Thomas stepped down into the dark, feeling his way with his toes, Ella keeping tight behind him.

“Tom! Tom! Put the light on,” she said, excited and frightened and annoying.

But the string for the light was at the bottom of the stairs. He slid his hand along the bare plaster wall, his fingertips sensing the tiny smears of perspiration rising up from the soil foundations behind it.

He tugged the string.

The bright light blinked twice, searing snapshots of three bright white coffins onto Thomas’s retinas before it came on. Ella was being another character, another girl she’d seen in a film or a ballet. She gasped at the freezers, stepped around in front of him, still holding his shoulder as if for protection. This character touched him incessantly, not in a wrong way, just a clingy way, as if she was en pointe and needed him for balance. He suffered it because her moods were sliding about all over the place and he didn’t want to upset her.

“What is there?” Moira was looking down from the top of the stairs, pointing to the chest freezer with the ready-made meals in it.

Ella opened the lid and fell back a step at the sight of all the food. She ran her hand along it, frost crackling at her fingertips. “What is everything?” She smiled back at Thomas for an answer.

“Everything is food,” he said flatly. “Moira, what would you like?”

“Is there any mushroom pappardelle?”

He looked along the top layer. All the lids were neatly labeled. No mushroom pappardelle. He raised the basket shelf to look below. Five portions marked “mushroom pappardelle” were sitting in a row.

“Yeah.” He leaned into the deep body of the freezer and brought three containers out. “Got some.”

Ella lurched forward, snatched them out of his hand and ran upstairs giggling as if she’d done something terribly funny and daring. She skipped past Moira, laughing into her face as if she was in on the joke, and disappeared from view.

Moira smiled passively. As she turned to go after Ella into the kitchen the grin dropped and her eyes fell sadly, as if she’d been smiling along to bollocks like that for a long time.

Thomas shut the freezer, pulled the light string and stepped carefully up the steps to the kitchen where Moira and Ella were standing on opposite sides of the black granite island. Ella saw him emerge and squealed, jumping back as if he’d caught her.

“I’m not chasing you, Ella,” he said carefully.

Ella waited for a moment, looked out of the big window, and then laughed as if he’d said something terribly witty. Moira smiled automatically, like the light in the cloakroom.

Thomas turned on his sister. “What’s so fucking funny, Ella?”

She stopped laughing, cocking her head.

“What’s funny?” He walked across the room and stood in front of her. He was very close to her but she just looked straight over his shoulder.

Thomas lost his temper, poked Ella in the shoulder, harder than he meant to. Afraid of the heat rising up the back of his neck he stepped away and glared at the frozen food on the counter.

“Food? Is the food funny?” He picked up a portion and threw it, missing her, the tub landing heavily and skidding across the floor.

Ella didn’t move but she’d stopped smiling.

“Am I funny?” he shouted.

In the silence of the kitchen his voice reverberated off the granite worktops. Ella’s fingers were shaking.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, you mental cow?”

“Tom, stop picking on her,” said Moira, silky voiced. “Let’s defrost these in the microwave and have supper.”

A high-pitched alarm trilled gently.

“What’s that?” asked Ella.

Thomas stepped over to the freezer room and looked back down the stairs in case he’d left the freezer door open. “No.”

“Car alarm?” suggested Moira.

Ella pointed at a red light on the wall, blinking in time to the intermittent noise.

“House phone,” she said triumphantly.

Thomas reached for it. “See? And you’re back in the fucking room, Ella.”

“Tom,” said Moira, “if it’s a journalist hang up at once.”

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice. She sounded angry. “Yeah, hi. Who am I speaking to?”

“Thomas.”

“Yeah. Would it be possible to speak with a member of the Anderson family?”

Moira’s eyebrows rose in a question.

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

“I’m Lars Anderson’s other wife.”

“Hang on.” Thomas dropped the phone to his belly.

“Who is it?” Moira was coming over to him, hand out to take it.

He faked a weak smile. “It’s only Donny McD from school pretending to be a fucking journalist. I’ll take it in the front room.”

