They reach the Hampton Clinic. Louisa checks in. Jomier and Jimmy accompany her to her room. The nurses are smiling and polite. They ask Jomier and Jimmy if they would like a cup of tea while they wait for Louisa to change and settle into her bed. Both accept the offer. Tea and biscuits are brought on a tray. Jimmy takes this treatment for granted: he is used to travelling club class. Jomier, used to Ryanair and the National Health, feels a grumbling disgust. Why does courtesy and politeness only come with the upgrade? How would these selfsame nurses treat them if they were poor?

Jomier and Jimmy are readmitted to Louisa’s room. Her pretty blue nightdress reveals more of her wasted body. Jomier dares not meet her eyes for fear that she will see the anguish in his eyes. They sit and chat. ‘I hear you’ve got a girlfriend?’ says Louisa: ‘I hope you’ll introduce me.’

Jomier does not want to think of Judith. ‘Not really,’ he says.

‘Not really – you won’t introduce me? Or not really a girlfriend?’

Jomier is happy to be teased. He looks into his daughter’s laughing eyes. ‘I’ll certainly introduce you when you’re better.’

‘You think meeting her might finish me off?’

Jomier smiles. ‘Henry and Sandra survived it.’

‘They say she’s very nice.’

Jomier prepares to leave: Jimmy will stay. Jomier will deliver Jimmy’s luggage to the Stafford Hotel. He will come and see Louisa again the next morning. He leans over to kiss his daughter, embracing her lightly for fear of breaking her bones. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Yes. And, Dad . . .’

He turns, holding the open door.

‘Pray for me, will you?’

‘Of course.’

Jomier returns to his house in Hammersmith. It is growing dark but he does not close the curtains in his living room or switch on the lights. He sits in an armchair in the gloom, staring out of the bay window into the street. A car passes. The click-clack of a woman’s high heels on the pavement. The clunk of scaffolding being loaded onto a lorry. The sounds made by people with something to do. Jomier has nothing to do. Or nothing he feels like doing. His journal? Copy out the past? Enter the present? ‘Met Jimmy and Louisa at Heathrow. Louisa looks like death.’ Would words detach Jomier from his anguish? Would they distance him from his suffering? Is that what keeping a journal has always been about – keeping his feelings at arm’s length by writing as if they were felt by someone else? Is that the function of all writing – processing the raw material of human agony into digestible entertainment for airline passengers and reading groups?