Stoltz was right. The play did not share the bleakness or scepticism of Lázár’s earlier work, and much of the reason lay with the character of György, a man who in his youth might have served as a model for a classic Soviet worker-hero, and seen himself sculpted in monumental brass for a public square, but forty years on, unillusioned, free of all dogma, he is merely decent, with the kind of gut courage and gut morality Camus endorsed. With the young woman to keep faith with him above ground, who was to say they did not in the end escape? It was unlikely, of course – highly unlikely – but there was nothing in the text forbidding such a thought.

In the midst of its spring boost, the garden at Brooklands was untrimmed, straggling, almost luxuriant. Bees were at work in the blossom; the earth ticked like a warm car. Alice abandoned the last proscriptions of her elaborate diet and they went shopping at the deli in Coverton to buy her old favourites – Parma ham, apple strudel, Vienetta ice cream, brandy snaps – foods from a golden age before biopsies and staging tests.

As Alec worked, he was aware of his mother glancing up at him from her book, and he had enjoyed that watching, had felt the weight and warmth of it, that regard never quite uncritical but of a quality and intensity he was quite certain no other person would ever have for him, or could have. Three days, three warm days in April which, in retrospect, seemed an entire season, and it amazed him that he had not been more conscious of his happiness then, that it had not somehow impressed itself upon him like a mark, whatever the opposite of a scar was.