But Lydia either could not understand her husband's silent plea or chose to ignore it. He had not brought her son to visit her, her face said, that was the least she expected of him, and tears flowed down her cheeks. Mikey's absence was bringing out into the open the anger and unhappiness that both of them had suppressed, postponed for another time, the night Lydia danced on broken glass and experienced a physical pain momentarily more overwhelming than the pain in her heart and mind. Now, in that hospital ward, those agonies, physical and metaphysical, fused together into a blend of fury and grief. She wept silently, without trembling lips or blinking eyes. Jackson imagined what the stony face of the weeping statue of Our Lady of Fatima looked like (even though he had twice resisted travelling to Portugal with Mam Agnes to see the miracle).

It was Jackson who saw an equally immense anguish on Silas's face, his clenched jaw and rigid eyes. He was at Silas's side when he started sagging down as if his legs had suddenly lost their strength. He helped him into a chair, and sent Alec running down the corridor to summon help.

Mam Agnes wondered what her husband was doing when, after loosening Silas's tie, he took a pen from the poor, trembling man's pocket and wedged it between his teeth. She would ask him afterwards how he had known it was a seizure.

‘It is the kind of thing you just see coming,’ he would answer.

At first, Gracie thought that Silas was acting, that it was a case of ‘green cheese’ (a term she had heard somewhere to describe people who would not be outdone for drama). But then she saw how limp he was, slumped in the chair, and how his eyes seemed to have rolled up in his head, something that only happened to dead people.

‘Oh my God!’ she shouted. ‘Come on, Alec, where are you?’

She too went running down the corridor, no longer trusting that he would find a doctor in time. Imagine the shame of having to tell people that Silas died in hospital, in full view of his sick wife, and that they could do nothing to help!

Lydia, when she had overcome her own feeling of helplessness, was dismayed at how quickly Alec and Gracie had panicked, and how this had infected Mam Agnes. She was standing over Jackson, hissing instructions, telling him to wait for the doctors to come. He tried to tell her that it would be better for Silas to lie down flat, even if it was on the floor. Sitting hunched up like that couldn't be doing his circulation any good.

When Gracie and Alec eventually returned with a doctor, it was obvious that they had been arguing, calling each other names, each saying that the other was ‘retarded’. Lydia could not help smiling. They used that kind of angry language to ease the tension. But she seemed unbecomingly calm, ‘grinning even’, Alec would say later, under such grim circumstances. She was able to tell the doctor that, to her knowledge, Silas had only suffered one such attack before, almost twenty years ago.