'Thank you so much for coming,' she mutters, clutching at his elbow. 'I don't know . . . I didn't know what else to . . . I mean, I don't want to leave him . . . you know . . . on his own . . . I couldn't just go out and . . .'

Simmy nods and pats her back soothingly. 'Of course, of course. I'm more than happy to come. Whenever. I mean it.'

There is a high-pitched squeal from the sitting room. Elina brushes a tear roughly from her cheek. 'I've just got to-'

'Go ahead,' Simmy says.

Jonah is on his playmat on the sitting-room floor. He rolls on to his stomach, then back again. He raises his legs in the air and lets them fall sideways, then wriggles round on to his front. Then on to his back. The process repeats itself. He pants and grunts with concentration.

'Fascinating,' Simmy murmurs, as he watches him. 'The effort of it.'

'I know,' Elina says. 'He did it all day yesterday and all day today. He's this close,' she holds up her finger and thumb, 'to crawling. But not quite.'

'It's quite painful to watch,' Simmy says. 'You just want to help him.' He puts his head on one side. 'It's rather like the knight's move, isn't it? In chess. Sideways then up, sideways then up.' Then he slaps his hands together and looks at Elina. 'So, tell me, what's been going on?'

Elina sighs again. She sits down. Then she slides to the floor and comes to kneel next to Jonah. 'He won't get out of bed,' she says in a low voice. 'He won't speak, doesn't say anything at all. He won't eat. I can just about get him to drink, but only just. He's not asleep the whole time but he seems to be sleeping most of the day and most of the night as well. I don't know what to do, Sim.' She cannot look up at him so she picks up a toy of Jonah's, a rattle with a bell, and shakes it. 'I don't know whether to call a doctor or . . . or . . . but I don't know what I'd say.'

'Hmm. And have Felix and-Has Felix been in touch at all?'

'He's been round. He rings every day. Sometimes twice.'

'And Ted won't talk to him?'

Elina shakes her head. 'She came round too,' she whispers. 'That was when Ted . . .'

'Smashed the window?'

She nods, swallowing hard. 'It was awful, Sim. I thought he was going to that he would . . .'

Simmy shakes his head. 'Poor Little My,' he murmurs.

'No, not at all,' she returns. 'It's poor Ted.'

'Well, poor all of you, I suppose.'

Elina lifts Jonah on to her hip. 'We should go up,' she says.

As they climb the stairs, she turns to Simmy. 'I won't be away long,' she whispers. 'No more than an hour, I should think. I don't even know if I'm doing the right thing. But if it's going to help . . . you know . . .'

'Of course,' Simmy says. 'Even just the slightest possibility is worth it.' He fumbles in his pocket and hands her something. 'Listen, take this. Take my car.'

She sees Simmy's car keys lying in her hand. 'Sim, it's fine I can catch a cab.'

'No. It's parked outside.' He curls her fingers around the keys. 'Take it.'

She nods and slides them into her pocket. 'Thank you,' she says.

'Don't mention it.'

They arrive at the landing.

'Ted?' Elina says. She hesitates at the open door to their bedroom. A trapezoid of light lies on the carpet, a single blue sock at its centre, like an actor in a spotlight.

'Ted?' she says again.

He is lying in bed, the duvet draped over his body. He is curled up, facing the wall.

'Ted, Simmy's here.'

The hunched shape in the bed does not move.

'Did you hear me?' Elina says. 'Simmy's come to see you. Ted? How are you feeling?' She glances back at Simmy.

He steps forward. 'Ted,' he says, 'it's me. Listen, Elina's popping out so I've come to keep you company. I've got magazines, I've got newspapers, I've got snacks, I've even got a six-hundred-page novel about convicts up my sleeve, so we're not going to be bored.' He lowers his bulk into a chair. 'Shall we start with the convicts? Or would you prefer a little light reading on the state of the economy?' Without waiting for an answer, he opens the novel and begins to read aloud, in a sonorous, fake-Australian accent.

