‘Ignore him,’ Charlotte said. She put a new packet of coffee down beside the kettle. ‘It’s all he thinks about. When he isn’t thinking about money.’

‘You’re a lucky girl,’ Abigail said. ‘What else d’you want in a man? Or expect, for that matter. I always said to your father—’

‘Listen,’ Tommy Palmer said suddenly. He was staring at his BlackBerry. ‘Text from Bill.’

Charlotte turned to look at him, the empty kettle in her hand. Mrs Jennings raised her eyes from the baby.

‘“High-flow oxygen,”’ Tommy read. ‘“Nebulised salbutamol and …” something or other, can’t read it, “… bromide, systemic steroids, all ongoing. Not responding so far. Collecting Belle from Barton soonest. Elinor staying put. More anon. B.”’

He stopped reading. There was a shocked and complete silence. Charlotte put the kettle down and crossed the kitchen to take her baby from her mother. She bent over him, her face against his.

‘Poor little Marianne,’ Abigail Jennings said softly.

Tommy Palmer stared out of the window. ‘Poor buggers,’ he said, ‘the whole bloody lot of them. What a nightmare.’

There was a small visitors’ room where Elinor was told she could wait. It was furnished with unwelcoming vinyl-covered armchairs, a low plywood table bearing a scattering of outdated and well-thumbed magazines, and its walls were meagrely hung with small sentimental watercolours of generic country views and clusters of cottages. The air of the room held the same density of accumulated tension and apprehension that she remembered from a similar room at Haywards Heath Hospital less than two years before, and she knew that, whatever privacy the room might offer, a chair in the corridor, or the hospital coffee shop, would actually be a great deal more bearable as places to pass the time.

And bearing was what she had now to do. In there – in that little, dramatic, concentrated ward – Marianne was being given everything she remembered as necessary to be given in the case of a severe asthma attack. A young consultant – he looked to her only student age – had explained punctiliously that the maximum inhaled beta 2 agonists might need supplementation with IV aminophylline, and if there was respiratory arrest, some adrenalin as well, and she had gazed at him and nodded and been absolutely unable to say please don’t list all these drugs for me but please, please just tell me if she’s going to die? She had felt sick with panic, looking at his young, pale, serious face, sick with helplessness, sick with a terrible, engulfing loneliness that had nothing to do with being by herself in a strange hospital and everything to do with the unendurable possibility of a future life without Marianne. This last prospect was so truly crushing that, for the moment, it left no room for remorse, even though she knew it was just waiting to swallow her up, reminding her of her irritation with Marianne, her lack of sympathy and empathy, her exasperation with her sister’s intensity, her resentments, her impatience – the list was endless. But it was not for now. Now was just a kind of terrible paralysis, on a plastic chair in a hospital corridor, picturing Bill Brandon speeding down to Devon like a man possessed to collect her mother and Margaret.

He’d been wonderful. He’d masterminded the ambulance and the hospital arrival, somehow forcing immediate attention in A and E, never raising his voice or taking no for an answer. He’d been like that for the first turbulent half-hour, and then, suddenly, had turned to Elinor with a face of utter anguish, and said, ‘I’d stay with you, I really would, but I’ll go round the bend if I don’t do something. So would it be OK by you if I go and get your mother?’

Elinor had swallowed, nodding violently. She said, ‘I’d be so glad, so grateful, I’d—’

‘Have you rung her?’

‘Not yet. I haven’t rung anyone.’

‘Ring her,’ Bill said. ‘Ring her now. Tell her I’ll be there in a couple of hours. If—’

‘Don’t!’

He flinched and put his hand briefly to his face. He said indistinctly, ‘They do wonders, now …’

‘Go,’ Elinor said.

‘Will you be all right?’

‘We’re neither of us all right. Go and get Ma. Please. Thank you.’

‘Text me. Ring your mother—’

‘Go!’

He’d whirled round and started running. Somebody stopped him, almost at once, a nurse somebody in a dark blue uniform, and Elinor had seen him pause for a second, and then race on towards the lifts, leaving the nurse watching him, shaking her head. And then Elinor had taken her phone out of her pocket and rung her mother, standing in the corridor looking down at an asphalted space between the buildings, dotted with concrete tubs of tired, serviceable shrubs, and had a conversation of a kind that seemed as surreal as if it were happening in a hideous dream, and not on a Saturday morning in real-life April.

‘Bill’s coming,’ she kept saying through Belle’s tears. ‘He’s on his way. Bill’s coming.’

