There was a box of tissues on the desk. She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes, carefully, so as not to smudge her eyeliner. She was quite in control of herself by the time she reached the carpark. That’s that, she thought. She told Alec on the way home. Gave him the gist of it, very calmly, as though talking about someone they both vaguely knew, a neighbour. It was almost comical. He stalled the car three times at the traffic lights at the end of Commercial Road, and for a moment she was afraid he was going to have some sort of collapse, a ‘wobble’, like the one he had before, when the police found him wandering along the beach at Brighton in a perfect daze. But they got home somehow, teatime, six o’clock perhaps, and she went into the garden to find that the first of the lilac was out, and she had cried again, sitting on the bench by the summerhouse, fronds of honeysuckle round her head, crying for joy at so much beauty and wanting to float up over the potato fields like the heroine in one of those South American novels, Alec waving to her with a white handkerchief from an upstairs window. It hadn’t lasted, of course. A week later she was so low they started her on the Paroxetine.

At least the will was done, though she had wondered recently whether she might leave something to Una. She hadn’t been sure at first about Una O’Connell. A dreamy, rather self-contained sort of character. And it was hard not to resent the young. Their rude health. The feeling that one was being condescended to. But the girl had qualities. Good hands. A sweet, rather melancholy smile. And in her way she knew as much about the wretched cancer as Brando did. Alec could give the lawyers a call tomorrow (you had to be careful; she couldn’t stand the thought of disputes). Then when Larry came she must speak to them both about the funeral, which they wouldn’t have a clue about. Stephen’s had cost the best part of two thousand pounds, and that was twenty years ago. There were cardboard coffins now, biodegradable. She had even read that you could be composted, which might be amusing. Four parts vegetable waste to one part human. The boys would decide about the house. And what would they do with her clothes? Give them away? Burn them?