The week was slow and empty. Ellis noted with wry admiration his dad’s ability to navigate clear of the word ‘tumour’ throughout it. When the time finally came, he drove Denny to the hospital. Chrissie couldn’t. She had what she called “wall-to-wall meetings” all day.

Father and son were synchronised bravado. They wore identical smiles and the unruffled body language of the Invincibles and they ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ at the same houses in Country Life magazine. But, in Denny’s room, where hotel luxuries and medical equipment made a strange marriage, Ellis felt things change when Denny asked at what time the next day his son should collect him. The consultant looked amused, initially, then appalled.

“Are you aware of the scale of this procedure, Mr O’Rourke?”

Ellis watched the warm, confident smile evaporate from his father’s face and realised that Denny had not begun to grasp the enormity of the impending assault on his body.

“This is surgery many people make a full recovery from but you are having a significant portion of your bowel removed this evening. It is major surgery. You are not going to be going home tomorrow. You are not going to be going home the morning after that, not for a couple of weeks.”

“Why ever not?” Denny was stunned.

The consultant spelt it out. “Because you will be in a great deal of discomfort.”

Ellis was shocked less by the seriousness of their outing than by the discovery that his dad didn’t keep the unpalatable truths of life at arm’s length just from his children but from himself also.

“Do you want me to take you through any other details?” the consultant asked.

“No thanks,” Ellis said. “Send in someone funnier.”

Chrissie seemed more indignant than upset that evening.

“All of a sudden we’re talking about a tumour. You told me it was just a lump and they’d whip it out.”

Denny placated her. “Well, it is a lump … and, chances are, whipping it out will do the trick.”

“Chances! I want to know for sure!”

“Yes, dear girl, me too.”

“Think of it like this,” Ellis began, making his sister squirm at the prospect of taking his counsel. “It’s great that the GP noticed this lump and it’s great that Dad kept up his health insurance from work and it’s great that Dad’s in here so quickly and by tomorrow it will have been cut out. I mean, that’s what happens, this is the reality of people finding out they’ve got stomach cancer and having it successfully removed.”

“Don’t say cancer, Ellis,” Chrissie said.

“Thank God it’s in my stomach,” Denny said, “where there’s loads to spare and they can just cut it all out. If this was on my lungs or liver …”

“You’d be fucked!” Ellis said, trying to lighten things up.

Chrissie smiled, despite herself.

“OK,” she retreated, “but don’t use the word cancer.”

They sat awkwardly and quietly, mulling this over.

“Isn’t that going to be quite difficult?” Denny asked.

“What?” Chrissie said.

“Not using the word cancer.”

“We’ve got to be able to talk about it,” Ellis said.

“OK,” Chrissie said, “but why don’t we choose a different word for the c-a-n-c-e-r? We could say TB.”

Denny was confused. “TB? As in tuberculosis?”

“Yes. It’s quick, medical and easy to remember.”

The room went quiet.

“I thought,” Denny said diplomatically, “the idea would be to replace c-a-n-c-e-r with something a little lighter.”

“Indeed,” Ellis agreed.

“Oh,” Chrissie said, confused. “OK, if you like. For me though, anything other than c-a-n-c-e-r is an improvement. That’s why I went for something catchy but still relevant.”

“How is TB relevant?” Ellis asked.

“’Cos you ‘get it’ and Dad’s also ‘got’ something.”

These days, Ellis and Denny found it difficult to know when Chrissie was being ironic and when she was being earnest.

“How about …” Ellis said, gazing at the ceiling.

All three of them thought hard.

“The disease,” Chrissie suggested.

“Again,” her dad said, “a bit dark.”

“You mind cancer but you don’t mind ‘disease’?” Ellis asked.

“Don’t say cancer, Ellis. The ‘thing’?”

“Too vague,” Denny said. “We’ll come a cropper the first time we are having a conversation about the c-a-n-c-e-r and also happen to mention a thing. All of a sudden, we’ll have two ‘things’ in the conversation and we won’t know what we’re talking about.”

“We just call it your condition,” Ellis suggested.

“No, sounds like I’ve got a rash.”

“We could name it …” Chrissie said. “Geoff or Scottie or something.”