Then Margaret had taken the phone from her mother, and Elinor had had to say everything all over again and Margaret – oh, bless her, really bless her – had sounded calm and together, and reassured Elinor that they would be ready for Bill, whenever he came, and only at the end had said, suddenly and desperately, ‘Will we be too late?’

‘No,’ Elinor said, crossing her fingers automatically, idiotically. ‘No. Of course you won’t.’

She looked at her watch now. Her wrist was bare. She hadn’t had time to put her watch on, hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t brushed her teeth even! She should do that. She should go and buy a toothbrush and a comb and some coffee, and go through the inevitably reassuring rituals of starting the day. An abrupt pang of agony about Marianne hit her so hard that she gasped and bent over, her head hanging, staring at the grey and shining vinyl floor, muttering to herself, ‘Please, M, don’t die, don’t leave me, fight, M, please fight, please, just for me, I’ll do anything, I will, I will—’

‘Are you Marianne’s sister?’

On the shiny grey floor, right in her field of vision, were a pair of large white medical clogs. She took a second or two to absorb the sight; then she straightened up, her gaze travelling up a pair of jeaned legs to a checked shirt and a white medical coat. Above that was a face, Elinor thought distractedly, possibly an Iraqi face or an Iranian face or even a Syrian face or a Turkish face, but Middle Eastern anyway, wonderful hair, so dark it almost had a blue sheen to it, navy blue—‘Marianne’s sister?’ the doctor repeated.

He was smiling. Smiling! Elinor shot to her feet. ‘Yes! Yes? Is she—’

‘She’s responding,’ he said. ‘She’s breathing. Bronchodilation weak still, but it’s happening.’

Elinor goggled at him. ‘You mean—’

He held up two crossed fingers. He nodded. ‘I mean’, he said, ‘not out of the woods, but on her way. You did right to bring her in.’

‘Can – oh, can I see her?’

‘Not yet. Later, maybe. When we’re sure we’ve stabilised her.’ He looked at her. He was older than she’d first realised, older than the other, earlier doctor, maybe a father even, someone who might understand about families, understand that even if you sometimes wanted to murder them, you couldn’t do without them, couldn’t imagine life without – ‘Why don’t you’, the doctor said, ‘go and get yourself something to eat?’

Half an hour later, fortified by a blueberry muffin, a mug of coffee and ten minutes in a discouraging hospital washroom, Elinor was back on her chair in the corridor. That corridor, which had looked to her, earlier, like some sort of living tomb, now appeared almost cheerful, with sunlight slanting in through the dusty windows and casting sharp shadow stripes on the grey floor. The row of blue plastic chairs was still empty, although there was a middle-aged man in the visitors’ room leafing restlessly through the magazines, and, rather than join him and feel an obligation to talk to him, Elinor thought she would turn one of the chairs to face the window and the sun and merely sit there, with her eyes closed, and bask in the unspeakable joy of sheer, pure, unfathomable relief.

She had texted everyone as she ate her muffin. It was the dullest of muffins, studded here and there with synthetic blueberries tasting of nothing but an indefinable bland sweetness, but nothing Elinor could immediately recollect had ever tasted so wonderful. She ate and drank with her left hand and texted furiously with her right, texts to her mother and Margaret, and Bill, to Mrs Jennings and the Palmers. ‘It’s OK,’ she wrote, ‘OK!!! She’s breathing! She’s breathing!’ She lay back in her chair now, eyes shut, her hands on her own ribs, feeling them rising and falling, rising and falling, letting her mind bob gently like a boat on little waves in the sunshine, over the miracle of her relief, the extravagant immensity of her gratitude, the intense and marvellous sense of being alive, herself, and able to relish that because Marianne was still alive, Marianne was breathing, breathing—

‘Elinor,’ someone said.

She opened her eyes, and looked up.

There was a man standing beside her, a vaguely familiar, dishevelled-looking man in a suede jacket with too long hair. She stared at him.

He sat down beside her. He was holding a showy modern car ignition key, the kind where you press a button—‘It’s Wills,’ Wills said. He tried a smile. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’

‘God,’ Elinor said, instinctively drawing back. ‘God, how dare you—’

He put a hand out. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Charlotte.’

‘Charlotte?’

‘She rang me. At seven o’clock this morning. She said it was an emergency.’ He looked down at the key in his hand. He said, with quiet emphasis, ‘She knows how I feel.’