The ripped metal of the plane squeals and shifts. Raphael jumps backwards and waits for the structure to find a new equilibrium. Broken glass has sliced a deep channel in the flesh of his arm of which he is completely unaware. He is unaware of many things. Only afterwards, in the flashbacks which will haunt him for the best part of two years, will he worry about the possibility of the plane catching fire. He grabs the farmer’s torch and returns to the woman and it is only when he points the beam into the dark interior of the cabin that he sees a boy lying behind her in the rear footwell. He smashes the small triangular window at the back with the butt of the torch so that he can reach inside. He squeezes the boy’s shoulder but gets no response. He presses two fingers to the boy’s neck. Nothing. He twists the boy’s head and pulls his upper eyelids back, left then right. No dilation. Traumatic head injury, probably. Behind him the farmer’s wife is praying quietly to herself. “Pardonne-nous nos offenses, comme nous aussi nous pardonnons à ceux qui nous ont offensés.”

  The injured woman is holding her swollen belly. Is it possible that she is in labour? “Hang on,” he says. “Help will be here very soon.” The woman’s head is rolling from side to side. He cannot even tell what language she is speaking, but with the aid of the torch he can make out the exposed bone of a broken femur. He takes off his tie and makes a rudimentary tourniquet. She seems unaware of what he’s doing. Her wordless drunken moan is growing steadily quieter. The roll of her head is a metronome winding down. “Be strong. We will get through this together, the two of us.”

  He pulls the tourniquet as tight as he can then secures it with a double reef knot. There is nothing more he can do now except wait. He feels her belly. The baby is moving. The following minutes are the most upsetting part of what will be the most upsetting night of his life, waiting for the emergency services to arrive, offering reassurance which feels increasingly meaningless, desperately willing the woman and the child to remain alive. “You can do it. Help is on its way.”

  After a period of time which could be ten minutes or an hour the woman’s head sags forwards and she stops moving. She has gone, he is certain of it. He knows now what he has to do. If nothing else he may be able to keep the baby alive.

  He unclips the woman’s seat belt and steps over her so that he is straddling her belly. There is blood everywhere. The pilot’s hand is frozen mid-air, finger pointing upwards, as if he were interrupted in the middle of a speech.

  Raphael grips the woman’s nose and tilts her head back. He puts his lips to her mouth and blows hard to inflate her lungs. Her chest rises. He pauses and does it again. If he can get enough oxygen into her lungs and keep her heart pumping then he may be able to get enough oxygen to the baby. He leans backwards, places the heels of his doubled hands against her sternum and presses hard. One…two…three…four…five…Back to the mouth. Grip, tilt, blow. There is an eerie stillness in the midst of all this. The twisted metal, the fog, the sound of the pigs, the rhythm of his hands. Occasionally the plane creaks. Or perhaps it is the broken metal of the building which stands over them. He pictures himself on an iron ship in the middle of a dark ocean. He and the unborn child could be the only living beings in the world.

  He doesn’t wear a watch on holiday so he counts, because the paramedics will need to know. Fifty cycles of CPR. Twenty-five minutes or thereabouts. He hears sirens and gunned engines and men’s voices and he is suddenly in the middle of a science-fiction film, all thunder and arc-light, helmets and jumpsuits. There is a large vehicle of a kind he has never seen before which might be a fire tender from a military airfield. A pair of gloved hands grip his shoulders and guide him out of the cockpit. He walks away then turns to take it all in—the silhouetted figures, the buckled crucifix of the plane, “CA-956” in yellow on racing green, pulsing blue lights, the sparkler-fizz of oxy-acetylene torches. It is like a vast Renaissance canvas depicting some new myth. Then he thinks, for the first time, that this is probably a family. The mother is dead, the father is dead, the son is dead. And if the child survives…? Something happens which has never happened in seventeen years of practising medicine. A flurry of violet hail blows across his field of vision and he sees the mud of the farmyard swing gracefully up to meet his unprotected face. He returns to his body to find himself sitting on a plastic barrel holding a small chipped mug of brandy and the farmer’s wife offering him an opened packet of chocolate LU Pépitos. Somewhere a baby is crying.

