The books all recommended that the patient have a list of questions to ask, a written list so that you didn’t get in a muddle, but she didn’t have one, and all she could think to ask was what everyone asks. How long? Such a silly question because doctors are not fortune-tellers and cancer doesn’t run to a timetable, but Brando had nodded and paused as though doing calculations in his head, some sort of algebra, and then said she should enjoy the summer as fully as she could. Get out in the sun, he said. I know you have a lovely garden. It took her a moment to work out what he was saying, to realize that he meant there wouldn’t be any autumn, yet alone a winter. She went deaf for a minute and had the curious sensation that it was the words and not the tumours that would kill her. When she could hear again he was explaining the treatment she could have. Surgery was not an option, but they could start her on another course of chemo in combination with radiation therapy, retard the spread of the disease a little, reduce the swellings. Think it over, he said. No need to make up your mind today. He said he was very sorry and she knew that he meant it. She asked about his son and he asked about her boys. He knew all about Larry and the show, and how there had been artistic differences. She told him that Alec was outside in the carpark waiting for her in the car, his old Renault, and did he know the type with the gear-shift on the dashboard, a great hook of a thing, and she couldn’t imagine why they had it there when in every other car in the world the shift was on the floor, which was the obvious place, and how typically French it was, always wanting to be a little different. She was still talking, babbling on, when the tears started. She was powerless to stop them because no one can be ready for such a moment and there was a violence to it that took her unawares. What else do you have but your life? Where else can you go? And then to find yourself in someone’s office with the sun squinting through the blinds and everything theatrically normal and twenty things to get done that day, and it’s all over. Finished. Ground out. And so she had wept, intemperately, cried so that she felt the seams of her face would break open, and Brando had reached for her and hugged her. No awkwardness in it. Just pressing her face gently against the cloth of his suit as though he were taking into himself some portion of her grief. Playfair would rather have eaten his stethoscope. He would not have been physically capable of hugging. Plenty of people weren’t and that was the pity of the world. Larry could, Alec couldn’t. Samuel, but not Stephen.