Elina waits a moment longer, then leans over Ted and kisses him. His eyes are closed and the stubble on his face feels sharp against her lips. ''Bye,' she whispers. 'Won't be long.'

The floor in the hall of the house in Myddleton Square is tiled with blue and white octagons. They spread from the door, from the mat, all the way past the stairs, a geometric expanse, a Cubist impression of light on water.

Several of the tiles near the bottom of the stairs are cracked, in a wavering line. This often makes Margot frown. She has talked about replacing them but has never got around to it. They were repaired, under the auspices of Gloria, in the late sixties, with glue and polish. But these fixings have since worked themselves loose and they rattle slightly if stepped on.

It was on them or at least near them that Innes was standing when he returned home from his internment in Germany and looked up the stairs to see a man in his father's dressing-gown. The man demanded, 'Who the hell are you?' and as Innes stood there on the loose, cracked tiles, he realised his marriage was over, that his life was about to take another unexpected turn.

It was Innes who damaged the tiles, although none of the current residents of the house know this. On a wet day in the late 1920s, a seven-year-old Innes stole a metal tray from the kitchen and carried it all the way up to the top of the stairs and proceeded to toboggan down, skidding over the carpet, from landing to landing, riding the swells and troughs of the stairs, until he arrived with a resounding crash in the hallway. The impact of the edge of the tray with the Victorian tiles caused a long, snaking crack; Innes hurtled forward to collide with the sharp corner of a coat rack. His screams brought Consuela running from the kitchen, brought his mother down from the drawing room above. There was a lot of blood on the tiles that day, red among the blue and white. He had to have two stitches in his forehead and there would be a small, vertical scar there for the rest of his life.

The octagonal tiles go past the cloakroom, in which Elina had her recent problems with Jonah, and end at the door to the basement. The steps here are twisting, narrow and dim one of the bulbs blew last week and Felix, in true Felix fashion, has not yet got around to replacing it or, indeed, even noticing it.

Down in the kitchen, a tap is dripping, beads of water falling into the porcelain sink with a quiet plic sound. Plic, it says, insistent, steady, plic. The noise is enough to distract the person in the room.

Gloria has been parked in her wheelchair at the patio doors. A carer from the council comes in every morning to get her up and give her breakfast; after this she wheels her here to 'get some sun'. Gloria sits with her head bent, her eyes directed towards the bright metal of her chair armrests. She sits in the place where her daughter stood with Theo on a morning a long time ago, watching Felix set alight a bonfire at the bottom of the garden. The carer brushed Gloria's hair this morning and her scalp still tingles with the sensation of the bristles, and the noise of the tap is confusing her, setting her thoughts off their tracks: she is thinking about a telegram arriving, the boy coming to the door and saying, a telegram for you, missis PLIC she is thinking about a teapot her mother gave her, beautiful it was, with gilt around its rim; the gilt wore off, of course, because the daily would insist on washing it with a scourer PLIC she is thinking about a day trip they took to Clacton, before he went off to war, the sky looking as though it threatened rain and he said, as he held her hand, what was it, a chiaroscuro sky, she'd had to look it up later- Gloria has been down here for a long time on her own. Not that she has much concept of time, these days. But where are the other inhabitants of the house today? The garden is empty. The swing seat sways to and fro vacantly. The surface of the pond holds a section of sky. The trees extend their branches stiffly and at their ends the leaves are crisp and curling.

A clock upstairs strikes midday; seconds later another answers it, at a higher pitch.

In the drawing room, Margot is sitting in a chair near the window. She doesn't know this but it is the chair Ferdinanda used to favour for doing her embroidery: a Georgian nursing chair, armless, with a low seat and dainty, fluted legs. It has since been re-covered, by Gloria, in a rather unbecoming tomato-red velvet. It sits, by chance, very close to the place Ferdinanda used to have it angled towards the window, towards the light.