  THE CHILD

  Philippe looks across the Avenue du Président Kennedy to the Île aux Cygnes. From this height the Eiffel Tower is visible in its entirety so that it looks like one of the models sold by hawkers below the real thing. A mint-green Line 6 metro train crosses the Pont de Bir-Hakeim. They must have come for another reason. If he can think of that other reason before they reach the apartment then they will not say that Maja is dead. It is like avoiding the lines between paving stones. But he cannot think of any other reason. If there were any other reason they would be talking to his lawyer, to his accountant or to Hervé. The Seine is a ribbon of pitted khaki sliding west. The glass door opens and Hervé leads them out onto the balcony. The man is an officier de la Police Judiciaire. Black uniform, two chevrons. He has unnaturally pale skin and a mole like a squashed sultana on his cheek. There is a portly woman standing just behind him in a dowdy beige jumper and a purple windcheater.

  People do not enter Philippe’s private space unasked. It is the job of Hervé and other members of staff to prevent situations like this occurring. The officer introduces his colleague. She is from the bureau d’aide aux victimes. This is not possible. Philippe’s mother died instantly of a heart attack while skiing in Lech Zürs. His father spent his last month in a villa in Kefalonia where he could be lifted in and out of the sea by nurses. Philippe is not so naive as to believe that money can alter the brute facts of life but he has always assumed that it can postpone and ameliorate.

  The officer apologises for being the bearer of bad news. He flips open a little notebook to check the facts. “The plane struck a farm building.” The woman is openly admiring the view. Or is she merely avoiding Philippe’s glance? How could she be of assistance to anyone? Hervé asks about the other passengers. The policeman explains that both the pilot and the young boy are dead. Philippe is glad. He would not be able to bear the knowledge that Viktor had killed Maja and that he or his son had survived. The woman turns back towards him and tilts her head to one side in order to seem sympathetic. She is a fatter, older, less attractive version of a TV presenter whose name Philippe cannot remember. His own thoughts seem to belong to someone else, running like ticker tape under the scene in front of him.

  “She was trapped in the wreckage.”

  Ten storeys below, a barge is being hauled upstream, water pleating around the tug’s snub bow. Why are they telling him these details?

  “The good news, however…” The policeman pauses and takes a breath. “I’m sorry. That was badly phrased.” He takes another breath. “Your daughter is alive.”

  Philippe holds the brushed steel rail and looks down at the moat of thorny shrubs that separates the building from the pavement. He had forgotten completely that Maja was pregnant. How is that possible? Steam drifts from a sunken grille. Did she give birth before she died, or did they hack at her like meat to save the child? If he were to lean a little further out then gravity will simply take over. It would be the easiest thing in the world. It would be like falling into bed.

  * * *

  . . .

  Hervé drives. He is Philippe’s factotum and bodyguard, one of the few people who will remain close to his employer as everyone else is discarded over the next few years. Philippe does not want to spend three hours in the presence of someone he does not know and he is in no state to drive himself. He watches the cruel countryside reel past. Shock is the wrong word. He is outside his body, airborne, cartwheeling, blank. They had decided on a name but he will not say it, even in the privacy of his own mind, for fear of making her real. He does not want a daughter, but neither does he want her to die. He wants to turn back time and trade her for Maja. What if the child was starved of oxygen? What if she is brain-damaged? What if she is crippled?

  Hervé pulls out and overtakes a Dentressangle eighteen-wheeler, a loose tongue of dirty orange canvas flapping so rapidly along its flank that it sings. Hervé is six foot four and seventeen stone and carries no fat. He wears, always, a white shirt under a charcoal suit with no tie. His shaved head shines like a polished apple. He wears Wood Sage & Sea Salt cologne by Jo Malone. He has no interest in other people except insofar as it impinges upon his own plans, needs and well-being. He listens, mostly, to seventies and eighties disco, of which he has an encyclopedic knowledge—Rose Royce, A Taste of Honey, the Love Unlimited Orchestra. He is polite and attentive to those to whom Philippe needs him to be polite and attentive. There is a set to his face, however, when he is displeased which is sufficiently unsettling for him to have needed to resort to physical violence on only two occasions. Nikki, Philippe’s secretary, is fairly sure that he would kill someone if asked and feel no compunction.

