Ellis stood at the doorway to Denny’s bedroom, with his body aching from aeroplane sleep, his gums tingling from the sugar of Cynthia’s goody-bag and his eyes deceiving him, surely, as to the extent of his father’s deterioration.

“Tell me about America.” The voice was too weak to belong to Denny.

“No, Dad. I shouldn’t have been there. Pretend I never went.”

When Chrissie found Ellis, he was staring into space.

“He looks awful,” he muttered.

“Yes!” she said, impatiently, as if it were Ellis’s fault. “I had to take him back for more tests.”

“What did they say.”

“We were in there all day!” This also appeared to be Ellis’s fault.

“What did the tests say?”

“We go back tomorrow to get the results. Hopefully you’ll start sharing the duties.”

Ellis walked away. She pursued him into the kitchen.

“We were having a conversation, Ellis!”

“It didn’t feel like it.”

“Well, we were,” she corrected him.

“Look,” Ellis said, “it’s not that I haven’t and won’t do all those things. It’s just that I’d never describe them as duties.”

She grabbed the kettle and filled it. Ellis saw that she was close to breaking down.

“He can’t be this bad,” he said helplessly. “The whole year can’t be like this.”

She turned on him. “Ellis! There is not going to be a year!”

Ellis stripped to the waist and felt the sun on his back. Occasionally, he stopped working and stood beneath the walnut trees, close enough to the rippling leaves for them to eclipse the sound of the motorway. At dusk he went inside and loitered in the kitchen.

“That smells nice.”

“Thank you. I think you’ll like it.”

“I always love your cooking.”

“Yeah, well it won’t be ready for a bit so get yourself a beer and go and sit with Dad.”

“Isn’t he asleep?”

“It doesn’t matter if he is.”

“I’ll lay the table first.”

Chrissie took hold of her brother’s hand.

“Ellis,” she said, being firm but not unkind, “you know full well we’re not going to eat at the table. We’ll do exactly what we always do if it’s just us, which is sit on our arses in front of the TV. There is no table to lay. You’ve cut the grass and you’ve weeded the beds that don’t belong to us, you’ve washed Dad’s car even though it isn’t going anywhere, you’ve unpacked the shopping for me, you’ve filled that horrible enamel tea-bag tin with tea bags. There is nothing left to do but go upstairs and take a good look at him. Ellis, I can just about live with the fact that you are so much closer to him than I am, but not if you’re going to screw it up at the last.”

Denny was sitting on the side of the bed taking deep breaths in preparation for the effort of coming downstairs. Ellis sat beside his father and their shoulders touched. For the first time in his life, Ellis was larger than his dad. They embraced and buried their heads against each other.

“We’ll have a few trips out …” Denny whispered.

When he had composed himself, he looked out across the houses. “If you’d move me into the spare room I’d be able to look at those walnut trees. You can use this room when you stay.”

Ellis smiled sympathetically. “Sod off. Your view’s rubbish.”

His dad laughed and it hurt him. His face grew rosy. They settled into silence. Denny abandoned his attempt to come downstairs and got back into bed. Ellis sat beside him.

“I want you to make sure you have a strong image of us together, one that won’t fade.”

“A photograph?” Ellis asked.

“Not a photograph. A memory … a moment … it’s important. They say that you can find yourself forgetting someone’s face or voice after they’ve gone …”

“That will not happen,” Ellis said firmly. “I’ve got hundreds of memories. Not all bad.”

Denny laughed again. “You want to be able to tell your children what a handsome devil I was.”

“I’d rather you told them.”

It was night-time and Ellis thought his dad was asleep but Denny’s feeble voice broke the silence.

“I’m sorry I hit you.”

“You’re sorry you what?”

“That birthday.”

“Oh, that …” Ellis shrugged it away.

“I’d redo that night if I could. I’d admit I was worried about Mafi. I’d give you a hug and tuck you in.”

Ellis said, “I’d watch you leave my room and then the door would open again and you’d creep back in and sit on the side of the bed and say to me, ‘Whilst we’re talking about things, Ellis, it’s also that at times like this I really miss your mum.’ You’d tell me all about her and I’d know that even though she went away she did love me.”

Denny reached out to his son and Ellis took his hand.

“She loved you so much,” Denny said.

Ellis woke in the far reaches of night-time, with the morning close by and the world still quiet. He straightened up in the chair, rubbed his aching neck and realised that his dad was watching him.