“Girls have to name everything!” Ellis protested. “You give your cars names for God’s sake!”

Denny climbed out of bed and took a seat in the high-backed armchair by the window.

“We’ll call it my headache,” he said. “Today, I’ve got a headache and tomorrow, my headache will be gone.”

Denny was pleased with this and Chrissie seemed to like it, too. They settled into a comfortable quiet. But Ellis, seeing that there was still an hour to kill before surgery, decided he wasn’t finished.

“But what if tomorrow you really do have a headache, which is quite possible considering what you’ll have been through?”

“I think I’m getting one now,” Denny sighed.

Chrissie despaired. “Oh, call it sodding cancer then, I don’t care.”

“Cancer it is!” Denny said.

“When all is said and done, cancer has that ring of accuracy to it,” Ellis said.

“I’m actually growing to like it,” Chrissie agreed.

Denny sighed contentedly and looked out of the window.

“You’re a pair of idiots,” he muttered.

Ellis and his sister watched the steam rise off their plates of food until the steam had gone. Ellis scraped the food into the bin. The phone rang at ten minutes to nine. Chrissie darted to it ruthlessly. Ellis felt his heartbeat quicken and the blood and enzymes and chemicals pumping out of control. Chrissie slammed the phone down and grabbed Ellis into an embrace.

“It’s gone very well,” she told him.

It was late and the hospital was quiet, like a hotel on the moon, and the corridors seemed to smell of Fry’s Peppermint Cream. Chrissie hurried ahead and was already at Denny’s bedside when Ellis walked in. She felt her father’s forehead and glanced up at her brother in the doorway.

“He’s sleeping,” she smiled, a tear rolling down her cheek.

Ellis smiled stiffly at her, resisted the urge to say “No shit” and ushered himself and his anger out of the room. He sat in the corridor on a soft chair, leaning over a coffee table. He stared at a column of magazines which were fanned out to reveal the titles. He rocked a little, back and forth, held his fingers across his lips and breathed heavily through his nose. All of these mannerisms belonged to his father, as if Denny had lent them to Ellis whilst he hadn’t the energy to be himself in such detail. Ellis looked through the open door of his dad’s room at the high-backed chair Denny had sat in earlier. He hummed to himself to contain the anger he felt at someone reducing his father to what he had just seen lying in the bed. Once, when he was thirteen, on a Saturday afternoon in winter, Ellis had taken a cup of a tea to his dad after they had been working in the garden. He found him sound asleep on his bed, his hands clasped together behind his head and his mouth open. He looked helpless. Lifeless. Ellis had wondered then if this was how his dad would look when he died. It was how he looked now.

He returned to the room, pulled a chair up to the bed and stroked his dad’s left forearm. It was unchanged, still powerful and cobra-wide at its most muscular point. It was the rest of him that had been lessened. He could feel his dad’s pulse and it dawned on him that he understood perfectly the task ahead. The body that he could feel functioning beneath the pressure of his fingers was the vessel his dad had been given to live in. They simply needed to protect, service, and correct this vessel and his dad would always be with them. It was uncomplicated. It was achievable. They had cut out the bad bit. They could always cut out other bad bits if necessary. It wasn’t really his dad that was ill, it was just his body. And it was only his body that looked different for now. He was inside this lifeless shell, lying dormant whilst they repaired him. Tomorrow, he’d come back to them. Tomorrow, he’d be waiting for them when they arrived. Tomorrow, he’d come out to play. Ellis looked at his sister.

“You’re right.” He smiled, feeling great love for her. “He’s just sleeping.”

The phone rang at seven the next morning. Ellis heard it in his sleep, ignored it, then remembered everything and leapt out of bed. He threw himself downstairs in panic but Chrissie beat him to the phone.

“Who is it?” she demanded. Then her face softened. “Oh! Hi,” she chirped. “You are thoughtful to call, Ree.” She put her hand over the mouthpiece and assured Ellis it wasn’t the hospital.

“For fuck’s sake!” Ellis hissed. He stormed into the kitchen.

“I’m going to call you back, Ree.” Chrissie hung up and found Ellis filling the kettle. She waited for him to be empty-handed, then wrapped her arms around him.

