The silence was violated only by Gilly’s talk. He had one topic of conversation, but that one was inexhaustible and everything recalled him to it. A name on a tomb, a scrap of verse on a gravestone, a pair of sparrows, the decorously robed statue of an angel. ‘Bit of all right, that one,’ he would say, stroking the stone flesh of a weeping muse, his hands so coarse and calloused that John wondered how any real woman could bear them to touch her. Or, lifting the ivy from a grave where lay a matron who had married three times, ‘Couldn’t get enough of it, could she?’ And these reflections led him into endless reminiscences of the women he had had, those he now possessed, and anticipations of those awaiting him in the future.

Nothing stayed him. Not the engraved sorrow of parents mourning a daughter dead at seventeen, not the stone evocations of the sufferings of those dead in childbirth. Some of the vaults had been despoiled and left open, and he would penetrate them, descending subterranean stairs, shouting up to John and Marlon from the depths that here was a good place to bring a girl. ‘Be OK in the summer. There’s shelves here, make a good bed, they would. Proper little boudoir.’

John often regretted the thing he had done which made Gilly admire him. It had been on his first day there. He knew, even before he had done it, that this was to show them he was different from them, to make it clear from the start that he was a labourer only because there was no other work obtainable for such as he. He wanted them to know he had been to a university and was a qualified teacher. The shame and humiliation of being forced to take this unskilled work ate into his soul. They must understand his education had fitted him for something higher. But it had been a foolish vanity.

There had been nothing in the deep cavity any more but stones and dead leaves. But he had jumped in and held up a big pitted stone and cried ringingly: ‘That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if ‘twere Cain’s jawbone that did the first murder!’

Gilly stared. ‘You make that up yourself?’

‘Shakespeare,’ he said. ‘Hamlet,’ and the awe on Gilly’s unformed pug-nosed face made him go on, excited with success, a braggart in a squalid pit. ‘Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing. Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth? And smelt so? pah!’

Marlon had gone white, his face peaked between the falls of thin yellow hair. He wore a heavy blue garment, a kind of anorak, but it gave him a medieval look standing there against the chapel wall, an El Greco sky flowing above its tower, purple and black and rushing in scuds above this northern Toledo. But Gilly was laughing, begging John to go on, and John went on, playing to the groundlings, holding the stone aloft. ‘Alas, poor Yorick . . .’ until at last he flung it from him with the ham actor’s flourish, and up on the path again was being clapped on the back by Gilly and told what a brain he’d got. And Gilly was showing what he was and what all that had meant to him by demanding to have that bit again, the bit about the lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.