‘A girl at the convent had a grandmother who died and she told me that the grandmother’s last request was to be buried permanently. If you aren’t – and it is fearfully expensive – they come and dig you up again. Italians never think of this; they are most improvident. They spend a lot of money trimming up the graves – I must say, they do do it very nicely – and then after all their trouble the cemetery people come and dig their relation up again, because the cemetery is too small, and people keep on dying and dying, and they have to go in somewhere, if you see what I mean.’

‘Oh!’ said Sydney, and glanced behind as though she might expect to see the new dead jostling one another in the gate. She felt that it had been a mistake to have come here at all, even to recover herself. This high-walled place with its one gate might well be a trap for her, and she wondered what she should do if, instead of the dead, Mrs Kerr and Ronald were to come in suddenly talking and laughing (she could see them) as they stepped over the graves. Why they should come to the cemetery she could not imagine, except that her dread of them, even in thought, might well prove a magnet to their unconsciousness.

‘Of course, of course,’ she said loudly, ‘people must keep on dying. They should have made allowances for that.’

‘There is a rubbish heap at the back of the chapel. If you’d come with me I could show you.’

‘What a horrid little ghoul you are!’ Sydney said mechanically. She found that in actually dealing with children theories collapse and one must retreat on the conventions. But when Cordelia in her reasonable little voice objected ‘Why?’ she could think of nothing to answer. There seemed no reason, even conventionally, why she should impose on Cordelia the adult idea of ‘morbidity’.

‘People wouldn’t like you to talk about being dug up,’ she said at last weakly, ‘though it seems to me a very practical arrangement. The Italians are realists.’

‘What is a realist?’ asked Cordelia, while, having gathered up some china flowers lying about on the ground she stuck these by their wire stalks into the band of her hat. ‘Haven’t I made my hat smart? What are realists?’

‘Ask Mr Milton,’ Sydney said promptly.

‘Is he —— ’

‘No, of course not. But he will tell you what unenlightened people they are.’

‘He is a long-winded man,’ said Cordelia, looking at her freind sideways.

‘Not at all,’ said Sydney irritably, ‘and, anyway, what do you know about it?’

‘Oh, nothing, nothing at all. I don’t know what “long-winded” means, even.’

‘Then you shouldn’t ——’

‘It was a sporting risk, after all,’ said Cordelia gravely, and Sydney, rebuked, wished that she could be so honest. ‘Where,’ she asked, ‘do they put the English?’