In the downstairs lavatory, the professional mourner is repairing her vampire lips. At the foot of the stairs, inconveniently interrupting the free flow of guests, Stephen’s respectable brothers are brazenly interrogating one of his several publishers about royalty statements and monies due. Can it be true, they want to know, that that woman who calls herself Harriet Osborne is Stephen’s literary executor? What is a literary executor? In their view, this phrase has no status in law. Who was Stephen’s solicitor? Where is his solicitor? Why have they not been better informed? They are, after all, they insist, the next of kin.

Half-in, half-out of the house, on the pretty latticed Edwardian back veranda, Sally Headleand (who has only come for the drinks and the snacks) finds herself engrossed in an intense soul-to-soul confessional with one of Stephen’s loyal ex-copy-editors from long ago. Sally has already told Pansy about her mad dead grandmother, her aunt Shirley in Alberta, her cousin Celia who is stuck in Oxford for ever, her sister Stella who is taking the slow boat back from New Zealand with a stop-off in China on the way: and Pansy has reciprocated with details of her own grandmother’s death in a hotel fire in Brazil, her unreciprocated passion for one of her less talented but sexier authors, her daughter’s asthma, and her sister’s marriage to a Saudi Arabian engineer. Sally and Pansy have been drawn together by their hairstyles, for both have gone for a short-sided, butch, erect, highly coloured format: Pansy’s is ink black, Sally’s henna red; Pansy has deliberate metallic little curls over her temples, and Sally has an intriguing soft vestigial pigtail at the nape of the neck.

Liz, her duty to Saint Marianne accomplished, moves through the gathering, checking fluid level, noise level, compatibility, mobility. She forces Stephen’s brothers away from the foot of the stairs into the drawing room and brutally introduces them to Simon Grunewald. She whisks Hilda Stark off to speak to John Geddes, who is trying hard to enjoy the party, although (and this he tells nobody) his lover Indra had died two days earlier holding his hand in the London Lighthouse, and he himself is worried about loss of weight and appetite. Is it grief, is it infection, and which would he rather it were? John Geddes smiles gamely, as Hilda is pushed his way. ‘Darling!’ he cries. ‘It’s been an age! You read that poem divinely! How well you look! What a lovely blue. Is that Thai silk too? I see Thai silk is the funeral fabric. It’s beautiful. I say’ (lowering his voice, glancing after Liz, bravely confronting and challenging comment on the worst of his fears) ‘isn’t our friend Elizabeth looking well. She must have lost a stone at least! That illness did her a power of good . . . ’