In the orchard he plugged in the bulbs. They worked perfectly, jewelling the dark as on so many nights in the past, nights even when Stephen was alive. The cat was back, caught in the glare as it hunted in the long grass. It froze, then leaped on to a water butt, leaped onto the wall, and away into the invisible. Alec returned under the square of lights, and after standing there a moment like a man who has entirely forgotten what he came for, he sank down with his back against one of the trees. He knew now, with a certainty that bordered upon relief, that he wasn’t going to manage. No labour of the intelligence, no artifice or soft voice could help him. Losing Alice would not be difficult, it would be unendurable, and something in him would simply not survive it. With the others he would have to go on pretending for a while, but out here there were only bats and stars to see him, and he took off his glasses, folded them carefully, put his head in his hands, and wept.

16

There was a moment sometimes, on waking, the moment before she remembered to be ill, when she felt almost normal. It reminded her of a scene she must have watched in an old film: the condemned man led out of his cell to be shot, but pausing in the courtyard to register the temperature and the light and whether or not it was likely to be a fine day, as if he would be part of it, as if it mattered. Habit, like that poor Burmese Orwell wrote about, stepping over a puddle on his way to the gallows, not wanting to get his feet wet. Was that the last to go? Certain gestures, reflexes, a way of cocking the head or moving the hands in speech? Her own hands felt as if they would soon become too heavy for her, as though they were great paddles instead of fragile webs of bone and knotted blue veins. It was hard to keep her rings on now. They slipped off while she slept.

With a grunt of effort she sat up on the side of the bed, then leaned forward, a position that she found helped her to breathe. The room was fuggy. Too many flowers, too little air. She would open the window. After all, what did it matter if she caught a cold? And what if it became pneumonia? The old person’s friend, they used to call it, though she doubted there was anything very friendly about it, drowning in your own bed. But which of the doors out of this world was easy? Stephen smashed up in the Rover. Her father, his fingers yellowed from three packets of Woodbines a day, dying from something malignant and vague like disappointment or boredom. And now herself, this. Death blooming in her skull like a flower. A black tulip.