“I’m an idiot for not telling you. I was missing her and I was angry at her but that’s no excuse.”

“Yes, it is,” Ellis said. He drew closer. “Dad, I know what my image is. The New Year’s Day you and I went to the top of Catt’s Hill, to watch the sun come up over the Marsh on the first day of the year.”

Denny shut his eyes and joined his son on the hill.

“We sat on the field gate on the upper lane. The pasture was crunchy with frost and there was just enough light to see. There was a single bright star left in the sky and it hovered above Fairfield. You commented on it. As the sun rose, the wind stirred. Slowly, the fields became green and the sky was purple-grey and fast. We heard the sound of a shepherd whistling to his dog, coming from somewhere on Becket’s Farm. In the silence that followed it, we both listened at the same moment to the same single faint sound, as if the whole landscape had just heaved a sigh of contentment. A breath that had nowhere to have come from. The morning seemed like the past even as it was happening. It was as if we were walking through someone else’s memory.”

Ellis fell silent at his own words.

“As if,” he realised, “this was my lasting image already, even before I knew it, before I got there. It was waiting for me.”

Denny whispered, “Life is just a dream, soon we shall awaken.”

“Where’s that from?”

“Can’t remember. Find out and put it on my headstone.”

Denny changed bedrooms and had a view of the walnut trees. Ellis carried the tape deck, amp and speakers up to Denny’s room. Denny asked Ellis to put on the Four Last Songs and muttered unintelligibly along to the last of them. When the music ended Ellis asked him what he had been saying.

“Dass wir uns nicht verirren in dieser Einsamkeit,” Denny replied.

“What does that mean?”

“We must not go astray in this loneliness.”

“Is it German?”

“Yes.”

“You speak German?”

“My father urged me to learn, after the war. So that … his hope was that if people understood each other better, it would never happen again.”

Ellis didn’t try to hide his surprise. “I can’t believe you speak German! You never mentioned it.”

“It never came up.”

Denny smiled and beckoned. “Come closer, I’ll tell you what the song says.”

Ellis edged nearer. His dad’s voice was weak and he spoke slowly, drawing a new, hard-earned breath at the end of each line.

It was not a procession of visitors – they came a few hours apart – but it gave the impression of one. First, the GP, who told Ellis that his father was becoming more ill faster than he’d expected. Then, whilst Denny slept, and to Ellis’s surprise, Bridget appeared, closing the village shop on a weekday for the first time in thirty years.

It had never occurred to Ellis that the village would miss the O’Rourkes, only that they would miss the village. But not only was the village fearing for Denny and his children now, they always had been. As Bridget spoke, it became clear to Ellis that Denny had always been perceived as a widower and a lone parent, and Chrissie and Ellis as motherless children, whereas Ellis, however much he thought of his mum and dreamt of meeting her, did not define himself in terms of being without her. The yearning he felt for her was deep but not constant. As a child, it could usually be diluted by his dad’s affection or play-acting. Ellis liked being the son of a single father. It was distinctive and to be able to give all his love to one parent made that love so potent that he didn’t always wish that things had been different.

“I miss your father so much,” Bridget said.

Ellis made a note to himself: I must get out of the habit of presuming that women with enormous bosoms don’t have deep feelings.

He led her upstairs. She stood in the doorway and gazed at Denny O’Rourke as he slept, then nodded to herself, as if concluding what she had come to say.

After Bridget came Reardon. He sat at Denny’s bedside and read him short stories by Ronald Blythe. The sight of the Land Rover parked outside nudged Ellis with a nostalgia for the rides in the back he and Tim had taken and, suddenly, the prospect of photo shoots with pampered models and neurotic stylists and others perched on fold-up chairs in various poses of self-appreciation left him with a sickly taste.

Reardon’s face burned with sincerity. “Is there anything you want or need, Ellis?”

“Do you know what I did to Tim?”

“Yes, Ellis. I know.”

“Do you hate me?”

Reardon grabbed hold of him. It wasn’t an embrace, his fingers dug in too deeply for that.

“Oh, Ellis! Ellis!” His eyes were kind and fierce. “You were just a child! You still are! You come to me for anything, you hear? Anything at all. For as long as I’m alive, you turn to me. Do you hear me, Ellis O’Rourke?”

