At once her gaze encountered someone else. Beatrice was listening intently with the grey sweeps of hair over her ears pinned youthfully back. The ravaged expression that she had worn beside the river had gone. She looked, once again, the intelligent, slightly harried, middle-aged mother and wife. Helen searched for him and found Stephen standing next to her. Their hands were even discreetly clasped behind the folds of Beatrice’s skirt. They had made their own compromises, Helen thought. Stephen looked sorrowful, but his attention was elsewhere. Helen wondered what he was really thinking about.

Compromises. The reasonableness of the word mocked her and her own mistaken idealism.

The funeral was over. In twos and threes the mourners were turning away from the graveside and along the flagged path to the lych-gate. It was Lord and Lady Montcalm who stood in the porch now, finding the sombre strength to acknowledge the condolences. Rose Pole came past. She was dry-eyed at last, and with a kind of defiant dignity showing in her blotched face. Gerry was beside her, ginny tears still streaming. Darcy had a gentle word for them, but when they reached Lady Montcalm she shot a glance of such poisonous hatred at Rose that the fat woman ducked her head and shuffled wordlessly past.

Helen’s thoughts were too intently fixed elsewhere even to wonder why. The bearers were the last to leave the graveside. She stood stock-still as they filed past. Tom was staring straight ahead again, and she saw how drawn his face was. He walked by without a word, or even a glance at her, and Helen knew that she had been expecting nothing else. There was nothing for them to say to each other, and they were avoiding the pain of pretending that there was.

She stood watching with numbed, patient acceptance as Darcy moved to and fro. He managed to find the right words and the right gestures for everyone. He had become himself, as if the finality of Oliver’s loss had set him free from the confines of his own fears.

I wish I loved him. I wish.

He put his arms round his mother’s shoulders and led her away to the funereal black Rolls. Lady Montcalm put her white hand up to his cheek as she shrank inside, and he kissed it.

Cars purred away through the village. They were taking people away back into the sunshine, where they would undo tight collars and buttons with relief, sigh, and turn their attention back to the business of life.

Darcy was coming back down the path to where Helen waited for him. They were the only people left in the churchyard except for the sexton and his boy who were bending to their task with the dark, raw earth. The heady scent drifting from the heaped-up flowers was overpowering.

Darcy turned abruptly away.