“I’m sorry, Ellie. That was a horrible start to the day for you.”

He freed his arms and then wrapped them around her. He could no longer remember what it had been like to be smaller than her.

“Who the hell is Ree?” he murmured.

“Henry. He’s a banker.”

“Daft time of day to use the telephone.”

“He’s got a penthouse overlooking the Thames.”

This sounded instantly ludicrous to both of them.

“Relevance?” Ellis asked.

Chrissie shook her head. “Don’t know why I said it.”

“Does Milek like Henry’s penthouse?” he asked.

“They’ve not met.”

“You don’t say.”

Denny O’Rourke stirred. His face creased up and his eyes flickered open.

“Pain …” he groaned.

“I know,” Chrissie whispered.

They watched the waves of agony cross their father’s face. They held his hand, avoiding the tubes that ran into his nose, hand and stomach. Chrissie found a payphone in reception and settled down to make work calls. The day passed in silence and was beautiful. In the late afternoon, Denny’s eyes opened again. He grimaced, looked at the ceiling and squeezed his son’s hand. Ellis sat up. He blinked his eyes affectionately. Denny smiled back meekly and drifted back to sleep. He stirred again later as Ellis left the room.

“I’m just popping out for a cigarette, Dad,” Ellis said. He stood over Denny and grinned. “A lovely, smooth, satisfying smoke, outside in the sunshine. A lovely, lovely ciggie.”

Ellis drew on an imaginary cigarette and exhaled ecstatically. In response, Denny muttered his first distinct words of the day: “You bastard …”

They were days of sunlight and simplicity. Ellis needed no props, no magazines or books. There were no hours. There was only the sunlight that filled the room and his father, lying in bed, squeezing his hand, smiling bravely.

With the breeze playing percussively in the walnut trees and his son and daughter there to assist him, Denny washed the first of his chemo pills down with a bottle of wine. He said they were celebrating the removal of the headache and brushed aside talk of the shadow that had been detected on his lungs since the operation.

“These pills will take care of that as well, especially with a Chablis like this,” he declared.

Ellis believed him and the belief took root fast and grew vigorously. Chrissie smiled at the men who were her family and knew that her dad would never get well again.

Denny spent the summer sitting in the garden and watched the evening primroses appear, the hedge become speckled white with flowering bindweed, and the walnut trees, whose leaves transformed from orange to green, stand out against light blue skies. He no longer heard the motorway and he ignored the surrounding houses, living within the open country of his mind’s eye and noticing only that which enriched his days. The paleness departed from his complexion, his movements became less laboured and the soreness inside him abated, allowing him to laugh out loud again.

In midsummer, as if to take everybody’s mind off the shadow on Denny’s lungs, Chrissie dumped Milek for Henry the banker and moved into his penthouse overlooking the Thames. Ellis felt he could now ask Milek for work without turning to his sister for help.

“Look, Milek,” he started, “I know that my sister dumping you, and me drawing a picture of your clients engaged in lesbian sex isn’t a great platform, but I was wondering if you’d give me a job.”

“Ellis, I presume.”

“Yes. I really want to work for you and get into photography.”

“OK. No problem.”

And that was it. The job application and interview was over. He started the following week and Milek took him out for dinner and Ellis ate Japanese food for the first time and when Ellis saw the bill his heart skipped a beat and Milek threw a credit card into the wicker tray and slapped Ellis on the back.

“Come and meet my new girlfriend.”

Milek seemed to be largely over Chrissie. Carla was Italian and worked as assistant to a costume designer called Richard. Ellis could not speak to Carla the first time he met her, such was the extent and exoticness of her beauty. Richard was the first gay man Ellis had ever met and Ellis told him so.

“I doubt that, somehow,” Richard replied.

They took to Ellis immediately, the way rich women take to Pomeranians.

“She drinks pints!” Ellis muttered in admiration.

“That’s the tip of the iceberg,” Milek confided.

“I’ll tell my sister she’s a dog,” Ellis said.

Ellis worked six days that week, two in a studio in Wandsworth, one in a forest in Buckinghamshire, a day at a lido in south London and the other two doing runs to the labs and stock shop. Milek corrected his invoice and adjusted it upwards.

