‘Yes, it is,’ lies Aaron. ‘Come on, sweetheart. Listen, they’re starting on the first hymn, come on, we don’t want to make too much of an entrance.’

As the voices rise in uncertain unison, Alix watches a bird perched on the ledge just outside the nearest window. It is the most horrible bird she has ever seen. Its feathers stick out at all angles, it is grey and black and huddled, its beak is crooked, and its legs end in pink leprous stumps. It is disease and pollution and death.

Turn back, O man, forswear thy foolish ways;

Old now is earth, and none may count her days.

They sing, and Alix finds herself reaching in her coat pocket for her wad of paper tissue.

Earth might be fair and all men glad and wise,

Age after age their tragic empires rise,

Built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep

Alix sobs. In vain has she tried to fix her attention upon the unpleasant Bird of III Omen: the music has made its way through to her, the familiar sonorous Old 124th pours through her, and in Pavlovian reflex she sniffs and sobs. She has always been a sucker for hymns, and this one goes straight to the heart. School assemblies of old stir and thicken in her memory, and she sees her young self, resilient, idealistic, standing bravely to attention to the brave words of Wandsworth-born Clifford Bax. Oh, the possibilities lost, the great expectations!

Would man but wake from out his haunted sleep,

Earth might be fair and all men glad and wise.

And so indeed it might have been, might be! Why could not man wake from his haunted sleep? Why must it go on for ever and ever, death and destruction, tragic empire after tragic empire, Tamburlaine, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the Stars and Stripes planted upon Mars as the imperial contamination spreads like a cancer through interstellar space? Will the killing ever stop, will the Numbers Game ever be played out, will atrocities ever cease, will the choir and the congregation be able to rise to the crescendo? No, of course not.

Earth shall be fair, and all her people one!

No, of course not, these voices are not powerful enough, they are not unified, they strain but they cannot make it, they are earthbound, feeble, out of tune. They are human. And God will not step in to help his people, for God is Dead. Even Clifford Bax had seemed doubtful about God, and more certain of the Inner than the Outer Voice: and since Bax’s death God himself has died, again and again and again. Alix believes she has utterly relinquished him, but the ache lingers on in the amputated limbs. For years after the Death of God, Alix had continued to pray to the habit of hope that God represented, and had found herself once more, in Brian’s illness, thinking of the possibility of prayer: but how to pray, in a universe of black dwarfs and red giants? How to pray, in a universe made of string? When I became a woman, I put away childish things, thinks Alix: things such as hymns, prayers, God, hope. The music revives in her a craving for them, a longing for comfort, for sugar, for the sweets of security. Is it this she weeps for, this loss? The very smell of school assembly, the smell of childhood returns to her: polished wood, pollen, boys’ trousers, dust, an institutional provincial Nonconformist smell subtly different from this old sacred church odour. What a package they had been sold, of high-minded devotion, of public service and self-sacrifice!