Kirsty frowned, then slid Alice’s mug into the hot water, resting her other hand on Alec’s back. ‘I think she took all her drugs.’

‘Thanks,’ said Alec.

‘She said some weird stuff when we were in the bathroom. Still, I guess she was tired.’

‘What kind of stuff?’ asked Larry.

‘Stuff you say when you’re tired.’ She yawned. ‘I’m gonna put Ella to bed.’

An hour later she went to bed herself. She had moved into the downstairs room with Ella; Larry had shifted his gear upstairs to Alec’s room, where there was an old-fashioned camp bed of tubular steel and wire mesh. There were only single beds in the spare room so this new arrangement had been passed off as a purely practical matter, though who this was intended to fool or reassure, Larry didn’t know.

The brothers finished the clearing up then sat on the sofa in the living room to watch the evening news. After the May election the government was getting busy, declaring a Year Zero, salvaging the nation’s future by making it modern and fashionable. Among the politicians they interviewed there was a strange, compulsive use of the word ‘new’.

Think it’ll work?’ asked Larry.

‘Plus ça change,’ said Alec. But he admired them for trying. For doing something.

Larry said he thought they were some kind of Khmer Rouge, and that he intended to visit a good old English pub while there was still one left to visit. He remembered a place called the Blue Flame, fifteen minutes’ walk across the fields. Flagstone floors, wooden barrels, not quite clean. A place with pickled eggs and cheap cigarettes.

‘Do you mind?’ It was understood that one of them would have to stay for Alice.

Alec shook his head. ‘I might do some work.’

‘No hard feelings about tonight?’

‘No hard feelings.’

‘Just letting off steam. It’s bound to happen.’

‘I know.’

‘Catch you later, then.’

‘Sure.’

When he was gone, Alec switched off the television. Out of the quiet came the sound of his mother’s coughing, a muffled hacking and retching that reached its crescendo, then slowly died away. He hurried into the garden, crossing the lawn and gulping down lungfuls of milky air. In the summerhouse he struck a match, lit the storm lantern and set it on the shelf by the portrait of Lázár. Then he sharpened his pencils, opened the manuscript of Oxygène, and for twenty minutes performed a kind of mime of work until the deception was no longer tolerable, and he leaned back on the rear legs of his chair to watch the insects that came to the light through the open window, among them a pair of large butter-coloured moths that knocked the dust from their wings on the glass waist of the lantern and flew like manic angels around the playwright’s head.