Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

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.

Larry said: ‘It’s eight o’clock in the morning for me. Is there a drink in the house?’

‘Maybe some sherry,’ said Alec. ‘Look in the cupboard under the TV.’

In the cupboard there was a lone bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, two-thirds full, a fine patina of dust on the bottle’s shoulders. ‘What happened to Dad’s clocks?’ he asked. His watch had just bleeped the hour.

‘They need winding,’ said Alec. ‘I’ve been busy.’

‘I can testify to that,’ said Osbourne.

‘Well, she’ll be here soon,’ said Larry. He poured the sherry into a tumbler. Osbourne thought he wouldn’t just yet. Larry knew there was no point in asking Alec.

‘I used to know a card trick,’ said the reverend. ‘All the queens came out on top.’

‘Hey, we could have a magic show on Granny’s birthday,’ said Larry. ‘What do you think, El?’

‘Balloons,’ she said, watching Alec’s hands like a cat.

‘Quite right,’ said Osbourne. ‘Can’t have a party without balloons.’

Alec was shuffling the order of the cups. There was a certain amount of patter involved. Larry stepped up to the table. ‘She’ll get it this time,’ he said.

The cups were lined up in their final positions. Ella immediately tapped the left-hand cup. Alec lifted it.

‘Clever girl,’ said Osbourne. ‘Clever girl.’

Before the trick could begin again, they heard a car on the gravel of the drive. They froze for a moment, then filed from the room and came out of the front door just as Una was switching off the engine. Though the rain was very light, Alec had taken the big golf umbrella from the hall and was holding it over Larry and Ella’s heads. The reverend stood at the back, still holding the peonies. Una got out of the car. Larry let go of Ella’s hand and went around to the passenger door. He opened it and reached down for Alice, and though the moment before she had seemed almost inert, an elderly lady lost in the midst of some sad reverie, she was suddenly animated, gripping his arms and hauling herself from the seat. ‘Oh, Larry,’ she moaned, ‘oh, my Larry…’

She clung to him, the material of his shirt bunched in her fists, and he held her, eyes closed, whispering to her, crooning to her like a sweetheart, while the others, awed by so much undisguised need, looked on, not daring to disturb them. After a minute, Ella edged towards her father and threaded a finger through a belt loop on his trousers. Larry freed one of his hands and pressed the child against his thigh. Osbourne whispered something canonical. Una smiled at Alec, her mouth unsteady. To Alec the scene was the most profoundly embarrassing he thought he had ever witnessed, and he stared fixedly at the gravel, afraid he would make some shocking noise, a bark of grief.

‘Can we go in now?’ he asked. But nobody moved, and it seemed they would be there for ever, stupefied by emotion.

On the following day, like a failing queen surrounded by her courtiers, Alice Valentine lay in her old bed at Brooklands and explained to them all what she required of them, and how, in these, her last days, they were to conduct themselves. Despite the labour of it, the poverty of air in her lungs, she spoke at length, though among her medicines now there were new drugs that threw longer, deeper shadows, so that she strayed from the light into the dark with a suddenness that meant she could not always be sure she was making any sense. Even so, it was surprising to her that the only one who appeared to understand her was Alec.