All the photographs of himself as a boy, most of them at Brooklands still, displayed him in Kodachrome gardens, or the vivid green of the sports field, or shoulder to shoulder with Alec on a beach in Brittany or Ireland, the same trademark grin on his face. Even in adolescence, when now and then he had slammed doors, and the skin around his mouth had turned raw for a year, his features had never failed to exude the good-tempered optimism of a boy entirely at ease in the world. Unhappy children, even children who seemed unhappy, roused in his increasingly suggestible mind the spectre of a darkness from which even innocence gave no immunity, and against this he continued, doggedly, a little desperately even, to do battle.

The child observed him, peeking from behind her mother’s black-cloaked bosom, then staring more openly as her mother harried the air hostess to find a packet of crisps on the trolley bearing the little K for Kosher. Larry wrinkled his nose, winked, crossed his eyes, frowned in mimicry of her own expression, all without the least effect. If anything she became more severe, more regally disapproving of him, his antics, and he began again, this time discreetly including his pulling-off-the-thumb routine, one of Ella’s favourites, but it was not until they banked over the coast above LA and flew in over acres of neat houses, over freeways and brilliant wires of sunlit traffic, that she consented to be amused, her face lighting up with a smile of such radiance he had to turn away from her. He stared down at his hands (the wedding band on the left; his right hand, his former racquet hand, still puffed with muscle) and spoke to himself, spoke behind the curtain of his face, easing himself away from the fear that he was about to commit, in this cramped and public place, some lavish inappropriacy. Laugh like a hyena, or curl up in the aisle, or caress one of the chestnut loops on the mother’s brow – an act that would certainly have startling repercussions. It was part of the new intensity, of course, the new waywardness that forced him to keep checking on himself, taking bearings on normal. But what troubled him most was the sense that something in him was colluding with it all, this unravelling, some impulse whose true character was still hidden from him, but which he suspected might, like his father’s, be merely destructive.

From her jump-seat by the emergency exit door, one of the air hostesses, her face stiff with cosmetics and fatigue, was watching him without much sympathy, and seemed on the verge of putting some procedure into operation, but now they were descending sharply, the plane suddenly on a level with the roofs of the airport buildings, and there was no longer time to do anything but mutter the garbled end of a prayer (Christ, don’t let us crash and die here...).