  The Commissariat in Boulogne occupies one corner of a down-at-heel crossroads opposite a tattoo parlour. Inside, a man in a hi-vis, lemon-yellow tabard and a pirate’s hat is complaining drunkenly about his landlord. A rank cheesy stink rolls off him. He is ushered from the building by a portly policeman who has donned a pair of disposable blue gloves for the purpose.

  Philippe hasn’t stood in a queue or waited in a public place since Cambridge.

  They are taken to the morgue where Philippe identifies Maja’s body. She looks as if she has been flailed. He has always scorned the idea of a soul but the body feels…empty. He will have the same thought about the Alfama apartment, about the Dubuffets, about the sweetbreads and sea lettuce at Mirazur, about Tribune Bay, as if Maja were the lamp that previously lit the world.

  At the hospital his daughter is asleep in a box of transparent plastic. There are two hand-holes on the side which makes Philippe think of gloved scientists manipulating plutonium rods from behind leaded glass. A cannula disappears under a Swiss cross of Micropore tape on the back of each tiny hand, giving her the air of a resting puppet. Hervé takes a photograph for the passport. A nurse places her gently in Philippe’s arms. He has never held a baby. She has his skin colouring—suede, coffee. Wisps of damp black hair on her head. She opens her eyes. They are astonishingly dark. She is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. The nurse gives him a bottle of formula milk and he feeds her. Angelica. He will call her Angelica. He will never remember the name he and Maja chose.

  Hervé books them into a modest hotel in Château Cléry while Angelica is observed overnight. Philippe has never stayed in a three-star establishment before. Hervé hires nurses and initiates the passport application process. He calls Maja’s father in Gothenburg and tells them the terrible news. He says that Philippe is too upset to talk at the moment. He tells Mr. Söderberg that he and his wife now have a granddaughter and he hopes that this is some small compensation for the loss of their daughter. Mr. Söderberg sounds woozy. Is it possible that he is drunk? Hervé calls the Beaufours.

  The following morning Hervé meets the private nurse. Côte d’Ivoire, he guesses. Her name is Océane. She is tall and strikingly good-looking. Philippe will not want the company of someone so extravagantly blessed. Hervé gives her two hundred euros in cash and tells the agency to send someone plain. He buys baby clothes, baby food, a car seat at an Intermarché, jobs well below his pay grade but he wants to keep the circle tight.

  Medical checks are running late so Philippe and Hervé sit in a hospital waiting room. Philippe keeps forgetting that Maja is dead, then remembering, the same sick lurch every time. An obese crone pads past in slippers and polyester gown, pushing a wheeled stand from which a bag of pale yellow fluid dangles and sways. A tattooed woman has her head bandaged in a way that Philippe has only ever seen in cartoons.

  They return to the ward but the chef de clinique is still busy. Philippe is shocked at how much waiting there is in the world of ordinary people and at how difficult it is to do. There are five other incubated babies on the ward. Four are premature—small, wrinkled creatures who could be sleeping in a hollowed oak in a fairy tale. They lie on cashmere blankets and wear tiny, hand-knitted woolly hats. One is Indian, he guesses, or somewhere thereabouts. Long, silky black hair on its shoulders and arms.

  An interne appears after twenty-five minutes and says that there is some remaining bureaucracy to be gone through. What he does not say, because the situation is difficult enough already, is that this concerns the need for confirmation of paternity. Hervé gives the man a card and says simply that Philippe’s lawyer will be in touch. Then they take Angelica and leave, displaying a presumption so free of doubt that it leaves no opening for disagreement.

