‘This is Ground Control,’ said Larry, but Alice, her voice still wrapped in the heavy velvet of sleep, continued her recital of the number.

‘It’s me, Mum. Larry.’

‘Hello dear,’ she said. ‘Ça va?’

‘Did I wake you?’

‘It’s still dark,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry. I was going to talk to Alec.’

‘Oh, Alec,’ she said. ‘He does his best.’

‘I know,’ said Larry. He had the receiver wedged between his shoulder and his ear, the body of the phone in his left hand. With his right hand he opened the medicine cabinet.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Not too bad, dear. I haven’t gone mad or anything like that.’

‘Of course not.’ He unhooked the little brass catch on the box. The lid popped up. He could hear very clearly the long drag of his mother’s in-breath.

‘There’s so much to think of,’ she said. ‘Hard to know where to begin.’

‘I’ll be with you soon,’ he said, holding a red-and-blue capsule up to the light and squinting to see the tiny grains of chemistry in it. ‘And Ella too.’

‘Kirsty’s a good girl, Larry.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she there?’

‘She’s next door.’

‘Come soon, won’t you, dear.’

‘I wish I was there now.’

‘I know, dear.’

‘Go back to sleep, Mum.’

‘You too, dear.’

‘Sweet dreams.’

A sigh. The phone went down. Larry shut the little box, closed the medicine cabinet and wrapped the pills in a sheet of tangerine toilet paper, before slipping them into the envelope with his money.

‘Who wants a piece of the doctor?’ he said, coming back through the door into the big swirl of the King’s music, but the others had their eyes fixed on more private horizons, and no one answered him.

15

There was a room under the stairs they called the workshop, though like the playroom where no one played any more, it was many years since anyone had worked there. Stephen had used it for repairing his clocks, or, when his hands were not steady enough, for drinking. Some of the gear was still there – the Formica-topped bench and the Sherline lathe – and even after so long the room seemed to have preserved a faint tang of cleaning ammonia and solder, so that Alec could never go in without for an instant seeing the shadow of his father’s back, the air like a sheet on which the print of the sleeper was still visible, a fragile outline that time would eventually smooth out to make the absence perfect.