‘Don’t let it dry up,’ said Larry. ‘And lets put some candles out. Make an evening of it.’

‘Good idea,’ said Alec, without the least enthusiasm.

‘And as for you,’ said Larry, as Ella appeared in the doorway, regarding him shrewdly with her head cocked to one side, ‘as for you ...’ But he had no idea what to say next.

In Alice’s room, Kirsty Valentine, only daughter, only child of Errol and Nancy Freeman (formerly ‘Friebergs’) of La Finca, Lemon Cove, California, sat on a stool at the end of the bed holding her mother-in-law’s feet in her hands, palping the soles with her thumbs in the way she had been shown in a class on reflexology at the day centre in San Francisco. Alice leaned against a bank of pillows, already dressed for her evening downstairs. Earlier in the afternoon, Toni Cuskic had come by with her wallet of scissors, her clips and dryer, her poodle, and had brushed out the snags from Alice’s hair, plaiting it, at Alice’s request, into a neat silver rope.

Her hair, and the blusher she had rubbed into the absolute white of her cheeks, put Kirsty in mind of a Bette Davis film she had watched recently, part of a gay icon series on AMC. Yet somehow the fashion suited Alice, suited the newly blatant nature of her stare, the startling bluntness of her questions – ‘Why don’t you have another child?’ ‘Do you still love him?’ ‘Are you faithful to each other?’

This, perhaps, was ‘disinhibition’, a term Kirsty had picked up scanning the cancer literature in Barnes and Noble: the tumours, weevil-like, eating away at the furniture of adult judgment; an irresistible, irreversible decline that ended in full-blown dementia, when the mind was of no more use than a fancy mirror in an unlit room. Nicer then, infinitely more consoling, to imagine there was something rather Zenlike in Alice’s new directness, that her manner derived not from the perishing of the intellect, but from her impatience with the conventional. If people had to die – and Kirsty was enough of an American not to accept the absolute inevitability of it – she wanted them to go full of a profound and liberating knowledge of things. When else should you be wise, if not at the end? But several times in the last twenty-four hours she had witnessed the shadow of vacancy or panic fall over the blue of Alice’s eyes, and in her heart she knew that here was a woman being shut up inside herself. That she bore it at all seemed nothing less than heroic.