Hattie had frivously suggested ‘Remember all the people, Who live in far-off lands’, but she had on persuasion relinquished it in favour of ‘As pants the hart for cooling streams,’ a piece that she has since early childhood found curiously erotic. She has also with some perseverance tracked down a more appropriate poem by a Paris-based Cambodian poet, called ‘Requiem for a Generation’. It is to be read, in translation of course, by Hilda Stark.

As the congregation settles, the organ plays some muffled music, and Liz gazes around her at the fluted pillars picked out in dark blood-red and gold, at the black and white tiles of her dream, at the gaudy turquoise and lighter red scrolls and twirls and ornaments behind the altar, at the funerary tablets upon the wall. Two plump winged cherub-heads hover solidly in heavy ivory-yellow corpse-marble above a polished skill. An inscription records the Vertues of Samuel Winter, renowned for his mildness of temper and benignity of mind.

Is that one of Stephen’s brothers over there, fussily arranging his rain coat on the pew? He looks very like Stephen. And there is Stephen’s landlord, Mr Goodfellow, with his mild untidy well-meaning features, peering short-sightedly at his programme, and that old boy must be Stephen’s one-time tutor, Lord Filey of Foley. There are Robert and Esther, there is Pett Petrie, there is Gabriel Denham (who might, thinks, Liz have bothered to put on a tie). There, good Lord, is Simon Grunewald! So he has made it! And there is Dr Marianne Sanderson, and Jonathan Headleand, and there is John Geddes, who seems to have lost a lot of weight. There are Brian and Alix, there is that chap from the British Council whose name she can never remember, and there is Melvyn Stacey. But who on earth is that elegant ash-blonde woman in a dark blue tailored suit with dark blue seamed stockings and a hat? And is that pallid, silver-haired worried-looking woman in a grey coat by any chance Rose Vassiliou? And where the hell are Aaron and Hattie Osborne? And can that be the representative from Stephen’s old school, Moxley Hall?

Aaron and Hattie are on the steps by the side entrance. They are both laughing, but there is a note of hysteria in Hattie’s laughter. ‘Oh shit,’ she says, ‘shit, shit, shit.’ And shit indeed it is. A pigeon in the straining, groaning broad-leaved plane-tree above them has shat upon Hattie, and her raincoat and her best blue maternity dress are spattered with tablespoonsful of grey-green khaki excrement. She dabs at it with a piece of kitchen roll from her pocket, Aaron scrapes at it with a dirty blue white-spotted handkerchief. ‘Oh Jesus, I look a freak,’ says Hattie, staring crossly upwards angrily through the coarse tossing green leaves. ‘Filthy, filthy, pesky, disgusting birds!’

‘Come on, Hat, we’ll be late,’ says Aaron, coaxingly. ‘Anyway, it’s lucky, so they say. It’s good luck, bird shit.’

‘Is it really?’ Hattie brightens.