GEORGE CHATS TO ELLEN for an hour. Rambling thoughts spill from him, like marbles from a jar. ‘Paninis, Ellen. They’re the future. Should have taken you on that cruise. Your eggs were perfect. I miss your slippers by the back door. The dog lies down when you click your fingers.’ Eventually he stands up and dusts himself off.

‘Come on, dog. Time to do some digging.’ George leaves Ellen with a gentle pat on the headstone and a promise to be back soon, then goes to find Betty. ‘Need a hand, you old wench?’

She’s tugging at a particularly resilient weed with both hands, but still no luck. George joins in and they re-enact the front cover of The Gigantic Turnip, with the two dogs urging them on.

‘Mary and Joseph,’ Betty wheezes, while Poppy digs at a patch of earth nowhere near the weed and Lucky runs round with a pink rose he stole from Iris Fielding’s grave.

‘Shouldn’t laugh,’ Betty snorts, when they finally uproot it, falling back and almost losing her footing. ‘God save the Queen!’ She sits back on her bottom and lets out a giggle that has no place in a graveyard.

‘Tougher than one of my bloody nose hairs, that was.’ George brushes away some mud and shines up the stone with his hanky. He offers it to Betty, when he sees she’s gone a bit runny and rheumy.

‘Wow. Thanks.’ She looks for a bit without dirt on it and dabs at her eyes. ‘You’re a true gent.’

‘Feel better for coming?’

‘Yes, oddly. Who’d have thought you’d be right about something?’

‘I can see why you’d want to forget.’

George has been thinking about it. About having to see Ellen like that, wasting away, all her faculties gone. All the things that had made her Ellen missing. Nothing more than a body that needed wiping and rolling over. He pictured himself in the bed, Ellen being the carer. How he’d hate that. Her feeding him with a spoon, wiping his arse. Making him the baby she’d never had. He’d drink the morphine down in gulps until it did the trick.

‘I bet your husband hated it. I bet he wanted to die from the shame.’ They are walking out of the graveyard.

Betty stops and looks at him. She’s got mud on one cheek and her lipstick looks as if a child painted it on. ‘That’s it. That’s how he looked. Ashamed.’

‘You didn’t kill him, Betty. You gave him nothing but kindness. That doctor was right – it was the cancer that did for him.’

Betty sniffs and smiles and links her arm in his. When they’ve walked a little further, she says, ‘Thank you, George,’ very quietly.