  Philippe insists that they drive to the crash site. Hervé thinks it unwise but rations his absolute prohibitions to maintain their force. He sits in the car with the baby. Philippe walks down the muddy lane to the farmhouse. He will notice later how dirty his shoes are and think of this as a penance. The farm building of the police report is a tall, cylindrical silo of black corrugated iron. It has been hacked through the middle and now slumps sideways like the bashed-in hat of a nineteenth-century pantomime villain. There are gouges in the earth where the plane was presumably dragged prior to being lifted onto a flatbed truck and driven away. He pictures it in a hangar somewhere, men in rolled-up sleeves taking photographs and jotting down readings taken from smashed dials. She wouldn’t have known a thing. Is that true? There are dark stains on the earth, some fluid which last night’s rain has not washed away. Oil? Fuel? Blood?

  An old woman is yelling at him. She belongs to another world. Overhead, the sky is uniformly blue, only two parallel contrails smudging and sliding. A railway for angels. There is nothing here for him.

  In the car Hervé receives a phone call from Paris. There are journalists at the apartment. He must find somewhere else for Philippe and Angelica to stay until the passport comes through.

  They meet the new nurse at the hotel. She looks as if she works on the checkout at Carrefour—forties, heavyset, the ghost of a tattoo on her right forearm. Agathe Guérin. Philippe feels both relieved and jealous of the ease and warmth with which she handles his daughter, the fluent, unaffected nonsense she talks. Un, deux, trois, allons dans les bois. Quatre, cinq, six, cueillir des cerises…

  Philippe says he wants to see the ocean. Memories of childhood, perhaps, or simply the comfort of having a whim indulged. They leave Angelica with Agathe, and Hervé drives them to Fort-Mahon-Plage where they stand on the promenade in bright sunshine and a cold wind. Hardy families hunker under umbrellas hammered into the sand. Far off, the gaudy blades of five land yachts—pink, white, orange, orange, white—scoot over the flats. What if he left it all behind—the money, the houses, the investments, the artwork, the travel? What if he took a job and he and Angelica lived in an unremarkable house in an unremarkable town? A boy stands on the beach staring at him. It is Rudy. If Rudy is alive, then it is possible that Maja is alive. He turns to get Hervé’s attention but when he turns back to the beach the boy has gone. He is suddenly frightened that Rudy has re-materialised in the hotel and is planning to do some terrible harm to Angelica.

  “We need to get back.”

  * * *

  . . .

  They move into a large villa near Cavaillon. Hervé hires a cook, a housekeeper and three more local nurses to work eight-hour shifts. Much as he loves Angelica, Philippe’s own parents were neither very attentive nor very affectionate and he has a limited appetite for baby talk. He does not know how to be a father. He spends much of his time engaged in the raw act of grieving. He thinks about Maja perpetually—scenes from their shared life, scenes from TV dramas, nightmare images of her death, nightmare images of Angelica’s birth. Sometimes he hears her voice and turns to see an empty doorway or a bird at the poolside. He had a gallstone four years ago in New York, a pain so all-consuming it rendered him briefly blind. This time there is no morphine. He must get down on all fours and ride it out. Hervé says that he can source medication but Philippe fears that it is only the pain that stands between himself and a great void into which he might tumble irretrievably.

  There are obituaries in the New York Times, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung. She has two pages in Aftonbladet. He reads them over and over. He saw her first in The Forest, a television series at which he would have scoffed had it starred anyone else. He watched both seasons in a fortnight, telling himself it was a childish infatuation till he googled her and watched an interview in which she quoted Christopher Smart at length, in English as fluent as his own. For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way…He flew to Stockholm to see her in John Gabriel Borkman at the Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern and waited at the stage door with flowers like it was 1954.

  He has arranged his life so that there is nothing he needs to do. Housekeepers look after all five properties. Nikki oversees the housekeepers, pays bills and runs maintenance. The accountancy firm retained by the family, Maines, subcontract an investment manager, Quadrant, to run a portfolio on a medium-risk basis that steadily outpaces inflation. He was in the tea business for seven years till rising Indian labour costs required him to tell lies and hurt people, actions which his partner Lem called deal-making and streamlining and which came to Lem as easily as breathing so that he slipped into that big leather chair on Portugal Street as if Philippe had merely been keeping it warm for him. And now? How does one conjure those engaging, complex, necessary tasks which give one’s days shape and meaning from within a life of such ease?