Stephen’s name hovers over the gathering, but it sheds little melancholy. At first some speak of him, and some do not. The service is praised, the Rimbaud setting receiving particular commendation. Stephen would have approved of it, it is agreed. One guest ventures that Stephen had chosen it as one of his Desert Island Discs: or something very like it. Mr Goodfellow tells a Stephen anecdote which serves as a fitting epitaph. Stephen, he says to a listening circle, had once modestly deflected the compliment of being an exemplary and tidy tenant in these words: ‘I’m not really tidy,’ Stephen had said. ‘It’s just that I don’t have many things.’

This remark does the rounds, relayed from one group to another. Heads nod. So it had been. Stephen had lived light, and travelled light, and lightly he had departed. His wisdom is praised by women who hang on to their handbags amongst the spoils of Liz Headleand, by men whose attention flicks from time to time to their office desks or their parked cars. Stephen has reinforced their identities. They hold out their glasses for more wine.

Other guests are not so fortunate, and their view of the day’s events and the course of post-industrial capitalist civilization may not be quite so benign. For this is one of those days, long awaited and by some gleefully predicted, when it seems that the whole system will break down. (And if the traffic can, why not finance, why not money markets, why not the machinery of the whole world?) The accident on the M4, which had forced Konstantin on to the tube instead of into a taxi, has introduced some virus into the bloodstream of the city, and traffic lights have broken down sympathetically all over the west and the north. Charing Cross Road, Tottenham Court Road, Baker Street, Marylebone Road and Euston Road are immobilized. Queues stretch northwards way up the Finchley Road. Once in, there is no way out. In stationary vehicles angry mourners berate their partners for having chosen the wrong route. Some abandon taxis for the Underground, only to find that it too is infected, its platforms dangerously crowded, its announcements on the blink. Aaron, threading through back streets in his old Fiat, glances nervously at Hattie’s belly and wishes he had let her follow her own instincts. Even if they get to St John’s Wood, how the hell is he going to get her back again to the delivery ward? By helicopter?