It would have been hot in the funeral car without the addition of Miss Docker. The springs on which Mrs Lillie functioned, inside her cloud of suspended belief, resumed their gentle quivering.

The cortège began to trickle, trickle. At first there was a man, a kind of major-domo, very stately, in a pair of gloves, walking ahead to regulate the traffic. Then he got inside the hearse. She noticed the rector in his unaccommodating little car. Agnes began softly to cry. Her sister, Mrs Lillie knew, had never much cared for Tom. The Trevelyan girls were nodding gravely beneath their black balibuntals.

So the procession trickled, and at length ran, oilily, almost as though it were the organized intention to get the business over.

‘There is Mrs Cartwright,’ Miss Docker observed. ‘Thought she might at least have come. Seeing you were customers.’

The splendid car was only just audible.

‘There is that blue cattle-dog,’ Miss Docker remarked. ‘Get run over if it isn’t careful. Wonder who the owner is. Some people and their dogs.’

Mrs Lillie had never owned a dog. For some reason, she remembered the infinite kindness of her young, her beautiful husband, before he had grown rude to people who wanted to plant their own gardens, and the knife which stabbed her side was so agonizingly painful, her smile grew demonstrative.

‘You can depend on me, dear,’ Miss Docker assured. ‘At all times. Even in the middle of the night, you can give me a tingle on the ’phone. That is what the alcoholics do.’

Mrs Lillie was surprised her hands had not been broken off. But was grateful in a way. The actual, physical pain in which Miss Docker dealt, prevented her from stooping, and kissing once again her husband’s dead lips. She did not think she could have borne that.

When the procession halted. Jarringly. Something had happened over which the expert young chauffeur had no control.

‘What is it? Eh?’ Miss Docker demanded. ‘Want to break a person’s neck?’ She wound and wound at the window. She began to crane. ‘There is Mr Wakeman. He has got out. And that fellow from the funeral establishment. Have they lost their bearings? Don’t tell me! You can see Mr Wakeman is every inch an ex-army padre! He can’t give up those army boots. A proper man’s man. I would have thought a professional funeral establishment would of known the roads from anywhere to There.’

They had halted uncertain at a signpost, somewhere in a suburban scrub. The soil could not have been sandier.

‘But I can tell them,’ Miss Docker said. ‘Everybody knows the way to the Northern Suburbs Crematorium. We are going there every other week.’

For it had been decided that Tom Lillie should not be laid beneath the glass and broken bottles.

‘I say! Mr Wakeman!’ Miss Docker called through the open window, her veins growing thick and distended.

But the rector and the funeral person did not recognize Miss Docker.

‘Mr Wake-murn!’ she called, her skin all mottled. ‘Ohhhh!. How stupid can some men get!’