Atlas was the only one of us Carricks who had any idea where Jonathan was buried. My father Rayner had made a point of not knowing. What few Carrick stragglers remained – other than myself, that is – did the same. After an hour or so on the road toward Hannaville, Claire stopped for coffee. She managed the wheelchair and me both; Atlas snored on in the car. We’d hardly spoken during the morning, Claire and I, but as soon as she’d fetched coffee for us and settled herself opposite me, she reached out and put her hand over mine.

‘I’m sorry I was so irritable yesterday,’ she said, ‘I shouldn’t have asked you to talk to Nate. It wouldn’t do any good.’

‘I know.’

‘No, you don’t. Nate doesn’t know what day it is anymore. I mean really: Is it Tuesday? He doesn’t know. Is it July? He doesn’t know. He can’t even remember what year it is. He loses his way when he goes out, gets fuddled on the way to the hospital, turns right when he should turn left. Sometimes he can’t remember the way home.’

‘Really? He sounded fine all day yesterday—’

‘Did he?’

‘Well, not at the table,’ I said unhappily. ‘That was – But what about his practice? I can see there are some difficulties, but – he seems to manage pretty well still.’

‘There isn’t too much he can do to harm these poor old folk. He reassures them. They need it; he’s good at it, and most doctors don’t bother. If anything important comes up, he usually has the sense to send them to someone else. Not always, though. There have been, uh, mistakes, and Dr Youngblood’s terrified of a suit. And now this cancer business—’

‘What cancer business?’

‘They’re implanting radium seeds tomorrow: that’s what the operation’s about. Prostate cancer. Didn’t he say?’

I shook my head. ‘What do radium seeds do?’

‘I don’t know. They set off alarm bells when you go through those metal detector things in an airport: that’s what Nate says, and it’s about all I know about them. I guess they buy a little time.’

In George’s ornate living room all those years ago, when only inventors and daredevils traveled by air, before there ever were such things as airports with metal detectors: in the steaming opulence of that room, the relentless ceiling fan creaked round and round, creak, creak, creak. It was as ineffectual as an airport alarm that reveals only radium seeds. The air hung as heavily as before.

‘You really ain’t changed at all, know that?’ George said to Jonathan, my grandfather. ‘Not a bit. The voice is fancy and the way you walk and all, but the face: just the same. Inside, too, I bet. I can feel it. Well, what the hell, I can’t offer you anything to eat. Wife off. Kids off. Gone to fucking Europe. Too hot to eat anyway. Servants off, too. Not a soul around.’

Jonathan nodded as he had before.