Lydia marvelled at herself. – I’m the useless one. I never even did my own housework or learned to cook – and I had a nanny when Grace was little. Now I don’t know how I’m going to fill my days! I can’t go on with what we did before. What would I do in all those exciting places, meeting those wonderful people, on my own, without Zach’s unstoppable enthusiasm? His enthusiasm always seemed so risky to me, as if he was setting himself up for disappointment – though he never was disappointed. The world went on supplying him with beautiful people making their beautiful gestures: good things came into being, to fulfil his expectations. They won’t come into being for me, that’s for sure.

— Something will come into being for you. I know that as surely as I know anything.

— I can’t be here. I can’t stay in these rooms.

— You don’t have to be here. You can come back and stay with us, for as long as you like.

The heavy coffin was carried in as if some singular and controversial work were arriving for exhibition. Quite a crowd was gathered in the gallery: family and friends and helpers hung back around the edges of the space. It was Isobel who bravely went up first to look at Zachary, when the undertakers had gone: she did it for Grace. She had had this magnanimous ideal of duty since she was a little girl, befriending all the doomed, lonely children in her class. — Oh, it’s not too bad, she reported with relief. — It’s sort of like him but not like him.

– I’m so glad to see his face again, Grace said when she went over to look. — It makes me feel better.

The two girls stood holding onto each other, Grace weeping into Isobel’s shoulder, Isobel stroking her shorn head. Hannah carried flowers down from the office, vases full with tall white foxgloves and delphiniums and hollyhocks, fat peonies. But the sight of Zachary’s body was a horror to Christine, the darkness in the nostrils, his closed face. He looked like a stuffed doll, with his stubby-fingered hand laid in rhetorical gesture across his heart, wedding ring on ostentatious display. Lydia had given the undertakers one of the lightweight wool suits he’d had made in Hong Kong – a clownish tobacco-brown check.