The force of the play was apparent to Alec on his first hurried reading of it in the hour after the motorcycle courier – whose presence in the flats had deeply impressed Mr Bequa - delivered it at the beginning of April. The following day he had taken it with him to Brooklands, where Alice, still officially in remission, had invited him to enjoy the good weather, and he had read it a second and a third time sitting in the orchard under a canopy of apple blossom.
Stoltz was right. The play did not share the bleakness or scepticism of Lázár’s earlier work, and much of the reason lay with the character of György, a man who in his youth might have served as a model for a classic Soviet worker-hero, and seen himself sculpted in monumental brass for a public square, but forty years on, unillusioned, free of all dogma, he is merely decent, with the kind of gut courage and gut morality Camus endorsed. With the young woman to keep faith with him above ground, who was to say they did not in the end escape? It was unlikely, of course – highly unlikely – but there was nothing in the text forbidding such a thought.
In the midst of its spring boost, the garden at Brooklands was untrimmed, straggling, almost luxuriant. Bees were at work in the blossom; the earth ticked like a warm car. Alice abandoned the last proscriptions of her elaborate diet and they went shopping at the deli in Coverton to buy her old favourites – Parma ham, apple strudel, Vienetta ice cream, brandy snaps – foods from a golden age before biopsies and staging tests.
As Alec worked, he was aware of his mother glancing up at him from her book, and he had enjoyed that watching, had felt the weight and warmth of it, that regard never quite uncritical but of a quality and intensity he was quite certain no other person would ever have for him, or could have. Three days, three warm days in April which, in retrospect, seemed an entire season, and it amazed him that he had not been more conscious of his happiness then, that it had not somehow impressed itself upon him like a mark, whatever the opposite of a scar was.
The following week she called him at the flat early in the morning while he was still in bed. She had sounded slurred and depressed, also angry, and he had travelled down full of dark presentiments. Even the good weather had gone, and on the way to the hospital for the new tests they drove through sopping air on roads silvered with rain. He waited for her in the hospital carpark, listening to the radio and looking out at a landscape of Portakabins and scruffy trees and barrack-like buildings through whose doors harassed people scurried with coats over their heads, or stood outside battling to angle their umbrellas into the wind. There were scans and blood tests, then a ten-day wait to collect the results from her consultant. Even in so brief a time, the change in Alice was observable, measurable. The navy blue dress she put on for her appointment with Brando looked two sizes too big for her, and her make-up, applied more thickly than usual, seemed a clumsy attempt at concealing what was happening to her face, the deflation of her features, the rings beneath her eyes as though sleeplessness had bruised her. He parked the Renault as close to the doors of the oncology department as he could, but when he had hurried around to her side of the car and taken her arm she had shaken him off and walked away on her own, even managing a cheery ‘Afternoon!’ to a nurse she thought she recognized. She was gone for forty minutes. When she came out, pausing at the step to get her breath, to collect herself, it was as if, somewhere in the recesses of that ugly building, she had been disassembled, then put together again in a hurry, unsuccessfully. Even getting into the car was suddenly an action fraught with difficulty, a pantomime of decrepitude. He saw that her eyes were bloodshot, and one of her cheeks was red, as though she had been pressing something against her face.
She gave him the news as they drove, talking to the windscreen and using many of the technical expressions she had learned over the last years from the doctors. When she had finished, Alec felt like a child who in some bizarre anxiety dream has been given his father’s place in the car. How would they get around the next corner? How would they stop? Frantically, he had tried to think of what he could say to her (surely the situation could not be as hopeless as she suggested?) but the moment when he needed to speak, when nothing more was required from him than the kind of sincerity peddled by American soap operas five nights a week, the words would not come. And though he had visions of himself pulling over into a lay-by to hug her, making some show of his own pain, he did nothing, for fear that whatever he could say or show would be grossly inadequate. For fear too, perhaps, of what might happen if he did manage to express what he felt.
At Brooklands she had politely thanked him for driving her. The rain was over, the clouds had dispersed, and the evening was unexpectedly serene and blue and mild. He went into the house to make tea (he found the cups still full the next day), then spied on Alice from the window on the upstairs landing, watching her in the garden moving from flower-bed to flower-bed, in what, with a great sinking of his heart, he imagined to be an act of leave-taking.
By eight o’clock she was in bed. At the kitchen table he wrote to Larry, a stiff, garbled, furious, self-pitying letter (Remember us? Your family?) which he immediately tore into pieces, hiding the pieces in an old yoghurt pot and hiding the pot deep in the kitchen bin. Later, he spoke to Larry on the telephone, and hearing the shock in his brother’s voice, his anger had evaporated, replaced by a desire to put himself entirely into his brother’s care, to be carried by him. For half an hour they talked until Larry had said, so tenderly Alec did not trust himself to reply, ‘I’ll get over there, bro. Can you hold out a bit longer?’
Settling the papers on his lap, Alec took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and massaged the bridge of his nose. He was working now entirely by the imperfect light of the lamp and had strained his sight and given himself a slight headache. When he opened his eyes again his gaze fell upon the tangle of small cream and raspberry roses that hung over the remains of a brick wall that had once divided the terrace from the rest of the garden, but which, in his father’s time, had been demolished, leaving just this short section for the flowers. These were Alice’s roses, and when he looked at them he saw her – an image, a superimposition, already starting to lose its vividness – dead-heading the discoloured blooms with quick, neat movements of her wrist. Insects hid in the moist hearts of the flowers, and perhaps destroyed them. Sometimes they would crawl under the cuff of her blouse and she shook them out, not quite indifferent to them, but not someone to indulge herself in squeamishness. She had no time for the kind of women who would shriek at the sight of a spider or a mouse. More than once he had seen her face down dogs, mongrel Doberman types that sprang from the end of farm tracks, or appeared suddenly at the bend of a quiet lane. And the story of her squaring up to the drunk who waved a broken wine bottle in her face in a multistorey carpark in Bath was part of family folklore. It was, of course, what one would expect from the daughter of the hero of Arnhem, whose photograph, looking remarkably like a 1940s version of Larry, gazed out from its silver frame among the ancestors on the walnut sideboard in the dining room.