He watches an episode of The Forest on DVD every night. It has dated terribly, but it is a magic box which still contains Maja and she is alive and she is young and she is beautiful. Hervé reorders all the books Philippe left in the teetering pagoda by his bed in Winchester, but Philippe can read nothing denser than Fred Vargas and Arnaldur Indriðason, good vanquishing evil in three hundred and fifty easy pages. There are bicycles in the shed. He goes for long rides. Sometimes he has to stop at the side of the road and weep. He floats in the pool and is badly sunburnt. He longs for some more serious ailment.

  He returns none of the calls, emails or letters from friends and acquaintances offering their condolences. It is not that he dislikes the idea of seeming weak, or calling upon the kindness of equals; it is simply a transaction he has never learnt. Perhaps it would be truer to say that they are not friends in the way that others might understand the word. He has never lived in one place. He moved school every two years—Sir James Henderson, the Institut Auf Dem Rosenberg, Aiglon, Phillips Exeter…When relationships, political climates or tax regimes became uncomfortable he moved on, as his father had done, as his grandfather had done. In his adult life he has chosen to spend time with people of similar tastes whose company he enjoys. Why would one do anything else? When those people have difficulties—a serious illness, drug addiction, a teenage child in trouble with the law—he has given them the space he would have wanted in a similar situation. He realises now that he loved Maja because she was the only person he needed. It seems obvious in retrospect, as do many of the hard lessons he is learning.

  * * *

  . . .

  The French air-accident investigation closes, offering no challenge to what seemed, only hours after the crash, to be the obvious explanation. The coroner passes a verdict of death by misadventure, the police case is closed and Maja’s body is released.

  Hervé arranges a funeral in Gothenburg. It is a shambles. No press are invited but the information leaks and there is an unseemly scuffle involving a photographer and Maja’s brother. When Maja’s mother is presented with Angelica she collapses, the way people do in films when given shocking news. Maja’s father, Hervé now sees, is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s which accounts for his seeming drunkenness during that first phone call and his failure to pass on the vital message. The old man spends a great deal of time at the reception asking for Teddy Lindholm, a name his wife does not recognise. He goes missing at one point and is discovered round the back of the building, kneeling beside a dead thrush and weeping. Maja’s agent delivers a dreary eulogy which sounds like her Wikipedia page, to an audience which contains two Oscars, three Oliviers and a Knight of the Realm. There is unremitting rain throughout.

  Philippe is pleased. Maja’s death itself was a shambles and a shambolic funeral feels right. Besides, he has never greatly liked her family. Brewers and soldiers. Her cousin is an MP for the so-called Sweden Democrats. Bevara Sverige Svenskt and everyone else can fuck off. Her father was the only one he had liked. That rebellious twinkle. Court-martialled for putting two cats and a lit Catherine wheel inside a tank containing a senior officer. His Alzheimer’s, thankfully, preoccupies Maja’s mother enough to stop her trying to pin Philippe down about arrangements for seeing Angelica before they slip out to the idling limousine.

  * * *

  . . .

  Antioch was designed by Amyas Connell in 1937 for Philippe’s grandfather and named after the ancient city on the eastern end of the Turkish Mediterranean coast. Occupying fifty-five acres of land, it sits in a saddle between two wooded hills above the village of Braishfield, eight miles west of Winchester. The office and the staff accommodation are shielded by trees at the boundary of the property so that even from the roof garden of the main house no other buildings are visible. The shield of the hills creates a sweet spot where the average temperature is always a couple of degrees higher than the surrounding countryside and cheeringly un-English palms grow happily around the long sloping lawn. On sunny days it is possible to think that one is in the Loire, if not quite Provence.

  Connell was a disciple of Le Corbusier though the master’s hard lines have been softened a little here. There is a good deal of concrete and many straight lines and semicircles, but everything is painted white and there are big windows so that the effect is more Riviera than Cité Radieuse. The house is Grade II listed and every few months a bold architectural twitcher will wander up the drive which remains without electronic gates because Philippe thinks the fashion vulgar. He returns to the house five weeks after the funeral when Nikki assures Hervé that even the most persistent journalists are long gone. He will remain there with Angelica for eighteen months.

  Before Maja was killed Philippe read widely, travelled frequently and collected art, each activity a manifestation of the same hunger for the world, as if the planet itself were a great feast to be greedily eaten. The Milky Way seen from the doorway of a yurt in Elsen Tasarkhai, the Modigliani portrait of Soutine, Leigh Fermor’s Danube…the dividing lines between the world experienced and the world described so porous that sometimes he could not remember whether he had seen a place, a painting or a building through his own eyes or through someone else’s words. He reads easily in four languages and can carry on rudimentary conversations in seven, though he always found those languages and their respective literatures more fascinating than their living speakers, using ramshackle modernisations of Latin and Greek, for instance, which confused and amused interlocutors in Italy and Greece. But now? Those paintings, those temples, those archipelagos, those tiny planes dragging their red ribbons across so many pages of the atlas, seem like the kind of cheap trick a conjurer might get away with at a children’s party to disguise the fact that there was in truth no magic in the world.

