Mr Henly liked having her talk to him. During many years of married life he had forgotten what sex was really about.

He reached into his pocket for a cigarette and discovered that he had smoked them all up. He felt very embarrassed. The girl stared at him as if he were a small child that had done something wrong.

Winter Rug

My credentials? Of course. They are in my pocket. Here: I’ve had friends who have died in California and I mourn them in my own way. I’ve been to Forest Lawn and romped over the place like an eager child. I’ve read The Loved One, The American Way of Death, Wallets in Shrouds and my favourite After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

I have watched men standing beside hearses in front of mortuaries directing funerals with walky-talkies as if they were officers in a metaphysical war.

Oh, yes: I was once walking with a friend past a skid row hotel in San Francisco and they were carrying a corpse out of the hotel. The corpse was done tastefully in a white sheet with four or five Chinese extras looking on, and there was a very slow-moving ambulance parked out front that was prohibited by law from having a siren or to go any faster than thirty-seven miles an hour and from showing any aggressive action in traffic.

My friend looked at the lady or gentleman corpse as it went by and said, ‘Being dead is one step up from living in that hotel.’

As you can see, I am an expert on death in California. My credentials stand up to the closest inspection. I am qualified to continue with another story told to me by my friend who also works as a gardener for a very wealthy old woman in Marin County. She had a nineteen-year-old dog that she loved deeply and the dog responded to this love by dying very slowly from senility.

Every day my friend went to work the dog would be a little more dead. It was long past the proper time for the dog to die, but the dog had been dying for so long that it had lost the way to death.

This happens to a lot of old people in this country. They get so old and live with death so long that they lose the way when it comes time to actually die.

Sometimes they stay lost for years. It is horrible to watch them linger on. Finally the weight of their own blood crushes them.

Anyway, at last the woman could not stand to watch the senile suffering of her dog any longer and called up a veterinarian to come and put the dog to sleep.

She instructed my friend to build a coffin for the dog, which he did, figuring it was one of the fringe clauses of gardening in California.