There was an instant’s confusion. The skin on Stephanie’s face tautened, as though her self-control might be far more fragile than her manner had so far suggested. But she recovered herself, set down the tray, and touched her pearls. ‘How very thoughtless of me,’ she said. ‘Of course you can see the house now. Rupert!’

‘Absolutely,’ said Rupert, springing from his seat. ‘Are we all going together?’

They started in the lounge, filing in behind Stephanie, who, sketching freely in the air, explained how they had knocked through and enlarged and finally forced upon these simple rooms a type of luxuriousness. In each of the rooms there came a moment when they gathered around Alice as though to witness a public act of recollection, but her gaze was distracted. She frowned as if they had brought her to the wrong house, or she was searching for something in particular, something that wasn’t there, the fine end of a thread that would lead her back.

They went upstairs, Alice at the front clutching on to Larry’s arm, the others inching up behind them.

‘You have a beautiful home,’ said Kirsty.

‘How kind,’ said Stephanie. ‘We keep our little place in London, but it’s not the old London now.’

‘Can’t buy a morning paper,’ said Rupert, ‘unless you speak Portuguese or Urdu.’

‘Un moment!" called Stephanie, striding to the head of the column. She opened the door at the far end of the corridor and announced the master bedroom. ‘We brought the mirror in Italy,’ she said. And then to Alec: ‘Do you know Siena well?’

Larry, who thought he might be able to have a lot of fun at these people’s expense, picked up a photograph from the mantelpiece beside the mirror. Two boys in cricket whites in the school grounds of some middle-ranking English public school. The boy with the bat was recognizably the languid Tom. The other boy, slightly older, blond-brown hair in a flop over one of his eyes, held up a ball as though he had just taken five wickets and was trying not to look too pleased with himself. At the far left of the picture there was the green flutter of a woman’s dress, and the dark green brim of her hat. Larry put the photograph back on the mantelpiece, catching sight in the mirror of Stephanie Gadd staring at him with an expression he had last seen on Betty Bone’s face in the San Fernando Valley.

At the window, Alice was gazing down into the garden. It was smaller than the one at Brooklands, and neater, running down a slight incline between beech hedges to the bank of a stream. The others joined her.

‘There,’ said Alice, a voice barely audible. ‘There...’

‘Do you mean the old willow?’ asked Stephanie.

Alice nodded, pressing on the glass with her fingertips.

‘You want to go into the garden, Mum?’ asked Alec.