On the wall at the bottom of the stairs, where it could not be avoided, hung the Perspex-framed double-page profile of Larry, from the US celebrity magazine PLEASE!. Made up mostly of photographs, the feature was entitled ‘America’s Favorite Valentine’ (heart-shaped point over the final i), and showed, on the first page, an old Press Association shot of the nineteen-year-old Larry holding up his racquet to the stands after beating world number seven Eric Moberg at the French Open in 1980. Below appeared a heavier, browner Larry, leaning against a silver Jaguar in front of the Manhattan Flatiron building, dressed in the type of clothes a successful young bonds dealer might wear to the golf club, this from the time he worked for Nathan Slater’s advertising circus in New York. Then there was the inevitable still from an episode of Sun Valley, in which Larry, white-coated and waxy-faced, was plunging defibrillators on to the chest of an attractive cardiac victim. But the largest of the photographs – filling the greater part of the right-hand page – was a family portrait of Larry and Kirsty and the three-year-old Ella gathered on a couch in their ‘beautiful home in San Francisco’s North Beach district’. Larry has his arm around Kirsty, who looks cute and excited, the lucky girl who landed Sun Valley's ‘perfect gentleman’, while Ella is wedged between them, though with an expression so determinedly mournful it was not difficult to hear the pleas of the photographer (bylined as Bob Medici) – ‘Can we get the little lady to smile too? How about it, huh?’ But even at three, Ella had been a tough child to plead with, and ever since the picture had gone up, Mrs Samson, adjusting the angle of the frame or wiping the Perspex with her yellow duster, could not keep herself from muttering, ‘Bless...’ or ‘Shame ...’, and furrowing her brow, as though the child’s displeasure somehow amounted to a judgment on them all.

In the kitchen Alec took from his back pocket the piece of folded paper with columns in Una’s handwriting that detailed the drugs Alice was to take, together with the times and the dosages. Antidepressants, anti-emetics, analgesics, laxatives, steroids. She had a plastic box beside the bed, its inside divided into segments – blue for the morning, orange for the afternoon and evening – but illness, fatigue, the pills themselves perhaps, had begun to create lapses, lacunae in her concentration, and on Alec’s first day down, Una, sitting beside him on the not-quite-even bench outside the summerhouse, had suggested that he discreetly oversee the filling and emptying of the box, and he had agreed immediately, eager for a chore that would not make him feel incompetent. Now he made a small tick on the list, picked up his leather satchel from the kitchen table, and went on to the terrace.