  He cannot travel without Angelica. Even in London he is beset by nightmares of her being lowered into a bath of boiling water by an idiot nurse, or rolling off a table and cracking her head on the kitchen floor. Two days in Bonn are a torment. Nor can he travel with a nurse in tow, his wife’s absence mocked constantly by a dowdy stand-in, tarnishing the golden memory of one country after another. So he hunkers down and lets the world’s callous carnival carry on beyond the trees.

  Every so often the senders of the unanswered calls, emails and letters turn up without an invitation, because they happen to be passing, because they genuinely care or because they are intrigued. Philippe assumes that they have all come to see Angelica. She is a thing of such wonder to him that she must surely be a thing of wonder to everyone, so she is brought out by one of the nurses while Philippe and his visitors are served tea and cake and try to keep the conversation afloat. One day Hanneke, Viktor’s widow and Rudy’s mother, knocks at the door. She has tried to contact Philippe repeatedly and polite rebuffs from Hervé and Nikki have not reduced the frequency of her attempts. Paola, the current housekeeper, gives her the same story she gives the journalists who turn up every so often: Philippe is living in Turkey. He watches from an upstairs window as she walks towards the white Range Rover parked askew on the gravel. He expects her to sit behind the wheel and gather herself before putting the car into gear and departing. To his surprise she opens the passenger door and takes out a small red fire extinguisher. She walks over to his Mercedes and swings it into the centre of the windscreen which slumps into a target of frosting. He doesn’t understand. Surely it is he who has the right to be angry. She leaves the fire extinguisher protruding from the rectangle of shattered glass and drives away and Hervé’s instinct not to press charges is correct because it is the last time she attempts to make contact.

  Maja’s mother telephones on several occasions, wanting to arrange a visit so that she can see her granddaughter again. Hervé pencils in some vague dates which are never firmed up. She is, he guesses, increasingly preoccupied with her husband’s deteriorating condition. For whatever reason, she finally stops ringing.

  Maja’s death has become, for a small number of people, an obsession, fostered and sustained by the Internet which, to Philippe, seems like nothing more than a great machine for connecting the deranged and angry people of the world. So, five mornings a week Angelica goes to a local nursery under an assumed name. After she leaves the house, Philippe swims one hundred and fifty anaesthetic lengths. He cannot imagine talking to anyone about his sadness. He does not want the burden shared or halved. He could no more give away this hurt than he could give away Maja’s clothes, her piano, her awards. He plays the music she once loved (Simon Boccanegra, Tristan und Isolde, Káťa Kabanová…) on the speakers built into the walls of the house and pretends that she is in a nearby room. He sees Rudy sometimes, standing at the end of a corridor, or in the gloaming under the palms. It does not surprise him. It seems natural that biology and physics have been fundamentally altered by the same impact that shattered his heart.

  He goes for long walks on the Downs where Maja used to ride. The Clarendon Way, Ashley Down, Beacon Hill. Inhuman nature calms him with its long, slow rhythms and its million different greens, the wind in the long grass, buzzards overhead. He doesn’t see Rudy out here. The boy is an indoor phenomenon, a product of those vibrations human beings leave ringing in bricks and glass and steel.

  Angelica toddles, then walks. She speaks late and her first word is “water” and Philippe is unaware of how peculiar this is. She hears her father talk about the paintings on the walls of the house and describes her first pictures—a forest of Twombly-esque loops—as “abstrack.” She likes all fruit except oranges and hates all vegetables except spinach. So she calls orange a vegetable and spinach a fruit because she likes categories not to overlap. For several years she will call the uncomfortable overlapping of categories “making things brown” because it is what happens when coloured paints are allowed to mix. She gives her twenty-two soft toys names which begin with successive letters of the alphabet, from a rabbit called André to an orang-utan called Very Very. She likes Barbapapa and Madeleine and Dear Zoo and Peepo! She likes Le Renard et l’Enfant and The Incredibles and Le Petit Poucet. Her baby-fat falls away. She is tall for her age and skinny with it, that same dark skin which surprised him in the hospital in Boulogne set off now by glossy, mahogany hair. Philippe could gaze at her for ever, but to other adults her looks can be disturbing, the darkness of those extraordinary eyes, so dark you feel as if you are looking into someone not at them. Philippe explains to Angelica that her mother acted in films and on television, that she was loved by people who had never met her, that she flew away and didn’t come back. These things fuse in Angelica’s mind so that she will always think of Maja as a faerie figure borrowed by the physical world before she was called back home.

  Philippe owns houses in Sri Lanka, Berlin and Skiathos. They are rented out, less to save money than to keep the staff on their toes. The villa outside Antakya remains empty. He cannot bear the idea of anyone else inhabiting what has always been thought of as the ancestral home. The family has owned the estate for as long as written records exist, so it is said. According to their own private myth they have been there since Antakya was Antioch, since Antioch itself was founded, surviving all the subsequent revolts, sieges, conquests and earthquakes. In the very centre of the house is a low-lit room where archaeological relics from the city’s early days are kept behind glass—bowls, amphorae, seven Roman dice, two vanishingly rare Domitian Tetradrachms from the city’s mint, a substantial piece of mosaic flooring which should technically be in the Hatay Museum. Is the story true? Perhaps it matters only that this is a family which has always prided itself as part of a global aristocracy, doggedly secular but with Muslim, Christian and Jewish roots, citizens of the world not in aspiration but in simple fact.

