They heard Lydia’s steps then, resonant in high heels, on the staircase which linked the living quarters with the gallery, through the office on the mezzanine. When she appeared in the office doorway above them it was clear that she had dressed up for the occasion – in a vermilion satin dress fitting her figure tightly, with a patterned scarf wrapped around her hair like a turban. Stepping down with assurance in her teetering high shoes, in the silence that had fallen with her arrival, she was as striking as a visiting queen, or a tropical bird alighting in the room. Her smile was faintly defiant – she had smiled like that, Christine thought, when she was scolded once at school for forgetting her homework. Their geography teacher had hated Lydia, spitting with loathing, shaking her violently by the shoulders so that her plaits flew: Lydia – Smith – you – nasty – little – piece – of – work. Now Lydia looked into the coffin, gripping its wooden side tightly. Then she said a few words, thanking people for their help, for rallying around the family. Her small, dry voice was lonely in the absence of Zachary’s loud informality, his booming, commanding bass.

Grace embarked on taking her photograph. The cranky ancient camera was specially adapted to hold a glass plate. Its broken imperfection, Gilby the photographer said, made for the beauty of the end result; glue peeling off between the layers of the lens meant that when the light struck, it diffused to beautiful effect. Because they couldn’t zoom, and the camera needed to be held steady for thirty seconds’ exposure, they had to set up a platform of sorts – two planks balanced across between two sets of steps – where Grace could crouch under her black cloth, looking down on where her father lay. A whiff of ether floated from the storage cupboard which was their temporary darkroom, and the syrupy collodion mixture dripped from the camera onto the floor. Lydia wouldn’t watch what was going on. Grace kept her hand clamped across the lens, pulled it away, counted to thirty, covered the aperture again. They went through the whole process with two separate plates, in case anything went wrong with the first one. No one could look at the pictures yet. They had to be varnished, the backs of the plates had to be painted over and the whole thing sealed inside a protective frame.