Everything was on TV. Millions of American families sat in front of their sets all weekend. The three networks canceled all their regular programs. The news consisted entirely of stories linked to the assassination, and between bulletins there were documentaries about John F. Kennedy, his life, his family, his career, and his presidency. With merciless pathos they reran the happy footage of Jack and Jackie greeting the crowds at Love Field on Friday morning, an hour before his death. Maria recalled how she had idly asked herself if she would change places with Jackie. Now both of them had lost him.

At midday on Sunday, in the basement of the Dallas police station, the prime suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself murdered, live on television, by a minor mobster called Jack Ruby; a sinister mystery piled on top of an insupportable tragedy.

On Sunday afternoon Maria asked Nelly Fordham if they needed tickets for the funeral. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry, no one from this office is invited,” Nelly said gently. “Only Pierre Salinger.”

Maria felt panicky. Her heart fluttered. How could she not be there when they lowered the man she loved into his grave? “I have to go!” she said. “I’ll speak to Pierre.”

“Maria, you can’t go,” Nelly said. “You absolutely can’t.”

Something in Nelly’s tone rang an alarm bell. She was not just giving advice. She almost sounded scared.

Maria said: “Why not?”

Nelly lowered her voice. “Jackie knows about you.”

This was the first time anyone in the office had acknowledged that Maria had a relationship with the president; but in her distress Maria hardly noticed that milestone. “She can’t possibly know! I was always careful.”

“Don’t ask me how, I have no idea.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Nelly might have been offended, but she just shook her head sadly. “From what little I understand of such things, I believe the wife always knows.”

Maria wanted to deny it indignantly, but then she thought of the secretaries Jenny and Jerry, and the socialites Mary Meyer and Judith Campbell, and others. Maria was sure they all had sexual relations with President Kennedy. She had no proof, but when she saw them with him she just sort of knew. And Jackie had feminine intuition too.

Which meant Maria could not go to the funeral. She saw that now. The widow could not be forced to face her husband’s mistress at such a time. Maria understood that with total, miserable certainty.

So she stayed at home on Monday to watch it on TV.

The body had been lying in state in the rotunda at the Capitol. At half past ten the flag-draped coffin was carried out of the building and placed on a caisson, a type of gun carriage, drawn by six white horses. The procession then headed toward the White House.

Two men stood out in the funeral cortege, being inches taller than the rest: French president Charles de Gaulle, and the new American president, Lyndon Johnson.

Maria was all cried out. She had been sobbing for almost three days. Now when she looked at the television she just saw a pageant, a show organized for the benefit of the world. For her this was not about drums and flags and uniforms. She had lost a man; a warm, smiling, sexy man; a man with a bad back and faint wrinkles in the corners of his hazel eyes and a set of rubber ducks on the edge of his bathtub. She would never look at him again. Life without him stretched long and empty ahead of her.