Margot has been crying, on and off, all morning, in different locations about the house. She sits now, surrounded by a litter of tissues, her head leaning on her arm. She is still crying and has assumed the shuddering, swollen-faced aspect of someone worn out by grief.

Two floors above her, past the bedrooms, and up into the attic, is the noise of someone moving heavy boxes around, shifting furniture. Someone is conducting a search. A crash, a thud, the sound of someone swearing, a pause, then another thud.

Margot sobs, tweaks another tissue from the box, blows her nose, sobs again, then stops, drawing in a sharp breath. Felix is standing in the doorway. He is holding an ancient, dusty typewriter in his hands.

'Felix,' Margot says unsteadily, 'that's mine.'

'No, it's not.'

'It belonged to my father. Mother said so and-'

'It was Lexie's. I know it was.'

'Yes, but, you see-'

'What about everything else?' Felix says, in a voice so quiet she has to strain to hear him, and Margot knows that voice. It's the one he used to employ in interviews with particularly slippery politicians icily calm, insidiously polite. It's the voice that said to them, and the nation: I've got you and you're not going to get away. It's the voice that made him famous, all those years ago.

And now he's using it to her. Margot swallows, tears rising in her eyes again. 'What do you mean?' she says, trying to rally herself.

'You know what I mean,' he says, still in tones of Arctic courtesy. 'Lexie's stuff. Where is it?'

'What stuff?' she blusters, but she knows he's got her and she knows he knows.

'Her clothes, her books, her things from the flat. The letters Laurence wrote to Ted, before he died.' He lists these things with infinite patience. 'All the stuff I cleared out of her flat and put in the attic.'

Margot shrugs and shakes her head at the same time. She reaches for another tissue.

Felix puts down the typewriter. He advances towards her. 'Are you telling me,' he murmurs, 'that it's gone?'

Margot holds the tissue to her face. 'I . . . I don't know.'

'This is unbelievable,' he says, and his tone has moved up a notch or two in volume. She'd forgotten that this is where the voice goes next strident, domineering, in for the kill. 'Unbelievable. It's gone, hasn't it? You and your bitch of a mother got rid of it all. Behind my back.'

'Don't shout,' she whimpers, even though she knows he isn't shouting, that Felix never shouts, never needs to.

'Tell me,' he says, standing above her. 'Did you throw everything out?'

'Felix, I really-'

'Just give me a simple answer. Yes or no. Did you throw it out?'

'I will not be bullied like this-'

'Yes or no, Margot.'

'Please stop.'

'Come on. If you're brave enough to do it, you're brave enough to say it. Say, "Yes, I threw it out. All of it." '

There is silence in the room. Margot picks at the skin around her nails, discards a tissue on the floor.

Felix turns and walks to the window. 'You realise,' he says to the glass, 'that Elina is coming? That I asked her to come. I told her we had all Lexie's things up in the attic. That we'd give them to Ted and he could look through them. The least we could do, I said. You realise she's coming here to collect it and you,' he turns to her, 'have gone and thrown it out.'

Margot begins a fresh bout of sobbing. 'I'm sorry,' she wails, 'I didn't mean to . . . I . . .'

'You're sorry. You didn't mean to,' Felix repeats. 'I'll tell Ted that, shall I? Margot didn't mean to throw out all your dead mother's things but she did anyway. Dear God,' he spits, 'Elina will be here any minute. You'll have to tell her that all we've got is an old typewriter and some dusty paintings, and you can tell her why as well-'

Margot half rises from the chair. 'Those paintings are mine, Felix,' she begins. 'They were never Lexie's. They were mine all along. I took what belonged to me and-'

'Spare me your petty, avaricious-' Felix stops. The doorbell is ringing downstairs.

Felix opens the door to the street. Elina stands on the step. She is, as ever, dressed in an ensemble of extraordinary clothes: a long, loose cloth thing with hems that are ripped and fraying. Purple tights. Paint-stained sneakers on her feet. Jonah is in a sling on her front, like a small marsupial. He is awake, his eyes wide with astonishment, and when he sees Felix his face breaks into a delighted smile. Which is more than can be said for his mother.

