“Not really…” I managed to laugh at myself and massaged my bruised hand. The rosy glow of angostura suffused the gin like a bloodstream glimpsed through a butterfly’s wing. The carousel owner and his muscular sons had ordered me away, suspecting that I was up to no good. “I’d forgotten the thing was moving—a trick of the sun. It turned the carousel into a kind of stroboscope…”

“Well, I believe you … try not to stop any speeding cars—I’d hate having to explain that to Lucy and Alice.”

The fan on the mantelpiece was turning, and the reflected sunlight through her blond hair reproduced this curious effect. The same aura hovered over Cleo’s bare shoulders as over every leaf in the garden. I was sorry to have worried her—for months she had been telling me that I was marooned in Shepperton, and the accident at the funfair must have seemed to her like another of my attempts at internal escape.

Old friends by now, we had never become lovers—in a boozy and reflective mood I had once described this to her as a technical omission, to which she had replied with a raised eyebrow, a shrewd smile, and silence. But we had been separated by our shared friendship with Dick. Our different perspectives on this remarkable but ambiguous man had kept us apart, along with a certain wariness that Cleo felt towards me. Now that Dick had gone we had only ourselves, that shock of recognition sensed at so many funerals and the cue to so many realignments.

I wanted to embrace her, but I found it difficult to get to grips with anything around me, the realm of desire and even the world of everyday objects. Cleo’s sensitive hands and shy lips, the leaves in the drive, the rainbows on the windshield of my car had all become idealised versions of themselves. The housewives shopping in Shepperton High Street, the extras leaving the film studios, the children on the carousel had been transformed by Dick’s death. Distanced from their everyday selves, they seemed to hover beyond the contingent world of time and space, exiled from the paradise of the ordinary.

*   *   *

I stood by my desk, where Cleo had placed two heavy manila envelopes. They contained those mementoes of Dick which his sister had offered to us. While Cleo watched from the safety of her glass of gin, I drew out the California licence plate, the fading photographs of Dick in the cockpit of his weekend Cessna, posing alongside astronauts and space scientists at the 1960s Cape Kennedy. There were coasters from the Tropicana Motel in Hollywood, chips from a Las Vegas casino, and name tags from forgotten psychological conferences.