He carried the cup-and-ball game into the living room, then moved softly up the stairs and peered into his mother’s room to where she lay in the quarter-light as if in a body of water whose currents moved her limbs and slowly turned her face from side to side on the pillows. Her inhalations were like moments of hushed surprise, and in each breath it seemed she lost more than she gained. The sickness was weaning her off air, and however many good days she had when she could sit in the garden with a rug and drink Darjeeling tea and talk to her visitors, the process, the day-to-day business of dying, ran on relentlessly, a ferocious, semi-public labour. What sense did it have, beyond the workings of a certain crude biology? What good lesson could be learned from watching someone die? Was it just to throw you back harder against your own life, to make you see the necessity of getting on with it? a memento mori like the old gravestones with their skulls and sand timers and glib reminders that ‘soon you shall be as I am’?

He had tried once, shortly after Stephen’s accident, to believe in God and the overarching purposefulness of things. He had set aside time every day to say his prayers: twenty minutes in the morning and twenty at night, kneeling down in the approved manner with his hands clasped by his lips. He told no one about it, and it had felt good at first, a source of consolation and power that did not depend on anybody else, teachers or parents, people who might suddenly not be there any more. Then the two sessions had became one and the twenty minutes shrank to ten. He talked to God but God did not talk back to him. There was only the sound of his own voice, the childish litany, the discomfort in his knees, until finally, with a sense of getting out into the air again, he had given it all up. His father had reserved a special venom for religion, the ‘God-botherers’. Alec didn’t know if Alice believed. He hoped she did, though the last time he had seen her with Osbourne she had been ragging him, saying that she had turned into a sun worshipper, ‘a bit of an Aztec’, something that the reverend, sitting beside her wearing a pair of green-shaded sunglasses, seemed to think entirely compatible with modern Anglicanism. It was a curious fact, however, that she did, in certain lights, certain hours, her face puffed up by the steroids, her gaze refined by suffering, look more like a tribal elder of some delicate mournful people in the great plains or rainforests than a middle-class English woman, a retired headmistress, his mother, Alice Valentine.

She opened her eyes, suddenly, as though she had not been asleep at all.

‘Larry?’ she said.

‘No, Mum, it’s me.’

A pause, then, ‘I was dreaming of you’.

10