Everything overran, despite Hannah’s best efforts: the hearse arrived and the undertakers had to wait, discreetly and sympathetically consulting their watches. Then Max and Alex and Sandy and a couple of Zachary’s cousins carried out the coffin, strained and tense with the difficulty of it; family and a few close friends followed the hearse to the crematorium, where there was a brief last ceremony. Christine was grateful for this displacement onto alien territory, with its exhausted neutral sanctimony, limp from use. Pink silky curtains, jerking along their rail, reminded her of a cinema. She could abstract herself at last, be absent, think about nothing.

Afterwards Grace had hardly any recollection of the day.

— But I wanted to keep it all up here, she cried in dismay to Isobel in her bedroom, putting her hands to her temples. — Now I wish I’d videoed it. I should have.

— You’ll have your photographs, Isobel reassured her. — Anyway, it will come back to you. For now, your poor mind is overloaded. It needs rest.

— I do remember Sandy’s instrumental. Wasn’t he great?

— He was great.

— Do you think he’ll take me more seriously, now that I’m grieving? Not that I’m looking for a sympathy fuck or anything. Though perhaps I am. I wouldn’t mind.

— Lie down now. Stop thinking.

They were to spend one last night in the chapel rooms before Lydia came to stay with Christine and Alex, and Grace went to Isobel’s. Grace didn’t know if she’d go back to Glasgow for her fourth year. She couldn’t imagine what would happen next, couldn’t imagine her life resuming where it had left off. All the women went to bed in the late afternoon and slept deeply, then woke to a honey-coloured evening light, emptiness in the rooms, syrupy birdsong. They were at a loss now that the funeral was over, which had been an end point in their imagination. Its burden was lifted and they were weightless; Hannah’s team had tidied the gallery, closed it for a week. Alex was out, who knew where? He sometimes walked for miles around the city streets. Christine cut some ham and put it out on the kitchen table with pickles and tomato salad, she boiled new potatoes and put butter on them, picked parsley in the yard where Zachary had grown herbs in all the pots. Lydia had held up wonderfully, everyone said, she had smiled graciously and talked to all the friends who came. She swallowed one of the pills the doctor had prescribed.