The seat next to him, which he had hoped might remain unoccupied, was taken at the last moment by a woman and her infant daughter. The woman wore a large shapeless black dress decorated with various ethnic trimmings, and a kind of cloth bonnet from beneath which a pair of thick chestnut curls straggled over her forehead. Regarding her with sidelong glances as the plane taxied to its place in the queue for take-off, Larry realized she was much younger than he had first thought – mid-twenties perhaps – though dressed as if to make herself appear older and less attractive, bulked out by mysterious pouches and padding, designed perhaps to insulate her from too much direct contact with the world. The child on her lap, three or four years of age, thin, listless, rather sickly looking, possessed the darkest and saddest eyes he had ever seen. He smiled companionably at the mother, who did not smile back but said, ‘She’s nauseous,’ in such a strong New York Jewish accent Larry thought at first it must be the child’s name, and was trying to puzzle out which feisty Old Testament heroine she was named after, when the woman snatched the air sickness bag from its slot behind the in-flight magazines.

‘Hope’s she’s not sick on you,’ she said, in a voice that suggested it would be his fault if she were. The child wriggled on her lap. ‘You wanna chuck up?’ asked the mother, and placing a firm hand on the back of the girl’s head she thrust the little face into the mouth of the sack, where it remained for some minutes before reappearing, comically distressed, her cheeks puckering with disgust, her great eyes returning Larry’s anxious stare with a mixture of hostility and weariness and sly appeal. He felt for her, imagining that he understood her, the character of her disenchantment with the world, and as they flew over the scuffed California desert, the coast to the right of them fringed with blue and pearl, he dedicated himself to making the child smile, a game he had often played with Ella, who shared with this little pale Jewish girl a heaviness, an elfin knowledge of things, which he found disturbing.