Gradually, stranded figures straggle in to swell the throng, with tales of disaster overcome. There is one woman in a black suit and veiled hat whom nobody recognizes at all. She speaks to nobody, but eats and drinks almost as heartily as Simon Grunewald. The rumour circulates that she is a professional mourner who works the beat. Aaron thinks he saw her at Jacqueline du Pre’s Memorial, and Pett Petrie says she may have been at Reggie Smith’s. Liz’s halfsister, the easygoing and friendly Marcia, tries to engage her in conversation, but reports that she has failed utterly: the woman had simply stared at her in astonishment, her crimson-lipped white doll face like a mask, and gone on munching a sandwich. The Nightmare Life-in-Death is she, murmurs Marcia to Hattie Osborne.

By the time Marianne and Helen reach Dresden Road, they are reconciled. They have buried the hatchet over the corpse of Eric Rosenberg. Now he, Helen had conceded, had been a good egg. He had been the Real Thing. She remembered his Jack Lemmon imitation with particular admiration. She’d never actually seen any Jack Lemmon movies, she wasn’t much of a movie-goer, but Eric’s version had been very entertaining. She’d been sorry to hear of the accident. Yes, she would like a glass of wine. Can that, she asks Marianne, really be Robert Oxenholme? And if so, what on earth is he doing in this set-up? His father, she says, had been one of the few people who had stood by her father, when the troubles began. She must go and say hello before the party is over.

Alix and Brian Bowen are amongst those stuck in the worst of the traffic. They had driven down from Northam, and had driven themselves from Regent’s Park Road to Holborn, and are now paying the price by sitting motionless in Lisson Grove. They take this philosophically. This is the way things are, increasingly, in London. It would not surprise them if the whole city came to a perpetual halt. As they sit peacefully, amidst the dull growling of engines punctuated by the occasional hopeless hooting of a defiant horn, they think about the Green Party and global warming and the car industry, as they would. But Alix and Brian are not as green as one might expect. It was all very well, they agree, for Alix’s parents to go green at the end of a long and fairly comfortable life, but what about the car workers of Dagenham? What about the poor of India, of China, of Africa? Shall they not have their refrigerators, their motorcars? Is it not their turn now?