‘Why don’t you two get together again?’ asks match-making Marcia, with mock-innocence.

‘I’ve thought of it,’ says Charles. ‘I’ve thought of it. But you can’t wind back the clock, can you? You can’t make water flow uphill. No, I’m afraid we buggered that one up. Shame, really.’

‘Yes,’ echoes Marcia, ‘it’s a shame.’

Up on the best spare bed, Hattie is telling Aaron that she feels odd. Low back ache, might even be labour pains. How’s the traffic, she wants to know. She doesn’t fancy giving birth in the Fiat. On the other hand, what if her waters break all over Liz’s smart white drawn threadwork fake-Victorian cotton counterpane? In the bathroom, the vampire is perfuming herself with Liz’s Eau de l’Herbe Bleue. In the kitchen, Deirdre Kavanagh is gazing in dismay at the pieces of a gold coffee pot that she and Jonathan have in their passion dislodged: its fragments lie on the floor amongst the crushed Venetian glass roses.

In the study, the vicar is staring at the titles of Liz’s books. He feels left out, neglected. Alone of the guests, he feels he is not getting the best out of this gathering. He has no complaints about the refreshments, no, they have been more than satisfactory: but he had hoped for a little serious conversation. He is a conscientious man, a professional, and in preparation for this event he had dutifully read his way through most of the œuvre of Stephen Cox. He had sat up until the small hours, reading an essay on Coleridge and the French Revolution. He had been expecting a higher tone, a more reverent remembering, from these literary types. He had been game to talk about the historical novel, about the French Commune, about the Goncourt brothers, even about post-modernism, if it should come to that. But hardly anybody he has met has even mentioned Stephen, let alone his œuvre. They are all absorbed in their own affairs. Chatter chatter, gossip wink and wave. Who are all these folk? What strange hairstyles the young affect, and how bizarre the shoes of the counter-tenor! He cannot work out who is married to whom, who divorced from whom. Is it possible that the vastly pregnant not-so-young woman can be Dr Headleand’s daughter-in-law? Surely not. And who on earth was that shabby young man who had burst into the church so noisily in the middle of the service? What has happened to him?

‘Yes,’ continues Charles to his willing auditor, ‘I proposed to her in a Chinese restaurant. In the middle of some party or other. She was making eyes at Gabriel Denham. We were all having dinner after a show. I’ll put a stop to that, I thought to myself.’

‘Very wise of you,’ says Marcia. ‘Why don’t you ask her again?’