The place fitted every part of Zachary’s idea and even surpassed it because he could make a home for his family as well, in the adjoining parish rooms which had been added on in the nineteenth century and came as part of the purchase. And the sensation of dropping down into this pocket of stillness and neglect – sometimes no one passed in the little cul-de-sac for half an hour at a time – was somehow significantly related to the roaring traffic and filthy air just around the corner on the main road. The chapel wouldn’t have appealed half as much, Zachary explained, if it hadn’t been less than a minute’s walk from the clamour of car body repair shops and kebab shops, printworks, fabric wholesalers, a funeral director’s with sculpted ebony horses’ heads on folds of sky-blue satin in the window, a dingy pub with yellow bottle-glass in mock-Tudor windows where a star cut out from fluorescent card, hand-lettered in felt pen, announced ‘Topless Waitress’s’.

Lydia flew over with Grace from New York to take a look. — This is a crazy place, she said. — I think you’re crazy. We can’t live in a church! We will be haunted. Think how these people would have hated us.

— They don’t hate us now, Zachary said. — They’re dead, they’ve transcended mortal prejudice. If they’re watching us they’ll understand our idea, they’ll like it. We’ll plant a tree in the middle of the courtyard.

Looking into the courtyard, Lydia was appalled by the accretions of so many generations of rotted filth, piled up to the level of the windows: this chaos seemed unalterable to her, like something fixed and cruel. She couldn’t have faced it herself, but she trusted Zachary. Contracts were exchanged, he was given the keys, and they invited Christine and Alex – who else? – to drink champagne with them that same afternoon in the chapel, consecrating its new life in art. Zachary kissed the keys ceremoniously in the street outside – where still, perhaps disconcertingly, no one passed. Would anyone ever visit the gallery? The keys themselves, anyhow, were things of beauty, with their austerely slender iron stems and the ellipse of their bow-ends, drawn fine as italic calligraphy. It seemed a miracle that after almost three hundred years you could put the same key in the same lock and turn it, and the mechanism would respond to its cue: they had brought WD40 but didn’t need it. The door swinging back on its hinges allowed them inside, where they had visited before, of course, but only under the inhibiting scrutiny of the estate agent. The musty, dusty, empty, softly echoing high space belonged to them now – they could do what they liked with it. Pale October light filtered through cobwebs as thick as cloth in the windows.