On the clock beside the bed, Mickey Mouse’s white-gloved hand flicked to the hour. Two a.m. Ten a.m. in the UK. But despite his promise, he was too weary to call Alec now, too bone tired to deal with what he might hear. He would call tomorrow, from LA perhaps. Tomorrow would be soon enough. He picked up Ella’s inhaler and shook it to check the reserves of salbutamol in the canister. Apparently there was a new and better inhaler on the market, a device called a SmartMist with a microprocessor to measure the drug intake and some other novelty that let you test the peak air flow. The researchers at UC had endorsed it. Kirsty wanted Ella to have it. Some of Ella’s school-friends already had it.

One last time, before leaving to spend the remains of the night in the spare bedroom, he gazed at her. Her expression had softened. If – however distantly – she had been aware of him before, now she was gone, borne away into the labyrinth of sleep, her spirit unlaced, her face astonishingly still and perfect, so that for an instant he had the panicky urge to wake her, to bring her back into the world of solid things. He leaned down, almost touching her. Then, like some tender ogre from the type of fairytale children were not supposed to read any more, he gently inhaled her breath.

NIGHTWATCH

‘Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here
about my heart...’

Hamlet (Act v, scene ii)

1

Inside the house his father’s clocks were striking the hour. Faintly, the chimes carried to where he stood in the garden, a lank young man in a summer sweater and shapeless blue trousers, wiping the lenses of his glasses with the corner of a crumpled handkerchief. He had spent the last hour with the hose watering the flower-beds and giving the ground around the younger trees a good soaking, as he had been instructed to. Now, having carefully coiled the hose, he made his way back towards the house, his progress shadowed by a cat that pushed through the stems of delphiniums and peonies and oriental poppies. At the top of the house, the light in Alice’s room shone dully from between half-open curtains.

It was the dusk of his third day back at Brooklands, the house in the West Country with its grey stone walls, brown-tiled roof and rotting summerhouse, where he had spent the first eighteen years of his life. His own small flat in London was shut and locked, and his neighbour, Mr Bequa, whose clothes carried their own atmosphere of black tobacco and failed cooking, had agreed to forward the mail, though there would not be much. Bequa had even come down into the street to wave him off, and knowing where he was going and why, had done so with gestures of extravagant melancholy, ‘Goodbye, Alec friend! Good heart! Goodbye!’