“You don’t calculate your overtime at the normal rate,” he explained. “Welcome to the joys of time-and-a-half and double-bubble.”

“I’ve earned six hundred quid,” Ellis muttered in disbelief.

“Doing something you enjoy … sick, isn’t it!” Milek said.

That night, exuberantly happy and with an audience of strangers, Ellis announced that he was spending his first pay packet on taking his dad to Paris. It was an idea born of champagne and Japanese lager but as soon as he’d said it he knew he was going to do it. When most places were closed, Milek and his friends led Ellis to a basement bar with black leather sofas and neon floors and, here, Milek took Ellis aside.

“Ellis … are you sober enough to listen and take heed?”

“Yes …” and Ellis tried very hard to be.

“The following is non-negotiable, so listen well. You are working for me and when you are out enjoying yourself you are doing it on the money I pay you. You can party, you can drink, you can get high, you can enjoy. But no cocaine. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, you are banned from cocaine and if you break that I’ll kick you out. I’ve been in your father’s house and I’ve been close to his daughter. I will not allow you to do that drug. No second chances.”

“Are you banned, too?”

Milek nodded. “These days.”

Ellis paid his dad the five hundred pounds he had borrowed since moving back home. He gave it to him in cash, placed within the pages of Fodor’s guidebook to Paris.

In the September sunshine, they walked in the Jardin de Luxembourg, stopping every quarter of an hour for Denny to catch his breath, on a bench within the chestnut groves, or on the low wall around the fountains, beside the lake where Denny stared at the toy sailboats. His hair had turned a little greyer in his illness and in the bright sunlight it was silvery and handsome.

“I’ve wanted to come to this city all my life,” Denny sighed. “And now I’m here. Unbelievable, isn’t it?”

“Easy, isn’t it?” Ellis replied.

Every hour or so, Ellis would ask his dad how he was feeling or if he was tired. “I feel good,” Denny would reply. Only on the second afternoon, when they had walked through the Marais after lunch, did he need to rest. He caught a taxi back to the tiny Hotel de Maison on rue Monge and fell asleep to daydreams of buying a garret in the Place des Vosges. As Denny slept, Ellis walked the halls of the Musée d’Orsay and bought a print of Redon’s Les Yeux Clos because it made him think of his mother. He crossed from the museum to the river and reflected on the day.

It’s similar, he told himself, to when you glance up at the sky and the clouds are the shape of a face or a mandolin. You look away and glance up again but either the shape has gone or it’s there but without the magic of first seeing it. That’s what it’s like to walk into the Sainte Chapelle for the first time, if you’ve not been told what to expect. That’s what it’s like when the towering columns of thirteenth-century stained glass first flood into your vision, causing a sensory double-take at the volume of beauty in front of you as you arch backwards to take it all in. At least, that’s what it was like when I took my dad there today.

“My God, Ellis,” Denny whispered, putting his arm round his son. “We’re in heaven. Thank you, dear boy, thank you.”

My pleasure, Ellis whispered, to the fast-flowing river.

Denny telephoned Chrissie from a payphone on the street. When he stepped out of the booth, he wandered away thoughtfully and Ellis followed.

“Oh dear,” Denny muttered, “I think your big sister is jealous of our trip.”

They wandered towards the dome of the Panthéon and sat in the Place de la Contrescarpe. “I feel inspired to plan my travels when the evenings set in,” Denny declared.

“And I feel inspired to rent myself a little pad in London,” his son replied.

“I’m glad to hear it. Good for you. Good old Milek.”

They talked about the countries they would visit together and they drank cognac and watched French women.

“Wonderful …” Denny O’Rourke muttered.

They fell silent for an hour, lost in daydreams and a cool air that promised the autumn.

When he lost his dad, Ellis lost the one person who knew truly how to be silent. The silences they shared in Paris were their masterpieces, at the end of a lifetime’s work. In that city, Ellis O’Rourke took care of Denny O’Rourke for the first time and it made him feel that he and his dad had known each other for ever and that they were each other’s father and each other’s son.

On a Thursday morning in mid-October, Denny O’Rourke rang his daughter and then his son and told them to come home that evening for dinner.

“The spot on my lungs has halved in size, more than halved in fact. We’re looking good!”

