On Sunday morning, Alice Valentine waited on the sofa in the living room at Brooklands. She was wearing a fawn winter coat, and round her neck a stole of mink fur, with a mink’s desiccated head on either end of it. The stole had belonged to her mother, and fifty years ago might have bestowed some glamour on a young woman with an evening dress and a powdered throat, but time and hordes of golden moths had done much damage to it. The creatures, with their glass eyes and ragged ears, seemed to be suffering from acute alopecia, and Alec thought of the old dog skin at the end of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, dropped from a window on to a dust heap. But Alice had wanted it, and after long searching he had found it coiled in a hatbox at the back of a wardrobe on the landing. None of them knew why she wanted it; perhaps in tribute to her mother on the visit to the old house. No one asked her for reasons any more.

It was a quarter to twelve by the time they left: Larry, Ella and Kirsty in the back of the car, Larry with his knees almost up to his chin; Alice in the front with her stick, her oxygen, her tissues, her supermarket carrier bag of pill bottles. They travelled on minor roads under the looped shadows of the trees, Alec leaning forward at the wheel like a card player, though there was almost no traffic. Ella, in a green frock and sandals, sat between her parents, poised and silent. Larry scratched the top of her head and she gazed up at him.

‘How you?’ he whispered. ‘How we?’