'Elina,' Felix says, standing back to allow her to step inside, 'how are you, my darling?'

'I'm . . .' She shrugs, avoiding his eyes. 'You know.'

'Thank you so much for coming.'

She shrugs again. 'I don't have much time. I have to get back.'

Felix realises at this point that he usually greets Ted's girlfriend, the mother of his grandchild, with a kiss on the cheek. But it seems too late to give it now.

'Yes, of course.' Felix clenches and unclenches his hands. He finds it often helps him think. 'So, how is he?'

'Not good.'

'Still in bed, is he?'

'Yes.'

Felix swears, very softly, then says, 'Sorry.'

'It's OK.'

'Would you . . . would you give him a message for me?'

'Of course.'

'Tell him . . .' He hesitates. He is acutely aware of the presence of Margot, a floor above him, and that of Gloria, a floor below. 'Tell him I'm sorry,' he says. 'I'm truly sorry. For all of it. Tell him . . . tell him it wasn't my idea. And that I never agreed with it.' He sighs. 'They cooked it up between them and I . . . It sounds pathetic, I know. I should have made a stand at the time, but I didn't and I must take responsibility for that. It was a terrible, terrible mistake. And . . . and tell him I'd like to see him. Whenever he's ready. Tell him to call me. Please.'

She inclines her head. 'I will.'

Felix carries on. He finds he cannot stop speaking now that he has started. He finds himself saying things about Lexie, about how they met, about the night he picked up Theo in Lyme Regis, about how he got into an argument with Robert Lowe at the police station and a policeman had to come tell them to keep it down, to think of the boy, please, gents. At one point, he is clutching Elina's arm and telling her that he loved Lexie, like no one else, that he made mistakes, yes, but that she was the love of his life, does she hear him, does she understand? Elina listens with a kind of doubtful intensity. She looks down at the tiled floor of the hallway. She runs the toe of her sneaker, stained red with paint, over the cracks. And then Felix tells her that the things have gone. Been thrown out. That there's nothing. Nothing for Ted.

Elina looks straight at Felix, shaking her fringe out of her eyes. Then she says, 'Nothing?'

Jonah chooses this moment to start to yell. He struggles and shouts in his sling, arching his back, his face reddening. Elina jigs up and down. She makes soothing, clicking noises at him. She unstraps him from the sling and hoists him to her shoulder.

'There's a typewriter. And some pictures.'

Elina is rubbing her hand up and down Jonah's back. She is turned away from him, still jigging up and down in the way that women with babies have. Jonah's cries are subsiding. He looks at Felix over his mother's shoulder with an expression of injured outrage. Sorry, Felix wants to say, I'm sorry. He is filled with an urge to apologise to all of them, one by one.

'I can show you,' he says instead. 'Come up.'

He and Elina and Jonah go up the first flight of stairs. There on the landing sits the typewriter. It is clogged with dust, the ribbon dried and flimsy. Looking at it gives Felix a feeling close to vertigo. He realises he can replicate in his head the exact sound it used to make. The clac-clac-a-clac of the metal letters hitting the paper, the ribbon raising itself each time to make the impression. The machine-gun fire of it, when the work was going well. The stops and pauses when it wasn't, to allow for a sigh, a draw on a cigarette. The ding every time the carriage reached its limit. The whirr as the page was snatched out, then the rolling ratcheting as a new one was wound in.

He looks away from it. He clears his throat. 'And these are the pictures. I think I found all of them. There might be a couple more around but I can always-'

Elina astonishes him by handing him the baby.

'Oh,' Felix says. Jonah dangles there, hoisted by his armpits in Felix's hands. His feet circle each other, as if he's riding an imaginary bike. He looks at a point above Felix's hair, at Felix's ear, down at the ground; he tips back his head to check the ceiling.