“Let’s get pissed!” Ellis said.

“You said it was only a shadow,” Chrissie replied.

They got drunk on champagne and Denny went to bed undecided as to whether he should take his chemo pills after so much alcohol. Ellis and Chrissie settled down in their beds soon after midnight, as the long graceful sweeps of wind which had buffeted the evening became more forceful.

Panic-stricken, Chrissie woke Ellis at five in the morning. “There’s the most peculiar noise coming from Dad’s bedroom!”

“Go back to bed!” Ellis grunted.

“How can you sleep! There’s a hell of a racket in the garden. I don’t know what it is.”

Ellis sat bolt upright. “You don’t know what it is?” He cupped his hands round his ears and listened theatrically. “It’s wind, a natural occurrence. It won’t bite.”

“Come and sleep next to me, Ellie.”

“No. Chrissie, you treat me like a right dork when it suits you. You can’t have it both ways. Now let me sleep.”

She returned at a quarter to six and this time she switched the light on and tore the blankets away.

“I’m not fucking around, Ellis! This house sounds like it’s going to collapse! There is the most terrible noise coming from Dad’s bedroom window and I cannot wake him.”

Ellis didn’t argue this time. He went to the window and looked out. “Fucking hell!”

In Denny’s room, the window frame was groaning. The glass heaved as if it were trying to draw breath. The wind howled around the house and outside, silhouetted against an angry, early morning sky, were the walnut trees, bent by the gale.

“Never seen anything like it,” Ellis muttered.

They pushed and prodded Denny but he didn’t stir. Chrissie resorted to shouting in his ear.

“Dad! You’ve got to wake up!”

Denny opened his eyes, touched Chrissie’s face and said, “By all means ask the captain but he won’t be able to come about in snowfall. We’re not even at Mauritius, you know.” He turned over and went back to sleep.

“I’d stick my neck out and say Dad opted for taking his medication last night, on top of the booze,” Ellis said.

At that moment, the bedroom wall let out a groan. The glass cracked and the entire window casement was sucked out of the wall and hurled across the garden. The storm poured in through the gaping hole. Ellis and Chrissie stared open-mouthed whilst their father slept on.

The shed had been picked up and deposited in a shattered heap on the other side of the garden. As Ellis dragged a section of it towards the house he was thrown backwards and sideways by the gusts.

“It’s amazing out there! Amazing!” he spluttered exuberantly, as Chrissie held the front door open for him.

They had to fall against the door to close it. She helped him upstairs with the shed panel and they found their dad standing by the bed, looking as if he’d been electrocuted.

“There’s a hole in the house,” he said to them, with pupils the size of pinholes. “It’s like going round the Cape. Fantastic! Let’s go outside!”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Chrissie said.

Chrissie took Denny downstairs. Ellis slid the panel across the floor. As soon as he held it up, it was sucked out of his hands and flew at the wall, covering the hole where the window had been. The room fell silent.

“Like slaying a dragon …” Ellis gasped.

When he’d caught his breath, he nailed the panel to the wall and then he went downstairs where his sister was making tea and his dad was buttering a piece of toast.

“Dad’s got the munchies,” Chrissie said knowingly.

“This toast couldn’t taste any better if it was served up on Selina Scott’s thighs!” Denny O’Rourke announced.

“You’re off your tits, Dad,” Ellis said.

“Ellis! You can’t say that!” Chrissie protested.

Denny nodded his agreement with a mouth full of toast.

“He’s right, dear girl, I think I am.”

Ellis had not slayed the dragon that night. No one had. The dragon slayed the town and the park. It slayed the wooded plateau leading to Ide Hill. It slayed millions. Oak, beech, yew, chestnut. Denny said that Jim Croucher up at Emmetts wept when he saw the devastation. On the television news, people in Jerusalem were praying for England’s trees.

“At least it was natural,” Denny said. “At least it wasn’t us.”

A month after the storm, the phone rang at midnight, waking Denny.

“Hello, Dad!” Ellis was in a call box.

“Are you all right?” Denny asked.

“Yup.”

“Sober?”

“Just about. Wasn’t earlier. But are you, more importantly?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?” A smile broke across Denny’s face, one of the many that no one would ever see.

