When the food came, they found that they were ravenously hungry. There was no game, so they ate rare, tender beef as the nearest substitute and heaped it with the simplicity of summer vegetables. The rich, stylish burgundy lapped them in its generous warmth. When the second bottle came, Helen recalled Oliver joking about the one-bottle lunch being a thing of the past, and how afterwards his mouth had tasted of the wine when he kissed her.

Goodbye, she murmured in her heart. Goodbye.

After the beef came summer pudding, the first of the year, running in its own crimson juice.

‘How perfect,’ Pansy sighed, as she spooned up the last mouthful.

Much later, over the brandy glasses, it was Pansy who spoke the words that were in each of their minds.

‘How Noll would have enjoyed that. Except he would have insisted “At least another bottle”.’ Her eyes went round the table, almost as though she was measuring the space for another chair. ‘It’s as if he’s sitting here with us. I couldn’t think about him at that graveside this afternoon. But now, tonight, he’s here. Slouching back in his seat, holding his glass up against the candlelight.’ Her lovely voice was husky and hardly more than a whisper, but they heard and remembered every word.

Pansy was a little drunk, and she let her guard slip lower than they had ever known it. ‘The trick is to be able to forgive yourself, isn’t it? Noll couldn’t do that. He couldn’t be gentle with himself. Funny that someone so outwardly invulnerable should be the most fragile person I have ever known.’

Fragile, Helen thought. Yes, that’s what it was. His world had made his hold on reality too fragile, and he distorted it beyond that with drink and drugs.

‘D’you think he wanted to die?’ Pansy whispered.

Tom stirred a little. ‘Perhaps, in the bad times, just once or twice. But not when it happened. He was too alive, then. It was the cruellest accident.’

His voice trailed away and Helen reached and took his hand. They sat in silence, thinking about him and the void that he had left.

‘Here’s to him,’ Pansy said, and swallowed her brandy in a long gulp. In their candlelit circle they drank to him. ‘He’s here when we meet like this. We’ll do it again, won’t we?’

Yes, they answered her. Somehow or other, we’ll do it.

‘Another toast,’ Pansy added. ‘You two.’

And Helen and Tom exchanged the fleeting, complicit glance of lovers.

‘What about Darcy?’ Chloe asked gently. Tonight had brought them too close for them to need to keep tactful silences.

‘I think Darcy will be all right,’ Helen answered her. ‘We didn’t belong together in that way, you know. I tried to believe that we did, from the very beginning in Venice, but it never was the truth.’