The district nurse installed oxygen cylinders at the bedside. She washed Denny and his face settled with contentment. Ellis wondered how often since his mother’s death his father had been held or caressed. Maybe never. Certainly not often enough. Denny needed the oxygen more and more. And he suffered fevers in which he was curled up in pain. The nurse left morphine tablets. The morphine made Denny talkative. He spoke of his father and characters in Ilford when he was a boy. He also sang, very softly. “I Dream of Jeannie” was his favourite. It made Ellis laugh. One morning, after a bad night, Denny sang “For Those In Peril On The Sea” again and again and became distressed. His temperature rose to 39 degrees and as Ellis struggled to cool him with iced drinking water and cool towels, it occurred to Ellis that there was now probably a number on the conversations remaining for them. Not a stellar number but an everyday one. Thirty-eight more conversations perhaps, or maybe only fifteen. Sixty at the most. Whatever the number, it was trickling away into a stream of morphine.

“Sweetie …” Denny muttered, as he strayed into unconsciousness. Then his eyes shot open and he smiled at Ellis. “No … you’re not sweetie, you’re my dear boy. Chrissie is sweetie and your mother is the love of my life.”

Ellis rang Chrissie and told her that their dad had said she was his sweetie and that he loved her dearly.

“Thank you for telling me. That’s lovely.” She was tired and had just arrived home from the airport.

“Where have you been?” Ellis asked.

“Frankfurt. Thank you for calling, Ellis, you are thoughtful.”

“Chrissie, I think it’s time for you to be here all the time.”

“I don’t need to be told that by you, Ellis. I already know that.”

“Then why aren’t you here?” he asked, quite innocently.

She told him that it was called “real life”.

Ellis felt low. He wondered if he and his sister would grow closer or drift apart after the end. He told himself he loved her but knew how little he enjoyed being with her now. He concluded, with regret, that, without Denny there, they would drift apart.

He watched a little TV that evening. Soon he was staring at the screen but watching nothing. A fear came to him, the idea that after his dad died Ellis would remain where he was, sitting in front of this television, in a house full of other people’s furniture, unable to switch off the set and leave. He unplugged the TV, pulled the aerial out of the socket and ripped the power cable out of the back of the set. He sat down again. Later, he heard Denny’s voice from the doorway. “Good night, dear boy. I’m going up now.” He knew before he turned to look that his dad wasn’t there, but he looked anyway and saw the old beamed stairwell of the cottage and heard the creak of the cottage floorboards as his dad went up to bed. He stared at the blacked-out television screen and began to cry. He said Tammy’s name and immediately hid his face in embarrassment. He went outside and crouched down beneath one of the walnut trees in a half-hearted attempt at kneeling. And he was tentative, because he had never prayed.

“God … cure him. Make him completely well again. You can do this if you choose to. Make my dad completely well again now. I believe you can do this. I know I’m lucky and have a lot but I am only twenty years old and I do not want to live without him. That’s what I’m asking for. Please.”

Denny spoke to his wife a great deal the next day. He told her about Chrissie and Ellis in outpourings of soft, breathy pride. Occasionally, he’d stop and catch sight of Ellis as if his son had only just appeared in the room.

“Your mother was the butterfly-lady …” he’d say, and drift away again.

In the late afternoon, the delirium had passed and Denny was lucid and it was hard to believe he was so unwell.

“When I was your age, I was fearless. Your mum stole that from me when she disappeared. I don’t want to have taken it from you. Be fearless …”

“OK, I’ll try.”

“She was always awake when I woke in the morning … her green eyes looking at me. ‘What’s the capital of such and such a country?’ she’d ask. If I knew the answer she made the tea. If I didn’t know, I had to get out of bed and make the tea. If she really wanted to stay in bed, she made up a country that didn’t exist …”

Ellis listened and before him appeared a boy who played in Valentine’s Park in Ilford, an adolescent who went to war, a young man who saw a woman in a field of butterflies and loved her. From time to time, Denny’s eyes met his son’s and they looked at each other without embarrassment. Once, after morphine, Denny squeezed Ellis’s hand tight and said, “I’ve known you since I was your age.”

A parcel arrived from Gerd. In it, Ellis found a cheque for his full pay, a batch of film stock and a photograph of the Hoover in the Days Inn in Cincinnati. The Hoover stood at the end of the claustrophobic green corridor like a schoolchild outside a headmaster’s office. Ellis tried to reconcile the banality of what he had seen there with the haunting image Gerd had produced, in which every lonely, lost soul inside every motel room in America had been evoked. He pinned the beautiful photograph to his wall. Ellis put Chrissie’s suitcase in his room, changed the sheets and made up the sofa bed downstairs for himself. He offered to cook supper but Chrissie said she wanted to. Whilst she sat with her father, Ellis drank half a bottle of wine beneath the wide, low spread of the walnut trees. He imagined living by the sea with Tammy in their tiny attic flat, with lots of nooks and crannies. Later, he sat with his dad whilst Chrissie cooked. Denny turned his wedding ring on his finger and said, “You’ll wear this, won’t you?” Ellis nodded, then he lay on the bed beside his father.

