What do you say about a funeral? ‘It was … well, processed.’

‘I know what you mean. Coffins on a conveyor belt. Mourners by numbers.’

‘A bit like that. Sort of next please! Jack made a speech, though.’

‘Did he?’ Penny was surprised, not surprisingly.

‘About pigeons. It was Ted who set off his interest in birds by telling him about the way pigeons live in London. He made a whole address out of it at the ceremony.’

‘I think that’s very appropriate.’

She was right. I was proud of Jack.

‘And then, at the drinks afterwards, everyone clapped and sort of cheered and tapped their feet when I made a toast to Ted.’

‘Ah.’

I took up the second cover and squinted at the panel where I would place the blocking. This second volume was thicker than the first and I would have to make an adjustment to positioning. I pinched at the spaces on the spine with my dividers, not wanting to expose my feelings to Penny.

She put her book in the press. It was a good edition of Keats’s Letters that we had restored and were going to rebind in full calf. Tomorrow she would paste a backing on the spine and cut the endpapers. I planned to hand-finish the leather binding with gold and blind tooling, the full works. It was a tasty job, as one of our old tutors at college would have said. If only we had a few more like it, as well as our regular bread-and-butter work of binding Ph.D. theses, law reports, photographers’ catalogue boxes and presentation Bibles.

‘I’m going to head inside,’ Penny said. ‘Evelyn’s going out and she wants me to give Cassie her tea and put her to bed.’

‘See you tomorrow,’ I said.

I made the pulls for the second and third volumes, using just the right pressure this time, then discarded the type and set up Lord Curzon. I loved the quiet in the bindery on evenings like this. Behind me, the tall window that looked out over the canal darkened and the pale struts of the gasometer supports briefly glowed like the skeleton of a spaceship.