  * * *

  . . .

  Angelica’s birthdays are simultaneously anniversaries of Maja’s death. Philippe ignores both. On her third birthday, however, Paola the housekeeper starts a tradition of taking her to Legoland in Windsor, and Philippe is too preoccupied with his own memories to be haunted by images of his daughter falling from a roller coaster or being abducted by a stranger.

  The fourth Christmas after Maja’s death Philippe tries to make up for his self-absorption by throwing a party for Angelica and a few friends from the nursery. The temperature drops unexpectedly the night before and by the time guests arrive there is snow on the palms and on the grass, fat flakes against a dark, pearly sky. If the noise of their shrieking is any measure the children are clearly enjoying themselves, sweeping from room to room in a raucous shoal. Only one girl stands apart, walking the room the way a cat does, following some kind of path invisible to everyone else. She climbs up and sits on the wide white mantelpiece at one point, like a presiding sprite, until her mother lifts her down for jelly, and Philippe can’t suppress the suspicion that she has some connection to Rudy, an emissary, a lieutenant. Hervé is not at ease among children. He hovers at the periphery only because the event carries so much potential for disaster. Two fathers start talking to Philippe without introducing themselves and he realises, belatedly, that he met them at local events years ago, when Maja was still alive. A number of the parents have clearly tagged along only to see the house and the grounds and spend the entire time looking over the children’s heads and out of the windows as if they are thinking of buying the place. One has to be extracted from a bedroom. The children eat Würstchen im Schlafrock and mini-pizzas with pineapple and ham. They drink magic punch containing gummy bears in ice cubes. They play Snake’s Tail and Pass-the-Parcel and Chinese Jump Rope. Nikki has hired Safari Sam who brings a boa constrictor, an iguana, a tarantula, a fat, black millipede and twelve cockroaches which the children are encouraged to place on their faces in order to horrify their parents. One of the fathers has to sit in his car for the best part of an hour until he is certain that the animals have gone.

  The whole event has the heightened colours of a folk tale, as if it is taking place inside one of those houses that spring up on the solstice, at which the weary traveller knocks and is asked inside to find a blazing fire, fine food and sweet wine. Angelica is happy and Philippe cannot imagine anything better than being here, now, with these people, his sadness gone, his wanderlust stilled, the snow, the palms, the music. But as always happens in the folk tale there comes a point where abundance tips into surfeit and the faintest of shadows falls. He is resentful of all these people who seem capable of making his daughter happy in a way that he cannot. He is frightened that they will spirit her away, not today and perhaps not literally, but that they will spirit her away nevertheless.

  He asks Paola to bring the party to a sharp close at the prescribed time, but it is one of the few occasions when she stands her ground. This is Angelica’s day and she is enjoying herself. Hervé extracts Philippe on the fictional pretext of an important phone call, and ushers him into the upstairs study whose windows look onto the unpeopled white woods at the rear of the house and from where the noise of the party is faint enough to be covered by the Juilliard’s rendering of Bartok’s third string quartet. Before Hervé leaves he glances out of the window and sees, on the strip of snow-covered lawn that separates the gravel path from the beginning of the trees, a roebuck, motionless, fox-orange. He waits for it to spook and bolt, its white rump flashing as it vanishes into the foliage, but it remains completely still. The two men watch it for a minute, two minutes, three. Philippe wonders if the animal is sick. It reads like a symbol of something, though what the meaning is he has no idea. Perhaps it is this insolubility that will keep the image bright in Philippe’s mind for such a long time afterwards. Hervé wonders if the deer believes that it will remain unseen as long as it doesn’t move. If this is true then they are scaring it. Hervé turns away and heads back to the party and when he glances from the staircase window the animal has gone.

  * * *

  . . .

  When does Philippe’s touching move from innocence into something more sinister? Is he conscious of having crossed a line at all? Or was the way he held her and played with her compromised from the beginning? If Philippe gives it any name, he calls it love. He cares for her unconditionally in a way that no one else will ever be able to care for her. They need one another, more even than he and Maja needed one another. She is made from his body, from Maja’s body. How could there be a boundary of any kind between them? The only woman he ever truly loved was torn violently from him and, in return, he was given this gift. Sometimes, he palliates the recurring nightmare of the crashed plane by thinking not that Angelica looks like Maja but that in some obscure way Angelica is her mother, that in those terrible final seconds some vital spark jumped between the dying and the living body in order that it might remain in the world. Nor, as she gets older, will he be able to bear the thought of sharing Angelica with another man. The pictures, the sounds, the sensations this possibility brings to mind make him nauseous. And it is a dangerous world out there, especially for a young woman as innocent as his daughter. Who else could protect her in the way that he can protect her? He will refrain from full intercourse until she is fourteen. He thinks of this as a kindness.