For his part, he had at first seen the cemetery as no more than a wooded knoll and the stones no more than granite outcroppings. It was not so now. The names in inscriptions, studied by him quietly or derisively read out by Gilly, evoked images of their bearers. James Calhoun Stokes, 1798-1862, Merchant of this City; ‘Upright in all his dealings, he stood firm to meet his Maker’. Gilly had an obscene rendering of that, of course. Thomas Charles Macpherson, 1802–79, Master Builder; ‘Blest are the Pure in Heart’. Lucy Matilda Osborne, 1823–96; ‘Her submissive duty to her husband and devotion to her sons was exceeded only by her pious adoration of her God’. John saw them in cutaway coats, in bombazine gowns, or night-capped on their deathbeds.

But Marlon saw them as a magisterial procession. Listening, watching, waiting perhaps for the ultimate outrage.

‘What a load of old cobblers! You’ll be down there yourself soon, all the fags you get through in a day.’ Gilly sat on a toppled stone, laughing. He had been telling John more about the casino man’s wife, trying to find among the statues they had piled up one whose figure might be comparable to hers. Britannias, muses, embodiments of virtues or arts, they lay prostrate, their blank grey or bronze faces all staring upwards at the clouded sky.

‘What are we going to do with them?’ Marlon said in the voice that was as desperate when he asked about trivialities as when he gave his prophet-like cries.

‘Ask the foreman,’ said John.

‘He won’t bloody know.’ And Gilly lifted on to his lap the bronze that was nearly nude, just veiled over her loins with metal drapery. ‘Randy old devil, he must have been, that Sidney George Whatsit, having her sitting on top of him when he was dead.’

‘He was a historian, the plaque says,’ said John. ‘She’s supposed to be Clio, the Muse of History. That’s why she’s got a scroll in her hand.’ And then, because he was bored with Gilly and afraid for Marlon, ‘Let’s stick them all in the chapel till the council guy comes.’

But Gilly refused to abandon the huge joke of caressing the bronze. Every reachable inch of her anatomy was examined until, suddenly, he jumped up, leaving her to roll into one of the muddy ruts the truck had made, and ran up to the pillared monument from whose dome she had toppled. He stood inside, a satyr, John thought, in a temple defiled by northern rains. He threw up his arms.

‘I said you was a randy old goat, Sidney, and so you was! I had a bird called Clio once myself, real hot stuff.’ His shouts punctured the thick greyness, the silence, the fog-textured air. He leapt down the steps, kicking a gravestone here, a marble urn there, and perched on a broken column. ‘Come out, all the lot of you, if you want, only you can’t because you’re bloody dead!’

And then Marlon made a horrible sound, the moan a man makes in sleep, in a nightmare, when he thinks he is screaming. He got into the cab of the truck and hunched there.