When he got to the end he read it through again, then tore it methodically into small pieces, placed the pieces in the ashtray, and using the same lighter László had used a week earlier to ignite the sambuca, he burned them and crushed the embers into a black dust. Then he moved the lamp closer to the window and leaned towards the glass, looking south to the boulevard Edgar Quinet, and the walls of the cemetery where Sartre and de Beauvoir and the glorious Beckett lay.

9

At six o’clock, Larry stood at the kitchen stove, labouring over the evening meal. A pillar of steam broke across the red of his face as he prodded the rice with a wooden fork, frowning at it like a soothsayer investigating the liver of a slaughtered ram for those striations and whorls that would betray the future to him. Beside the hob, propped against a mostly empty bottle of white wine, was one of Alice’s cookbooks, an Elizabeth David, open at a recipe for risotto, though it had, of course, been necessary for him to find alternatives to the chicken stock and the beef marrow and the diced ham, and everything that would, in his opinion, have given the meal flavour and nutritional profit, but which his wife – ‘I don’t eat dead animals, Larry’ – would have refused to eat, to touch even.

He had collected her the previous morning – Alec’s old car again – from Terminal 4 at Heathrow, where she had come out a little dazed and fragile in the wake of a sports team of blazered young men with crew cuts, who were joshing each other loudly despite the early hour. When he had called her name it had taken her a moment to locate him, and as she searched the faces at the barrier her expression was unmistakably a look of distress, as though this were not an orderly airport in an orderly country, but somewhere more fluid and dangerous, and still half asleep, time in a tangle in her head, a voice from the crowd had marked her out. But then she had seen Ella and let out a joyful ‘Hi!’, and for a while they had been like any other family there, grinning hard and trading hugs. Only a very practised eye could have seen it for what it was: a tenderness shot through with shared and private fears. She was upstairs now, in the room above his head, tending to his mother.