Simple love for him filled Helen as she watched his dark profile. He was looking straight ahead of him as he bent with the others and they shouldered their burden. Slowly, in step, the bearers moved away down the aisle, taking Oliver out into the sunshine for the last time. Lord and Lady Montcalm followed him together, heads up now. The pews disgorged their dark occupants in their wake. Helen hung back and was swallowed up in the slow press forward. They came out of the cool church and into the light, where the afternoon sun was dipping lower and lengthening the shadows behind the headstones. White butterflies skimmed over the wild flowers that fringed the churchyard.

With Chloe and Pansy, Helen stood at the edge of the solid black crowd. She knew that Tom, and Darcy, and the other bearers were straining to hold the coffin steady on its band as it made the slow descent into the dark hole. Then there would be the scattering of earth, and the last, great, solemn words.

She struggled to hold the reality of Oliver close to her, away from here, as he had once been. She felt the vibrant life in him as he braced himself beside her in the black Jaguar. The curled sheepskin lining of his aviator’s coat tickled her throat and wrists. Suddenly, suffocatingly, he was all round her. She remembered his kiss after their first lunch together, and how he had tasted faintly of the rich burgundy.

They had gone to the little house that he called home on the Montcalm estate. He had carried her away, effortlessly out of herself, so that she didn’t belong to herself any more, but to him. Remembering his love-making, the natural way he had taken her as if she was a ripe fruit, the days of her love for him came flooding back as vividly as if they had just happened. It had been Oliver’s way to take, unthinkingly, with the assurance born of extreme privilege. But he had given too, his vitality and mercurial charm, with prodigal generosity while it was still his to give.

Love for him flowed through Helen once again, against the fierce current of sorrow and bitterness at his loss.

Out of the crowd a face caught her attention. It was Jasper Thripp, almost at the grave-mouth. Tears were sliding down his seamed brown face and falling unregarded on to his ancient, greeny-black suit. Helen jerked her eyes away again, unwilling to witness the nakedness of grief.