Marlon hadn’t laughed or congratulated him. Bewildered, frightened by the daring of it and the incomprehensibility, he fumbled to light a fresh cigarette, another of the sixty he would smoke that day. Cigarettes were all he had, a tenuous hold on that real world in which his mother, sixteen years before, had named him after a famous actor. The smoke flowed from his loose lips. In a way, but for that cigarette, he might have been an actor in a miracle play perhaps or in a chorus of madmen. On that day as on all the others that followed, he walked behind them as they made their way back through the shaded aisles, under the leather-leaved ilexes, between the little houses of the dead.

In the hut there was tea to be drunk, and then home, the foreman off to his semidetached and his comfortable wife, Marlon to his mother and stuffy rooms and television commercials, John to his bedsit, Gilly (as John, the favoured, was now privileged to be told) to the arms of a casino owner’s wife whose husband lacked a gravedigger’s virility.

The chapel was built of yellowish-grey stones. It had an octagonal nave, and on its floor thin, hair-like grass grew up between the flags. To one of its sides was attached a square tower, surmounted at each angle by a thin ornamented spire. The four spires, weather-worn, corroded, stained, were like four needles encrusted with rust. The workmen used the chapel as a repository for pieces of broken stone and iron rails. Even Gilly’s bullying could not make Marlon go inside. He was afraid of Gilly and the foreman, but not so afraid as he was of the echoing chapel and of the dust beneath his feet.

Gilly said, ‘What’d you do, Marl, if you turned round now and it wasn’t me here but a skeleton in a shroud, Marl?’

‘Leave him alone,’ said John, and when they were alone in the nave, ‘You know he’s a bit retarded.’

‘Big words you use, John. I call him cracked. D’you know what he said to me yesterday? All them graves are going to open up and the dead bodies come out. On some special day that’s going to be. What day’s that then? I said. But he only wobbled his head.’

‘The dreadful Day of Judgement,’ said John, ‘when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed.’

‘Wouldn’t suit me, that. Some of them old skulls’d blush a bit if I told them what I’d been getting up to last night. The secrets of all hearts? Open some of them up and I’d have a good many blokes on my track, not to mention that old git, you-know-who. Break his bloody roulette wheel, he would.’

‘Over your head, no doubt,’ said John.

‘A short life and a randy one, that’s what I say.’ They came out into the cold, pale sunlight. ‘Here, have a shufty at this. Angelina Clara Bowyer, i8i6 to 1839. Same age as what you are, mate, and she’d had five kids! Must have worn her old man out.’