“’Cos I need picking up.”

“Why so late and why the surprise visit, not that I mind either?”

“Well … long story really, but it would be particularly nice to see you. That OK?”

“Course it’s OK. You at the station?”

“Well … I’m at a station.”

“Which one?”

“Yeah, that would be my next question too. Battle station, near Hastings.”

“That’s an hour away!”

“This is true.”

“Why are you there?”

“Because I met this girl in a bar and we went out and I said I’d see her home and first of all I presumed she lived in London and even when I found out she didn’t I still thought she was going to invite me in for the night but when we got to her door she said ‘Thanks, see you’ and shut the door and by the time I’d walked back to the station the last train had gone.”

“You saw her home from London to Battle?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I think you know why.”

“And she didn’t invite you in?”

“Like I said.”

“And she shut the door on you?”

“Your hearing’s not impaired by the chemo, then.”

“She didn’t even invite you in for a coffee?”

“Not even a Jimmy Riddle.”

“You caught the train with her for an hour and a half and walked her home and she shut the door on you?”

“After saying goodnight, yes.”

Denny roared with laughter and called his son an idiot. Driving through the darkness, he felt propelled forward by the happiness of being a father, and grateful to be included in his son’s nonsense. Next morning, he cooked a fried breakfast and wanted to know more.

“So how does it work in this day and age, Ellis? Meeting a girl, getting to know her, courting her.”

“It doesn’t work,” Ellis said.

Denny broke open his fried egg and spread the yolk across his toast. He dipped his mushrooms in a pool of melted butter and ate them one by one.

“Your mother’s laugh reduced me to jelly. She made me feel wonderful. I know things are different today and there’s no harm in … whatever the correct term is …”

“Putting it about a bit?” Ellis offered.

“Beautifully put. But I don’t think the journey all the way to Battle is worth it unless it’s for someone who makes you feel …”

Denny shook his head, unable to find the words. He smiled at his son, with a look of openness and pleasure that Ellis was unfamiliar with.

“… someone who makes you feel like jelly inside. You’ll meet someone special. And when you do, put her first in all things and love her unconditionally.”

Denny set about his bacon. Ellis watched his father and wondered where the hint of exuberance had sprung from.

“It was fun last night,” Ellis said.

Denny nodded. “Not the fun you were hoping for.”

“Better,” Ellis said.

They ate then in silence. Ellis cleared the plates away. Denny made fresh tea and set the pot down on the table.

“One can afford to just go with the flow a bit and not worry about everything,” Ellis said, using the term “one” for the first and, he suspected, last time in his life.

“One can,” Denny said, stirring the pot.

Then, Ellis said, “When I think of my mum … when I think of being born … there’s just this empty space. I don’t know how to be close to a woman. I don’t mean physically close, I mean really close. I don’t want some other woman to show me love until my mum has. But she isn’t ever going to do that.”

“But she did,” Denny said.

Ellis continued. “At five o’clock on a winter’s morning, in the darkness, Chloe Purcell feels the way I imagine good love feels.”

Denny nodded his understanding. “You know,” he whispered, tapping his son’s hand with his finger, “you need to avoid sleeping with other men’s wives in the future.”

They both breathed a faint laugh and Ellis felt a familiar sense of bewilderment come upon him, a bewilderment particular to the memory of Chloe.

“Dad, I’m not trying to make excuses, but …”

“What? It’s all right, you can say it.”

“She kind of … seduced me.”

Denny grinned. “You poor thing. How terrifying. How lovely.”

And he loved the reluctance in his son to say anything that might sound ungallant.

“Ellis,” Denny said. “Your mother loved you. She went away because she felt the world was happening without her.”

“I can understand that feeling,” Ellis said.

“I know you can and that’s why I get scared by you.”

Then there was silence and Ellis thought of the bundle of letters in his dad’s locked drawer. This was the moment to ask if he could read them.

“Dad …?” he ventured, but saw that Denny was far away.

“You know, Ellis … allowing grief and fear to blight your heart is an awful waste. I’ve been guilty of it. You must never be. And you must never allow me to obstruct you. You must ignore me if I do. Life goes so fast.”

He touched his son’s hand again and left the table.