Larry took a last drag on the cigarette. He was one of those deep-lunged men who could get through a cigarette in four or five big pulls, the paper uncoiling beneath a long, sharp ember. The Beefeater relieved him of the butt and walked away with it towards some secret receptacle. Larry checked his watch. Two-fifteen Pacific Standard. Something after ten at night in England, at Brooklands. Home?

‘Good night, Mum,’ he said, and he went in to be among the dentists.

8

In her dream, Alice watched her elder son emerge theatrically from beneath the giant weeping willow in her parents’ garden and cross the lawn towards her, telling her in French that he would save her. ‘Je te sauverai, maman. Je te sauverai.’ But even while she slept, held just beneath the surface of consciousness by the ballast of her drugs, she knew that there was something clumsy and improbable in the image. Larry did not speak French, and had, at sixteen, despite her coaching, decisively failed his O-level in the subject. Alec was the linguist, but it was not Alec who smiled at her on the lawn. The dream was a fraud and she woke into the darkness, confused and agitated, feeling herself to have been tricked.

Slowly she brought herself to order, then made herself smile at the memory of a class of eight-year-olds singing the responses to her patient drilling of French verbs.

Je ...?

‘SUIS!’

‘Tu...?

‘Es!’