‘Yes, well.’ Audrey patted the back of her hair, hitched up her cardigan at the shoulders. ‘I’ve got the professional training, of course. And when I think what I went through with poor Bill.’

‘I meant humiliating for Ma.’ Tom knew he was being foolish, as well as unfeeling. His aunt, too, had had a bad day; and he could not do without her. Yet it seemed important, at the outset of the discussion he knew would follow, to establish Iris as a distinct being; before talk took away her particularity, positioning her as the object of sentences.

He said, ‘What a terrible shock for you. You’ve been tremendous.’

‘Yes, well.’ But her heroism acknowledged, Audrey favoured the version of herself that was selfless and uncomplaining. ‘It’s second nature to me, rendering assistance. Remember when Shona did my personality on the Internet?’ She drew her nephew into the house, ignoring his murmured protest; she had been waiting for this conversation all day.

A glass-fronted cabinet held a harlequin, a corsair, a ballerina, a drummer boy, a Bo Peep with a crook wreathed in fl owers and a lilac dress bunched up over a sprigged underskirt. Once a week Audrey murmured to small porcelain people of love while holding them face down in soapy water.

Tom turned the flowered mug in his hands. He couldn’t bring himself to drink another cup of bad coffee. A plump tabby left her cushion by the heater and crossed the room to rub her ears against the visitor’s legs. She sprang up, a warm purring weight.

Tom thought of how wolfish creatures are tolerant of cold but dislike damp. He tried willing himself to believe that the dog had made his way to the ridge road, and was lying safe, dry, sated, in a trucker’s kitchen. At this minute a woman might be reaching for the phone, while a child read off the number on a tag.

The picture was overlaid by another: night and bedraggled fur, a thin wind blowing.

Audrey was given to summary: the review of offences that confirms authority and justifies punishment. Cushioned in crisp chintz, she outlined what she called ‘the situation’. Iris would not venture into the passage alone. ‘What if the heater bursts into flame when I’m out? She’ll be burned to a crisp.’ Audrey had lately begun providing her sister-in-law with dinner as well as lunch, Iris now being capable of no more than tea and toast. ‘And even then, I don’t like to think of her with electricals.’ Audrey knew for a fact that Iris no longer risked the shower, making do with washbasin and facecloth. ‘You have to ask yourself about hygiene.’ It went without saying that Audrey was happy to do what she could; nevertheless, she said it. ‘But I can’t be bound hand and foot.’

She had a genius, this woman upholstered in rosy fl esh, for conjuring bodily abuse. ‘She’s got her nose out of joint.’ ‘I was running my head into a brick wall.’ Images that recurred, scenes from a censored film, on the bland screen of her talk.

‘I told her, I made it clear: If this goes on, you’ll have to go into a home.’ She looked at Tom with small blue eyes, the sapphire chips he had first seen in his father’s face. ‘No one can say I haven’t made it clear.’

‘No.’

‘Did you see my Berber? Ruined.’

‘If you could arrange steam-cleaning, I’ll fix you up, of course.’

But that was too simple an outcome.

‘Well, if you think I didn’t do a good enough job on that carpet.’

‘Of course not. I could hardly see the stains. Steam-cleaning would get rid of them completely, that’s all.’

‘I work my fingers to the bone for your mother.’

Driving home, his mind glazed with fatigue, Tom thought he should have offered his aunt more money. But for Audrey, money was a subject veiled in elaborate rituals; best approached, like a god, by cautious increment, face down in the dust.

There was her resentment that Tom should be in a position to offer money. On the other hand, if money was not offered, there was resentment at being taken for granted. And then, there was the question of how much; settled by indirection and insinuation and inspired guesswork, a process strung between accepting the figure named by Audrey and exceeding it by too wide a margin, either error occasioning tightened lips, silences charged with grievance, oblique accusations and small, roundabout acts of revenge.

The rain had stopped. At a traffic light, Tom lowered his window; a cold breath arrived on his cheek.

Audrey and he both knew he would rather write cheques than confront the devastation time had worked on his mother; as a man will make donations to charity the better to turn his face from the misery of the world.

This shared awareness diminished him in all his dealings with his aunt. It was Audrey, after all, who prepared meals and washed clothes, who drove Iris to the doctor and the hairdresser, who arranged for non-slip soles to be attached to shoes, who shopped for chocolate biscuits.

On Punt Road hill, Tom saw the city laid out before him like a parable. The sky was clear but blank, its lights obscured by electric galaxies. The hubris of it always thrilled him, that jewelled fist raised nightwards in defiance. Age brings increased delight in the natural world; or so tradition holds. But Tom was all for artifice, for the resplendent, doomed contrivances of his ingenious kind.

Towards morning he snapped awake, his mind on the loose. He drained the glass of water beside his bed; burrowed back down into warmth.

The dog’s muzzle was scattered with liverish spots, darker than the rest of his fox-red markings.

Animals do not suffer as we do. They do not live in time, they are not nostalgic for the past, they do not imagine a better future; and so they lack awareness of mortality. They might fear

death when it is imminent, but they do not dread it as we do.

So Tom Loxley reasoned, and tried to believe.

He thought of the stray dogs of India: question-mark tails raised over the lives they witness and endure.

He thought of the clearing he had seen on the hill, the tyre holding charred wood, the soggy remains of activity, and was visited by brief, lucid images of things that can be done to animals.

Thursday

Tom checked the weather for the hills on the Internet: heavy rain with intermittent hail and a gale warning.

Straightening up, he was conscious of stiffness in the small of his back. As a student, he had worked part-time as a storeman; had set himself to heft cartons with the casual aplomb of the muscled boys beside him. Now he spent too many hours reading, or in front of a computer: the scholar’s hunched existence.

Palms on the desk, he stretched, relishing the voluptuous ache along his spine.

He wondered how his mother was faring that morning. Age, he thought. The undistinguished thing.

Less than a month earlier Osman had said, ‘I’m forty-seven. I won’t die young.’ He had been allowed to go home at the beginning of November, the cancer in remission; although, as he told Tom, the respite would almost certainly be brief. A hospital bed filled the living room, where chairs had been pushed against walls and a new flat-screen TV set up on the sideboard.

‘My welcome home present,’ said the effigy on the bed. ‘We watch DVDs. I can’t read any more. And who can bear the news? This election they will win for leaving people to drown.’ He looked at Tom. ‘Tell me a poem.’

‘Yet might your glassy prison seem / A place where joy is known, / Where golden flash and silver gleam / Have meanings of their own.’

When Osman closed his eyes, the curve of the ball was prominent under the lid. Cancer had made him thin-skinned. His face was in the process of being replaced by a skull, an ancestor stepping forward to claim him. Yet his ability to bring ease into a room remained.

Afterwards, he said, ‘So many poems. How come you know so many old poems?’