Eventually Eugene disappeared. He was a bachelor. Nobody knew what illness he had been suffering from for years, apart from the nurses who changed his dressings once a week.

But he’s still there with Birdie. And in the last hours before dawn she can walk through her desolate house and still hear the plaintive music that Eugene’s little fingers commanded out of thin air. Not the thunder of ‘Here Comes the Bride’. No. That was Eugene’s pièce de résistance, which he had let rip in the church at the end of every wedding, for as long as anyone could remember. He called it ‘World War Three’.

But that’s not what Birdie hears. She hears the soft whisper of the harmonium playing Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’, as Eugene played it on that September morning in a small church on a hill just outside the town. It was a gothic stone church, flanked by two grand chestnuts. It was so small. And she loved the shafts of amber light that filtered through the stained glass behind the altar, and the smell of candle grease. It was like being at the door of heaven, the old people used to say.

Not to put a tooth in it, she was delighted that the canon, the old sourpuss, had refused to marry her in the main church in the middle of town.

The Vet had been talking about a friend of his, a priest out in Africa who was coming home, whom he hoped might officiate at the wedding. Well, the canon nearly had apoplexy. A dour old cleric, with folds of flesh falling off the bones on the side of his face, which gave him a disturbing resemblance to the gundog that snored on the rug beside the fire. Oh but the holy cleric was indignant that he, as parish priest, as canon up on his horse, would not be considered adequate to the task of marrying one of his own parishioners. Particularly, says he, particularly, that woman. But the Vet wasn’t a man to cower before the clergy. No, sir. And so they found a compromise, which adequately hurt both of them. The couple could have their guest priest if they wanted, but they couldn’t have the main church in the town.

And so it happened. As the chestnut trees outside the door showed signs of golden rust on the frayed edges of their leaves, and the first ripe chestnuts could be seen, as shiny as the flank of a horse, inside the opening pods on the cement paving, Birdie’s father walked her to the door. Waited there. And Eugene pumped the harmonium with his little feet, like a child pedalling a bike up a hill. For a few seconds the congregation could only hear the organist grunting, and then finally the first notes of ‘Ave Maria’ wheezed out of the old instrument.

Birdie never stopped loving that church, never stopped being drawn to it. She buried the Vet there behind the church twenty-six years later. And she never missed the annual visitation to the graves each November. No matter how difficult it was. No matter that she had to walk from the car, or stand in the wind, or look down at the little blue plastic bucket of flowers that she propped against the headstone, to declare that after all those years she was still as attentive as on the day of her wedding to a man the town knew nothing about.