When they turned into the drive at Brooklands, Larry leaned forward, wondering what changes he would find. He had not been here since the retirement party the previous August when he had become shit-faced on duty-free and kissed the art teacher, Miss Whatshername, behind the summerhouse. In the light of what had followed, it was tempting to recall the whole of that night as though it were one of those movies set on the eve of a disaster no one is expecting, but which everyone is secretly preparing for. Tempting but false, for surely they had all been perfectly innocent of the future, and Alice had not said, or at least not meant, what she had whispered to him in the minutes before the fuse blew. Absurd request! What did she have in mind? That he would smother her with a pillow the moment she stopped making sense?
Then the house swung into view, its walls more bowed, more overrun with creepers than he remembered. A dozen of the terracotta tiles were missing from the roof at the gable end, the guttering above one of the upstairs windows had ruptured, and the wooden side gate into the garden was jammed ajar, turning it into a kind of trellis for weeds. He shook his head. ‘This place needs a lot of work,’ he said, ‘a lot of work.’ He felt quite nauseous with fatigue.
Napping in the twin room downstairs, Larry dreamed pleasantly of Sister Kim, and when he woke, half expected to see her beside him, his guardian angel, but there was only Ella, in shorts and T-shirt, sitting on the other bed, swinging her legs and watching him. She had opened one of the suitcases and Larry automatically looked to see what she might have helped herself to, but the case contained only clothes and toiletries, a couple of books, nothing that was likely to be of interest to her. He sent her off to find Alec while he shaved and showered and drank a cafetière of coffee and smoked three cigarettes and swallowed another Xanax. Then, feeling different rather than better, he patrolled the house with a last cup of coffee, looking into rooms and out of windows, recovering the place, trying to arrive.
He left Alice’s bedroom until last, uncertain how he would react to it, but the room had been thoroughly tidied and aired and smelled only of furniture polish, and very faintly of pine disinfectant. The curtains were pulled back and tied. There were no clothes draped over the chair, no shoes on the floor, no sickroom litter of pillboxes and tonics and half-read magazines. The double bed was made up under a patchwork cover, though at the foot of the bed the material was rucked, as if someone had been sitting there. He smoothed it out, then went to the chest of drawers where the photographs had been angled so that they could be seen from the bed. The largest (it chilled him) was of himself, sixteen, waiting in his whites to go on court at a youth tournament in Eastbourne. Then a formal portrait of Alec in his academic gown at the graduation ceremony at UEA, smiling bravely yet somehow contriving to look as if he’d lost something. Beside this, in a pretty frame of lacquered wood, a softly monochrome photo of the teenage Alice standing in front of a weeping willow with her father, and another man, younger, who has turned away from the camera, frowning at something out of shot that the others have not yet noticed.
He picked up a picture of Ella, nude on a blanket, one year old. Then an enlarged, overcolourful snap of the wedding reception at Lemon Cove, Kirsty with her hair cut page-boy style, laughing at some remark thrown from the group of delighted onlookers, while her father proffers an elaborately wrapped package. The fondue set? The engraved cocktail shaker? The steak knives?
He stood, listening for any sound of movement in the house, then slid open the underwear drawer and disentangled one of Alice’s bras, an elaborate and robust garment of elastic and wire and pastel lace with a little silk butterfly bow at the front. He thought of the stuff he used to buy for Kirsty. Nathan Slater’s party girls had taught him about lingerie – the difference between the crass and the sexy, how to match colour to skin tone, what styles enhanced a curve, what cuts most flattered. He tried to remember the last time Kirsty had worn any of it, then realized he could not remember the last time he had seen her in her underwear. It had not been recently. It had not been for months. And this, surely, was as good an index as any of how things stood between them. Their steady retreat into strangerhood.
He turned the bra in his hands then pressed one of the cups to his face like a mask. A whiff of washing powder, of dried lavender. Little or nothing of Alice. He tucked it quickly back into the drawer and pushed the drawer shut.
‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.’
In the playroom, Ella was letting Alec show her various old toys. Some of them had been laid out on the table like exhibits at a trial – a boxing glove, a spaceship, a little black gun. But the toy that had caught the girl’s interest was a glass bulb with a wire spindle at its centre and six small square sails of black-and-white card. Larry remembered it. He was surprised that something so fragile could have survived so long.
‘You have to put it in the window, El. The sunshine makes the little sails spin round.’
She wanted to know what it was called. He shrugged. ‘Make up a name,’ he said. ‘I expect you can have it if you want. Ask Uncle Alec.’
‘Of course,’ said Alec. He was pulling out the old collapsible baize-topped card table from behind a pile of boxes.
‘I don’t think she knows how to play bridge,’ said Larry. ‘Shouldn’t we be getting ready for Mum?’
‘What’s there to get ready?’ said Alec. ‘There’s nothing to get ready.’ He carried the table out into the passage, Ella, the sun machine held gravely in front of her, walking behind him like an altar girl following the priest with some curious relic of the faith.
At three-thirty, Dennis Osbourne arrived to be part of Alice’s welcoming party. He brought a bunch of pink and carmine peonies from his garden. He shook Larry’s hand. ‘America treating you well?’
‘Like royalty,’ said Larry.
They were waiting in the living room. It was twenty years since the place had last been decorated. The paint was crazed around the light fitting in the ceiling, and on the walls the turquoise paper curled outwards at the joins.
‘I expect you’ll be doing a new show soon,’ said Osbourne.
Larry nodded, wondering how Osbourne would get along with a man like T. Bone, what, trapped in a lift, they might find to say to each other. ‘Only a matter of time,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for a new agent.’
It started to rain. From the window Larry watched the garden grow lively with countless little movements of water. He had forgotten how much weather the place had, this incessant shifting of the light.
Ella and Alec were sitting either side of the card table. The reverend touched the child’s hair. ‘Hello, young lady,’ he said. Ella smiled up at him with an expression Larry thought she must have learned from one of her doctors. On the table in front of her were three red plastic cups. She was trying to decide which of them was hiding the ball.
‘And your good wife?’ asked Osbourne.
‘She’s well,’ said Larry.
‘When I think of California,’ said the reverend, ‘I think of long roads lined with palm trees. And a violet sky. And Rex Harrison leaning on a balcony smoking a cigarette with a kind of ebony filter.’
‘That’s it,’ said Larry.
Ella tapped the middle cup but she was wrong. Alec was still a move or two ahead of her. Larry wondered how long his brother had been practising. He had never seen him in the role of magician before.
As each car passed on the road at the top of the drive the adults’ attention – Ella’s too perhaps – was held there for an instant, so that the atmosphere in the room was constantly tightened and released in a way that was becoming difficult to bear.