She thinks of Betty Sykes, in her own eccentric way still obedient to that high calling, that long indoctrination: she thinks of Brian who has never needed God but who has always loved his fellowmen; she thinks of Paul Whitmore, whom God had utterly abandoned; she thinks of Stephen Cox, who had loved nobody and hated nobody, dying alone in a foreign land.

She hopes that Stephen did not die in despair. She hopes that it is true that he died of malaria, not at the hands of his fellow-men. We all owe God a death, but we hope not to find ourselves cornered in a guesthouse bathroom staring down the barrel of a gun, or forced to dig our own grave by our own kind.

‘Earth shall be fair, and all her folk be one!’ conclude the choir and congregation, with a faltering unpractised note of heartbreaking optimism, extended equally to the toiling billions of China, to the Indian subcontinent, to the Americas, to the fragmenting empire of the Soviet Union, to the Iranians and the Inuit and the head-hunters of Irian Jaya and the whole stinking selfish murderous brutish greedy gazetteer of National Geographic folk colourful and colourless, rich and poor, oppressing and oppressed: in short to the whole four or five billion individuals that make up the population of the globe, of whom this ragged, tattered, fragmented, faithless gathering makes but a miserably inadequate representation. Alix feels a sudden, terrible impatience. What are they doing here, in a church, for God’s sake, at this point in time? Why can’t we get on with the next thing? She blows her nose firmly, and Hattie Osborne dabs at her stained dress, and jetlagged Helen Anstey yawns discreetly, and Lord Filey noisily unwraps a throat sweet, and Charles wonders if he will get a parking ticket. (Or, worse, a clamp.)

During the address that follows, in which Stephen’s virtues are respectfully but wittily recalled by one of his many ex-publishers, Alix stares firmly at the pigeon. Brian’s illness has shaken her more than she will admit. Mortality huddles and struts on the window ledge. Paul Whitmore has tried to hang himself. Stephen is dead. What becomes of all those soarings, those flights, those intimations? Does life thin out now until death, is one’s best hope now to cease to feel? Must one now give up, at this late stage in the game? Alix half wishes she had not taken up reading popular scientific theory. Chaos and string have unhinged her mind, and it wanders off unbidden into outer space, where it has no business, and which it can never comprehend. While scientists in their decaying mortal frames fret, aggrieved, anthropocentric, after the Nobel, that other time extends for ever, and nothing comes back but a thin cosmic giggle. We got over Copernicus, we got over Galileo, we got over Darwin, we have survived Einstein and the Death of God and the Death of the Family and the Death of the Novel, and what can we now do but laugh? Can the joke save us? Or has it too gone off? Alix is depressed by the publisher. He means well, but he has gone on for too long. She hopes he will not make a joke about the Booker Prize. But he does, he does.