The following week she called him at the flat early in the morning while he was still in bed. She had sounded slurred and depressed, also angry, and he had travelled down full of dark presentiments. Even the good weather had gone, and on the way to the hospital for the new tests they drove through sopping air on roads silvered with rain. He waited for her in the hospital carpark, listening to the radio and looking out at a landscape of Portakabins and scruffy trees and barrack-like buildings through whose doors harassed people scurried with coats over their heads, or stood outside battling to angle their umbrellas into the wind. There were scans and blood tests, then a ten-day wait to collect the results from her consultant. Even in so brief a time, the change in Alice was observable, measurable. The navy blue dress she put on for her appointment with Brando looked two sizes too big for her, and her make-up, applied more thickly than usual, seemed a clumsy attempt at concealing what was happening to her face, the deflation of her features, the rings beneath her eyes as though sleeplessness had bruised her. He parked the Renault as close to the doors of the oncology department as he could, but when he had hurried around to her side of the car and taken her arm she had shaken him off and walked away on her own, even managing a cheery ‘Afternoon!’ to a nurse she thought she recognized. She was gone for forty minutes. When she came out, pausing at the step to get her breath, to collect herself, it was as if, somewhere in the recesses of that ugly building, she had been disassembled, then put together again in a hurry, unsuccessfully. Even getting into the car was suddenly an action fraught with difficulty, a pantomime of decrepitude. He saw that her eyes were bloodshot, and one of her cheeks was red, as though she had been pressing something against her face.