Settling the papers on his lap, Alec took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and massaged the bridge of his nose. He was working now entirely by the imperfect light of the lamp and had strained his sight and given himself a slight headache. When he opened his eyes again his gaze fell upon the tangle of small cream and raspberry roses that hung over the remains of a brick wall that had once divided the terrace from the rest of the garden, but which, in his father’s time, had been demolished, leaving just this short section for the flowers. These were Alice’s roses, and when he looked at them he saw her – an image, a superimposition, already starting to lose its vividness – dead-heading the discoloured blooms with quick, neat movements of her wrist. Insects hid in the moist hearts of the flowers, and perhaps destroyed them. Sometimes they would crawl under the cuff of her blouse and she shook them out, not quite indifferent to them, but not someone to indulge herself in squeamishness. She had no time for the kind of women who would shriek at the sight of a spider or a mouse. More than once he had seen her face down dogs, mongrel Doberman types that sprang from the end of farm tracks, or appeared suddenly at the bend of a quiet lane. And the story of her squaring up to the drunk who waved a broken wine bottle in her face in a multistorey carpark in Bath was part of family folklore. It was, of course, what one would expect from the daughter of the hero of Arnhem, whose photograph, looking remarkably like a 1940s version of Larry, gazed out from its silver frame among the ancestors on the walnut sideboard in the dining room.

Thus far, her courage had sustained her. From the beginning she had talked of ‘getting on with it’, which meant behaving properly, not making a fuss. But who could resist the assault of a disease that seemed to possess its own malicious intelligence? That hated life, but fed on it ravenously? The day would come, or the night, a night like this, when she was no longer ‘getting on with it’, and someone else would have to take the strain. Then what? He glanced down at the manuscript. ‘Hammer blows, steel on rock, a triumphant sound but also a mocking one.’

6

László Lázár stood on the landing outside his apartment looking down over the banisters to where his neighbour, Monsieur Garbarg, was standing outside his own apartment, looking up. Garbarg held a red-and-white chequered napkin in his hand, the little banner of his interrupted dinner. At his shoulder, in the opening of the door, stood Garbarg senior, who was blind, and wore on his face his customary expression of cautious astonishment.