The play was called Oxygène: sixty-seven pages of card-bound typescript that told, in a clipped, elliptic language, the story of a mining disaster in eastern Europe. It was to be shown on a revolving stage, with two sets, ‘above ground’ and ‘below ground’, alternately on view. The action commences with the explosion that traps the miners at the end of a narrow shaft. Above ground, a rescue team and a chorus of relatives attempt to force a way through to them. Hope endures to the end of the first act, but by the beginning of the next it is apparent to everyone that the rescue can only have a single outcome. Underground, the miners struggle to come to terms with their fate. For one, it is nothing but the crude majesty of facts – too much rock, too little force. Another finds peace in a religious quietism, wedding himself to the will of his Creator. A third rages at the mine-owners who have forced them to go on drilling despite warnings about the safety of the tunnel. In the middle of the act a fight breaks out between two men so starved of air they can do no more than slow-dance like drunken lovers. Despair seeps in like a gas. Even those above ground succumb to it, gasping as if they too were under threat of asphyxiation. But at the moment when all further effort seems futile, one of the trapped men, György, a veteran of the mines, rouses himself, rallies the last of his strength, and renews his assault on the rock, while on the surface a young woman, unhinged by grief perhaps, takes one of the abandoned picks and clumsily wields it at the earth. As the house lights are dimmed and the audience sits on in the dark, the air rings with the steady percussion of the tools, a noise that the text insists should be ‘a triumphant sound but also a mocking one’.

The force of the play was apparent to Alec on his first hurried reading of it in the hour after the motorcycle courier – whose presence in the flats had deeply impressed Mr Bequa - delivered it at the beginning of April. The following day he had taken it with him to Brooklands, where Alice, still officially in remission, had invited him to enjoy the good weather, and he had read it a second and a third time sitting in the orchard under a canopy of apple blossom.