She turned to him and smiled, beamed at him as if she were surprised to find him there, and his suggesting that they go out somehow made it possible. ‘What an angel,’ she said. And then turning to Stephanie Gadd, she repeated it: ‘My son is an angel.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Stephanie, her hand straying towards the pearls again. ‘Yes, I can see that.’

For a few minutes the garden gave Alice new strength. With her stick she moved on her own across the trimmed lawn with more energy than she had been able to muster in weeks. It was mid-afternoon, the velvet hour. At the point of farthest visibility, the air was silver and slate, darkening nearer the horizon, almost purple. Something was building out there, new weather, but it was still a long way off, and might, in the end, come to nothing.

‘The place doesn’t look too bad on a day like this,’ said Rupert. He was standing with Kirsty in the shade of the house.

‘Oh, I think it’s heavenly,’ she said.

‘Old fellow from the village mostly. Can’t understand a word he says but he’s reliable. Steph’s the brains behind it all.’

‘It was kind of you to let us come.’

‘Not at all.’

‘I think she’s OK now,’ said Kirsty, watching Alice pause to lean her face into the heart of a large yellow rose.

‘Still,’ said Rupert, ‘it must be wretched for her.’ Then in a voice that was quite different, he added, ‘We lost Tom’s brother to leukaemia two years ago. They used Tom’s bone marrow but it didn’t help much.’ He grinned, as though his face suffered from a poverty of expressions. ‘Poor Tommy seems to think it was his fault. You know. Thinks he should have done more.’

When Alice started to slow down, a toy unwinding, they brought out a chair for her and tried to coax her into the shade. They were solicitous and complained that she was overexerting herself, but she insisted they set the chair on the grass in front of the willow. Alec helped her to sit. She clutched at his hand and told him it was the garden she had come back for. Nothing in the house had helped her–who were those people? – but the tree was miraculously unchanged. The perfectly kept secret of itself! The same tree she had seen each morning from her bedroom window as she got ready for school. The tree behind whose branches she had hidden with Samuel, her head on his shoulder, Sunday afternoons before he took the train back to London. The tree she had stood beside the night she went out to rescue her father. The night he told her about the flame-throwers. Did he know about that?