Una moved Alice into the shade and untying the sunhat gave her a few minutes with the gas bottle. Alec, coming out for the last plates, stood unobserved under the trees, studying them as though one day he would be called on to recite the details. The wasps dancing around the cake crumbs. The silvery tracks of the wheelchair in the grass. The cat padding through a private corridor of air. And at the heart of the picture, his mother, her eyes shut above the plastic mouthpiece, her eyelids grey and flat and leaden. Would he have pitied her more if she had been a stranger? Some woman whose name he did not know and to whom he owed nothing but an ordinary debt of compassion? Then at least he would have felt something manageable, not this tangle of pity and fear; this childish revulsion like a weapon he did not know whether to turn against himself, or her. So why not leave like the party guests? Take the car. Get out. He had done it before, running from that gulag of a school he had taught in (thirty-five fourteen-year-olds, some almost savage); a week’s fugue of which he could remember very little other than a noise in his head like the hissing of pylons, and an image, strangely beautiful, of the lights from the esplanade reflecting on the wet shingle he was walking on. No one would be surprised if it happened again. They would be expecting it.

‘Who’s there?’ asked Una, shading her eyes.

‘Just me,’ he said. He came forward and started to stack the plates. She was squinting at him, smiling, and he saw that the sun had brought out a dozen freckles on her nose and cheeks, which made her look younger and somehow carefree.

He put the wicker tray on the table and quickly loaded the last of the crockery. He didn’t want to disturb them – didn’t think he should be there with them at all – but as he moved away Alice opened her eyes, tugged the mask from her face, and called out after him, a single garbled word of protest that froze him in mid-stride.

‘Mum?’

But whatever it was she wouldn’t repeat it. The effort had set her off and she needed her gas again, her oxygen. It was several minutes before Alec realized that the word had been ‘menteur', and that she had called him a liar.

At half past five, Una came to the summerhouse to say goodbye. Alice was back in bed, she said, resting. Alec thanked her for staying so long. He thought she would leave then (he could think of nothing else to say to her), but she stayed, looking round as if she had never been in the place before.