Thomas felt like an aberration in this grand, pristine room. Two enormous white sofas were facing each other and between them a white table with white things on it and the walls were white and the curtains. Opposite, facing him, Moira had her arms crossed, her skinny legs coiled around one another, her lips thin and twisted. She was sitting very still, staring at him. She stared for a long time before she spoke.

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know about it and then I never want to speak about him again.”

Thomas had expected a talk about Jamie. He had prepared some excuses, was going to blame Mary or grief, and was thrown by her opening gambit. “Oh.”

She ground her teeth. “Ask me.”

He didn’t want to know, hadn’t wondered about many of the details. It was the consequences he was worried about but he said, “What did Dad do wrong?” Moira rolled her eyes.

“You said ask anything.”

“I did, I did.” She took a breath. “He invested other people’s money and they lost it all.”

“After the market crashed?”

“No.” She sighed. “Everyone was very angry because the investments he was selling sort of caused the crash.”

“How?”

“This is very complicated, Thomas, I meant you could ask me about your father’s suicide, not about this—”

“I want to know this, I’m reading about it in the papers all the time and I need to know what he did. Then I’ll ask about the other stuff.”

She cleared her throat: “Lots of people stopped paying their mortgages and the investments failed.”

“Why did they stop paying?”

“Because they’re silly. And now everyone’s angry because Daddy’s company bet against them paying.”

He looked at her. Lies for a child. “The mortgage rates shot up after two years,” he said. “He knew that and bet the houses would be repossessed. Don’t you understand it or do you think I won’t?”

“Well, it’s terribly complicated.”

It was fitting that his father owned an empire of empty homes. Thomas recalled walking around the National Gallery, stopping in front of Monet’s Water Lilies: a huge, fluid wall of beauty filling his vision, and his dad behind him, telling him the monetary value. Even aged nine Thomas knew his father was missing the point.

“Do you have any questions about your father’s death is what I meant.”

Thomas thought he should ask something. “Where did he do it?”

“On the lawn.” She gave a bitter little smile, acknowledging the significance. “From the oak. Used a rope.”

“When?”

“Yesterday at lunchtime, about twelve thirty.”

She stared hard at him again. Conscious that they weren’t talking about Jamie, Thomas thought he should ask another, bigger question:

“Why?”

Moira uncrossed her arms and took a deep breath. “He left a note. Want to read it?”

Thomas shrugged, though he did want to read it very much. She reached into the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a folded sheet of paper, holding it out to him by her index and middle finger.

Thomas took the sheet and opened it. It was a photocopy.

“He left you a photocopy?”

“No. The police did that before they left. They had to take the original with them.”

Thomas read his father’s big bombastic handwriting:

Thomas looked at Moira, sitting placidly on the opposite sofa, watching the paper as he read it. It was Lars all right. It was him angry and a little bit drunk, alternately shouting and hissing at her. They could both hear his fighting voice coming off the page.

“Are you sure you want me to read this?”

She shrugged, rolling her eyes back for a languorous blink. “The police have it, they’ll read it, someone will leak it. Everyone in the country will know.” Her eyes reddened. Thomas read on:

Thomas looked at the back of the page and found it blank, and then at his mother. She was weeping.

“I didn’t even get a mention,” he said, and let it fall onto the table.

They both looked at the letter, at the giant hateful letters and sloping lines, at the fury that had made the pen puncture the page at the full stops.

Thomas started laughing first, a titter, covering his face, and then Moira joined in, laughing and crying, pointing at the note, trying to speak through sputtering tears:

“Would you…would…would you want one!”

They were rocking with laughter now, struggling for breath and Thomas stood and screwed his face up and jabbed his finger at her and shouted, “Yaaaw dried up CUNT!”

And Moira fell face down into a cushion with mock shame, still laughing and crying because he did a good Lars. Then Thomas puffed his chest out and looked down at her as if he was disgusted and, still laughing, used one of his father’s lines:

“Get out of my fucking sight or I’ll pick you up and throw you out of that fucking window!”

But Moira had started coughing, choking on her laughter because it had gone too far down and she was red in the face, but still she couldn’t stop laughing and she stood up and pointed in Thomas’s face:

“You fucking loser prick, I’ll teach you to be a man,” and she faked a wide-armed slap because it was too complicated to mime taking him to a brothel in Amsterdam.

Thomas stopped laughing at that memory but he wasn’t sad. They were both panting and smiling. He sat back down, falling onto the sofa, looking at the door to the hall.

“He’s not coming back,” said Thomas simply.

Moira opened her eyes wide, incredulous at their good fortune. “I know.” She sat back on her own sofa and combed her hair with her fingers, wiggling them through the crunchy hairspray. She looked young and excited and her chest heaved.

“I watched them cut him down.” She stared out of the window to where the oak was. “His…They cut the rope and held him by the legs and put him on…a bed thing.”

“A stretcher?”

“A stretcher, yes, and his hand fell off it—and I jumped!” She mimed a little bunny-hop jump and laughed again, at herself this time.

Thomas didn’t laugh. “He’s not coming back,” he said again, serious, staring at his hands. He looked up suddenly, realized that the house was very quiet. “Where’s Ella?”

Moira’s eyes brimmed again, not happy at all, panicked, her head bobbed forwards, and Thomas suddenly knew that Ella was dead and his dad had fucked and killed her and stamped on her nose and left her in her room with her gash on show. He stood up as Moira covered her face and spoke.

“At school, still, Thomas—”

But Thomas’s heart was racing and he couldn’t bend his legs to sit back down. She looked at him with big wet eyes.

“Thomas, I wanted to see you first because—” and she broke off to sob into her hands again, her fingers curling into her hair. He could see the blood drain from her nails as she dug them into her scalp. When she took her hands away he could see bloody dashes in the parted, unmoving hair.

“Thomas. I know that sorry isn’t enough, I know it isn’t, but I was standing with that note in my hand and watching them cut him down and all I could think of was you and how you—”

Again the nails in the head, the shoulders convulsing, silent, like a cat bringing up a hair ball.

She sat like that for quite a long time. When she looked up her face was scarlet and wet, the wet from her nose running all over her mouth until she wiped it with a bare hand. Her hair was standing on end. She couldn’t look at him.

“I have always known, Thomas, that I should have protected you and didn’t. And I wanted…” an aftershock shook her chest, “to apologize.” She found her rhythm and caught her breath. “I’m sorry. And I know that isn’t enough but I’ll do anything…”

Thomas felt nothing. The most vivid emotion he felt was mild surprise at her letting him see her cry, at the mess of her hair. She never came downstairs without her make-up and a full set of matchy-matchy clothes on. He wondered if she was drunk but she wasn’t.

She looked up at him, a straight stare, not chin dipped down, supplicant and looking for favors. Not mouth twisted and annoyed or reprimanding.

Moira looked at him as an adult would another adult, with respect and with love and with honesty and she said, “I love you, you know.”