“She loved you,” Denny whispered. “She thought you were perfect.”

Ellis stroked his dad’s arm. “Don’t let on, when you see her.”

Then Denny cupped his hands round Ellis’s face and Ellis did the same to Denny in response, as if they were peering through a window at each other.

“You’re perfect to me, Ellie-boy …”

“You’re perfect, Daddy.”

Chrissie and Ellis watched from the doorway as the nurse hooked up a morphine drip that would be operated by Denny’s hand squeezing it when he felt pain. Feeling a directionless but urgent anger, Ellis marched away and rang Jed.

“Unlike vets, doctors in this country aren’t allowed to put their patients to sleep so they’ve devised a way for the dying person to do it themselves. Maybe it’s for the best because I’d probably kill the doctor who put my dad to sleep, although that’s really what they’re doing anyway …”

Jed listened and didn’t try to make Ellis feel better, and for that Ellis was grateful.

Chrissie dabbed glycerine water on to Denny’s lips with a cotton bud. Sometimes, she and Ellis stopped breathing because they were listening so intently to their father’s life. Outwardly peaceful, Ellis’s mind raged, even now. Why can’t we just keep him alive, prop him up and piece him together so that he stays here with us? Why can we not do that? I could take care of him.

Chrissie fell asleep in a chair in the corner of the bedroom and Ellis saw the soft edges return to her face.

“You need to go to bed,” he said as he woke her.

She looked nervously at her dad.

Ellis said, “We’ve got to accept that it doesn’t matter, it mustn’t matter, if he goes when one of us isn’t in here.”

“I agree,” she said.

Ellis watched his sister kiss her father goodnight and decided that if his dad were to die with him there and Chrissie absent then he would lie and pretend he had been out of the room or asleep. In the few moments in which she lay on her bed before sleep engulfed her, Chrissie resolved to do the same.

Denny opened his eyes. A child’s eyes, curious, trusting, a little frightened. He squeezed Ellis’s hand and his eyes closed again, very slowly. Ellis held Denny, gently, to camouflage the truth that he was trying to cling on to his father’s life, the same way he held on to special objects and stray dogs in his dreams in the hope of bringing them back with him to the other side of sleep.

“When old or sickly spiders leave home,” Ellis whispered, “they draw a strand of silk out and wait for the silk to catch on the wind. When it catches, the spider is lifted into the air like a balloon on a gossamer line and set free. Charles Darwin found spiders caught in the sails of HMS Beagle hundreds of miles from land where the waves are huge and silent. It is your ship now rising out of the deep swell and you can see land ahead where none is charted. You are gliding gracefully towards the land and when you step ashore you know that Mum will be waiting for you and you will never feel pain or loneliness ever again.”

Eyes closed for ever, his breathing almost done, Denny smiled.

Chrissie woke Ellis at five o’clock and for a few moments he listened for the dawn chorus in the village and yearned for the air that rose from the fields there and moved through the cottage. He pulled on his clothes, washed his face and went to his father’s bedside. Chrissie had made a pot of tea with Mafi’s rarely used china and that way, she felt, invited her great-aunt to join them.

There was no talking but as they drank their tea they found themselves sipping and swallowing in harmony. They allowed this to continue for a little while and laughed gently at it.

At seven o’clock, Chrissie said some prayers. Ellis bowed his head and hid his face. Chrissie lay alongside her father a while on the bed. Later, Ellis found himself kneeling beside the bed. Chrissie did the same, opposite him. Ellis rubbed his father’s lips with the glycerine water. Denny gently pushed his tongue forward three or four times and Ellis painted the water gently on to his tongue. Denny’s eyes were closed all the time. His breathing became slower and very calm. Ellis rubbed the water on to his lips again. He put the buds down and he and his sister stroked the soft skin on Denny’s forearms. Then, Denny’s eyes moved beneath his eyelids and he gently expelled the air from his lungs. A serenity fell upon him and the ashenness lifted from his complexion and disappeared, and a breeze swept through the walnut trees.