A little before midnight, Larry returned, crooning some country-and-western number as he clambered over the stile and weaved his way back to the house. Alec extinguished the flame in the lantern and sat on in the dark, long enough, he hoped, for Larry to have got to bed. He didn’t want to speak to him again tonight. Though they had made their peace, he was still shaken by the row in the kitchen, could still feel where Larry had jabbed his shoulder. And where were you hiding? Go to hell! They had fought often enough as kids, as teenagers, passionately against each other for half an hour. But tonight he had seen something new, an anguish that mirrored his own, a depth of trouble he knew nothing about and could not have explained. Kirsty had been right the evening he called San Francisco (and he had been wrong): people change. And how credulous of him, how unthinkably naive, to imagine that his brother would just go on the same, untouched by the disorder that found its way unerringly to others lives – to every life in time. But how was he to understand himself now? What more telling definition of himself could he hope to find other than being what Larry was not? He had never questioned it. Had anyone? It was the easiest way to think about him. So what now? If Larry wasn’t ‘Larry’ any more, who was Alec?

At a quarter to one he recrossed the garden. Flower-heads showed silvery against the dark of the foliage, and the night felt heavy, liquid, the stars not quite in focus. Perhaps it meant a change in the weather, a heavy dew tomorrow. He locked the terrace doors, drank a glass of tap water in the kitchen, and was on the point of switching off the lights in the living room when his attention was caught by the card table in the alcove beneath the stairs. He had put the table there the day after Alice came out of hospital, and at the same time had put the pieces of the little conjuring game back in the box. But now they were out again, the three red cups in a line across the centre of the table. He went closer. Who had taken them out? Larry? Why should he? Certainly not Kirsty. Ella, then. Ella, of course. If nothing else, her obsessive nature betrayed her: the intervals between the cups must have been uniform to within a centimetre or two. But when? And who had she wanted to play with? He crouched, studying the cups in turn, then lifted the middle one.

‘You win,’ he whispered. He picked up the right-hand cup. Still there was nothing. He turned over the last.