‘Any messages?’ None. He went to his room, caught the news on TV1, and fell asleep over a book, his head pillowed on his arm, his face quite solemn in repose. Now and then there was an out-breath that seemed to contain the fragment of a word. Then he would frown, grow momentarily tense, and faint back into some more profound level of sleep.

When he woke the room was dim. The arm he had rested his head on was quite insensate. He had to move it with his other hand as though it were a piece of driftwood.

He looked over at the bulb on the telephone, wondering if he might have slept through a call, but there was no flashing light. Was something not ready? Had something gone wrong? Would they warn him? He wondered how many others there were, men and women in rooms like this one perhaps, half bored, half anxious, waiting for a signal, a note under the door, a tap on the shoulder.

He switched on a table light, pulled up his shirt and examined his chest in one of the room’s several mirrors. He could not decide whether his mysterious ‘complaint’ was marginally better or slightly worse, though there was no particular discomfort now, nothing that required him to take a painkiller with his aperitif. All the same, he thought of shadows on the lungs, of emphysema, of gross impediments in the branching of his airways. When he got back to Paris he would see someone about getting an X-ray, and he sat on the end of the bed, recalling the names of all the doctors he knew.

13

The night of the visit to Granny Wilcox’s house, Alec was woken by a noise he could not at first identify. He lay in bed, staring up through the not-quite-dark of the air, listening, but hearing only his heart, his breath, his brother’s breath, and the faint mechanical basso of the water pumping station behind the Joys’ house. Yet whatever it was that had woken him, it had thrust him out of sleep, startled him, so that he knew at some level he had been listening for it all night – for many nights perhaps – monitoring the audible world for a sound that could not be innocently explained.

He sat up and lifted a corner of the curtain. The storm that had broken over their heads on the drive home (striking the windscreen with waves of stone-coloured rain) had passed, leaving in its wake a coolness of clear, moonless air. It felt late – three, four a.m. – but the alarm clock on the table with its luminous hands was turned away from him towards the camp-bed.

‘Larry?’

‘Yeah,’ said Larry, ‘I thought I heard something too.’

‘What?’

‘No idea.’ Larry fumbled for the rocker switch on the cord of the bedside lamp, put the lamp on, and unzipped the sleeping bag.

‘You’re going out?’ asked Alec.