‘I shouldn’t have had it perched there by the mirror,’ said Rachel, and she turned the conversation to a forthcoming visit by a string quartet.

When Pearly and Helen were home and preparing for bed, they talked about the evening as was their familiar marriage custom — the hosts, the other guests, the meal, the house, the art, the inclination or otherwise to invite any of the folk to their own home. And, of course, about the small accident with the Venetian vase.

‘What on earth were you doing in there?’ asked Helen.

‘Looking at my tongue, and I just bumped it with my arm.’

‘It was probably quite expensive. We should do something about it.’

‘You buy something,’ said Pearly. ‘You know what’s appropriate. Buy something nice and I’ll write a card and take it round.’

‘How is your tongue?’

‘It’s coming right,’ said Pearly.

It was too late for Helen to read, and once in bed she turned the light out. Normally Pearly went to sleep quite quickly, but the day had discomforted him: not in a dramatic way, but just in its random somehow meaningless juxtapositions. The no-cigar letter in the car, his bitten tongue, the passing disagreement with Helen, the fall of the blue vase in the Sissonses’ bathroom. The last item might well become an anecdote that Adele would recount to her own guests: the mayor smashing a Venetian vase in the Sissonses’ bathroom and coming out to apologise. ‘We can’t for the life of us think what he must have been doing in there for that to happen,’ she might say archly.

But most of all Pearly thought of Rob Prendergast. What a decent, community-minded man he was and how soon he’d be forgotten. Pearly recalled his old face, warped and sagging on the skull, but still lit with good intention and concern for others.