She gave him the news as they drove, talking to the windscreen and using many of the technical expressions she had learned over the last years from the doctors. When she had finished, Alec felt like a child who in some bizarre anxiety dream has been given his father’s place in the car. How would they get around the next corner? How would they stop? Frantically, he had tried to think of what he could say to her (surely the situation could not be as hopeless as she suggested?) but the moment when he needed to speak, when nothing more was required from him than the kind of sincerity peddled by American soap operas five nights a week, the words would not come. And though he had visions of himself pulling over into a lay-by to hug her, making some show of his own pain, he did nothing, for fear that whatever he could say or show would be grossly inadequate. For fear too, perhaps, of what might happen if he did manage to express what he felt.

At Brooklands she had politely thanked him for driving her. The rain was over, the clouds had dispersed, and the evening was unexpectedly serene and blue and mild. He went into the house to make tea (he found the cups still full the next day), then spied on Alice from the window on the upstairs landing, watching her in the garden moving from flower-bed to flower-bed, in what, with a great sinking of his heart, he imagined to be an act of leave-taking.

By eight o’clock she was in bed. At the kitchen table he wrote to Larry, a stiff, garbled, furious, self-pitying letter (Remember us? Your family?) which he immediately tore into pieces, hiding the pieces in an old yoghurt pot and hiding the pot deep in the kitchen bin. Later, he spoke to Larry on the telephone, and hearing the shock in his brother’s voice, his anger had evaporated, replaced by a desire to put himself entirely into his brother’s care, to be carried by him. For half an hour they talked until Larry had said, so tenderly Alec did not trust himself to reply, ‘I’ll get over there, bro. Can you hold out a bit longer?’