, nothing that was likely to be of interest to her. He sent her off to find Alec while he shaved and showered and drank a cafetière of coffee and smoked three cigarettes and swallowed another Xanax. Then, feeling different rather than better, he patrolled the house with a last cup of coffee, looking into rooms and out of windows, recovering the place, trying to arrive.

He left Alice’s bedroom until last, uncertain how he would react to it, but the room had been thoroughly tidied and aired and smelled only of furniture polish, and very faintly of pine disinfectant. The curtains were pulled back and tied. There were no clothes draped over the chair, no shoes on the floor, no sickroom litter of pillboxes and tonics and half-read magazines. The double bed was made up under a patchwork cover, though at the foot of the bed the material was rucked, as if someone had been sitting there. He smoothed it out, then went to the chest of drawers where the photographs had been angled so that they could be seen from the bed. The largest (it chilled him) was of himself, sixteen, waiting in his whites to go on court at a youth tournament in Eastbourne. Then a formal portrait of Alec in his academic gown at the graduation ceremony at UEA, smiling bravely yet somehow contriving to look as if he’d lost something. Beside this, in a pretty frame of lacquered wood, a softly monochrome photo of the teenage Alice standing in front of a weeping willow with her father, and another man, younger, who has turned away from the camera, frowning at something out of shot that the others have not yet noticed.