“Oh.” She seemed to know it wasn’t, but she retracted her hand and backed off. “Stop swearing, it’s common.”

“Yeah.” He nodded Moira over to the food as he walked out to the hall.

“Hang on,” he told the receiver and went into the living room. His hand hovered over the light switch but he left it off and stood in the dark to speak. “Hello?”

“Who is this?” demanded the woman. “Who are you?”

“I’m Thomas Anderson, Lars Anderson’s son. Who are you?”

“I see, I see, I see.” She sounded very much in charge. Thomas felt a bit intimidated.

“My father told me about you.”

“Did he?” She softened. “Did he tell you I have a son your age?”

“He said. Phils, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Phils. Phils…”

“Dad told me about him.”

She sniffed at the mention of Lars, mumbling something about him being gone as Thomas wandered across the room to the window. It was dark and had been raining. The lawn was as sleek as a badger’s pelt. He shouldn’t be intimidated. He should try to sound normal. “Sorry, what’s your name?”

“Theresa.” It was a low name, Irish, but she made it sound Spanish by putting the emphasis on the first syllable and rolling the r—Theresa.

“What’s your second name?”

“Theresa Rodder.”

It wasn’t a posh name, but she certainly sounded posh. He could see the drop of her jaw as she drawled her surname.

“Theresa,” he said, mimicking her affected tone respectfully, “might I come and visit you?”

A pause. He thought she was horrified by the prospect until he heard the bottle chink against the glass and the trickle of wine or whatever it was. “Yes, Thomas, I should like that.”

Thomas stood with his cheek pressed to the cold windowpane. “Shall I come tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Will Phils be there?”

“No, he’ll be at school.”

“Oh, I see. What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Betsy.”

“So, Theresa, what’s your address?”

She gave it to him. He didn’t recognize it but mouthed it over and over to himself in the dark: 8 Tregunter Road, SW10. She hung up without making a specific time.

Thomas walked through the hall, sweating lightly as he tried to remember the name of the street, clutching the phone to his chest. He hurried into Lars’s office. It wasn’t his actual office, just a big room with a massive bookcase installed, even though he never read anything. The desk was matching yellow glossy wood with spots, poplar burr. Thomas went to the desk and looked in the top drawer for a pen, jotting the name of the street down on one of Lars’s embossed memo cards. Then he called 1471 and got the phone number, in case he got lost on the way.

As he wrote he glanced back to the drawer and saw a black sheen. Thomas reached into the dark drawer. Soft, warm skin. Lars’s wallet. Lars always had his wallet with him. Thomas imagined him standing exactly where he was standing now, his feet where his feet were now. He imagined his father reaching into his pocket, pulling the wallet out and tucking it away, his very final gesture before hanging himself.

Thomas pulled the wallet out and flipped it open. It was crammed with big notes and credit cards, the leather worn smooth from being in his father’s back pocket, rubbing against his left buttock. Thomas shut it slowly and slipped it into his left-hand back pocket, just to try it. It felt heavy, tugged at his trousers, but the weight of it was comforting, felt like a morsel of Lars’s certainty. Very suddenly, Thomas missed that.

The light snapped on above him. Moira was standing in the doorway.

“What are you doing in Daddy’s desk?”

Casually Thomas folded the memo card and put it in his pocket. “Lost Donny’s number, just jotting it down. I said I’d meet him in town tomorrow.”

Moira folded her arms and looked skeptical. “Why isn’t Donny at school?”

“He was sent home before me. Stepdad’s got cancer.”

She knew it was a lie and narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think it was Donny at all. Why haven’t I heard his stepfather’s ill?”

Thomas cleared his throat unconvincingly. “They’re keeping it quiet. Worried about stock prices or something.”

Moira considered it and then said, “I don’t believe you. That’s a wicked lie to tell, Thomas—cancer.”

Thomas shrugged and came around the desk.

As he pushed past her at the door she was smiling and sang after him, “I think someone’s got a girlfriend.”