As for having another child, to Alice she said, ‘I’m not sure this is really a great time.’ But the reality was simpler and sadder: how could they have a child when for months they had slept with a wall between them? (Two walls: the bedrooms were separated by the passageway.) And what of the child they already had? Hoffmann had rung the evening before she was due to fly with some talk of another episode, though, oddly, he had seemed more concerned about Larry, who, according to the professor, was ‘struggling to articulate the appropriate responses’. What exactly he had meant by this she was unsure, she preferred not to ask, but the phrase looped through her head during the flight over until it acquired some ominous quasi-mystical significance that had threatened to bring on a migraine. Worst of all, it seemed to support her own most private misgivings, the unpalatable fact that she was less and less comfortable leaving Ella alone with Larry. She had seen the way he crossed roads, jaywalking through the traffic, not yet trying to stare it down, not raging at it, but playing with the danger. And he laughed at the television – news items, sad movies – in a way that spooked her. When Natasha Khan, her friend over in Sunset, asked if Larry had a gun in the house (Natasha’s ex kept an assault rifle in the games room) she had immediately gone home and turned out all the drawers in the guest bedroom, uncovering a small stash of pornography and sports magazines, a quart of bourbon, a flight schedule (SF to Vancouver) and, most miserably, a pair of her own panties, not even clean, which he must have fished out of the laundry basket in the shower room. But no gun. And then at Heathrow, Ella on Larry’s shoulders holding up a sheet of paper saying ‘HELLO MOMMY’, they had looked fine together, just fine, and she had felt ashamed of herself. Whatever Larry was, whatever he was becoming, there was a reserve of sweet water in him it was mean of her to doubt. It was Hoffmann perhaps, Hoffmann she should give up trusting.

From the landing Larry called: ‘Decent in there?’

‘We’re decent!’ sang Kirsty.

He came in, flushed in a way she immediately and wearily recognized.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘It’s nice for her feet,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Supper in fifteen minutes. Let’s get your shoes on, Mum.’

She had a pair of trainers, large white cushioned shoes with Velcro straps in place of laces. These had been Una’s suggestion, and though they looked cartoonish on the end of Alice’s skinny legs, they were gentle to her skin, and after the first time she wore them she no longer complained of their ugliness. The thought that they were in some way fashionable had even made her smile.