On the morning of the day itself I went out to buy a card with jokes, rabbits, or daisies on to send to Sophy: it was her big day, her first big part, and I felt that I could not grudge her a card of good wishes in view of all the coffee, tea and black currant juice of mine that she had drunk over the past few weeks. On the way I passed a shop that I had never noticed before: it said FARRAR: CREMATION EMBALMING INTERMENT. Oh well, I thought as I registered the jolt it gave me, what silly significance life is made of. And at the news agent’s where I had gone to select my card the headlines of all the papers, spread out en masse, were devoted to some horrific air disaster over the Atlantic: more than a hundred missing, feared drowned, with twenty-six miraculously rescued. I had not looked at our paper that morning, and anyway, we take The Times. I bought a copy of The Guardian to see if there were any reports of what the survivors had said: it is interesting to know what people think who unexpectedly survive death, whether it seems to them to be coincidence or providence. There were no spectacular remarks this time, but it said that the only child on board, a three-year-old boy, had been rescued, and that it was believed that his mother had not been on the plane, that he had been flying to join her in England. And at this fact, this small fact, I felt my eyes fill with tears of gratitude. I stood there crying in the news agent’s because he would not have to say endlessly “Where’s Mummy?” with no answer, whereas for all I knew, for all the paper said, he had never set eyes on her in his life since birth, she might well have deserted him in the cradle. I thought of Flora or Joe, wet with all those oceans of water, and I cried. Then I bought a card for Sophy, with blue rabbits, and went back home. When I got back, David was still in bed. He called to me as he heard me on the stairs, and I went to him.

“There was someone on the phone for you,” he said.

“Oh. Who?”

“I don’t know, he didn’t say. Some man.”

“It must have been Mike.”

“I know Mike. It wasn’t Mike.”

“Oh. Then I can’t think who it can have been.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. Look.” I gave him the paper, with the account of the air disaster.

“What about it?” he said. “We heard all about that at rehearsal last night. What’s so special about that? You didn’t know anyone on it, did you?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“Nothing. It’s just so accidental. So arbitrary.”

“Accidents always are accidental.”

“There was a little boy.”