At the burial service the next day, the coffin was wheeled on its cart into the Protestant cemetery. The iron rims rang across the dusty rubble. The children stood beside me in their best party clothes, and I hoped that they would never hear the rage of death below the coffin lid. The young Spanish clergyman abandoned his broken English and spoke in a thick Catalan, once banished by General Franco, whose dark consonants were the language of the dead, which Miriam would now be speaking. Sally Mumford stood with Lykiard and the Jouberts. None of them could look at me. Smoking her reefer, Sally stared at the graves as if she expected the stone lids to be flung back and the angry occupants to leap out and seize us.

The gravediggers bent over their spades. The first stones struck the lid like a fist beating against a door. Nordlund handed a spare spade to me and I cast two blades of the nutty soil into the grave. Together we walked from the cemetery and drove through the football crowds, as if leaving a crime behind us.

*   *   *

After three days to cross a country and a sea, we returned to Shepperton. The long French roads helped me to straighten the perspectives of my mind. The past, on which I had turned my back on the day of my marriage, had rushed up and now stood behind me. Miriam’s death joined me once again to all those nameless Chinese who had died during the Second World War. I remembered the dusty dead beside the crushed motorcars in the Avenue Edward VII and the straining jaw of the Chinese clerk at the rural railway station, first rehearsals for an afternoon at Figueras. Images of the bone-white paddy fields came back to me, like the pearly light that lay over Lunghua after the explosion of the atom bomb at Nagasaki. Kennedy had outstared Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, but American bombers were still parked under the flat skies of Cambridgeshire, and the kingdom of light waited to be born from those concrete aprons among the fens.

Miriam’s sister, Dorothy, and her husband were waving cheerfully by the gate when we arrived home. They had treats and surprises for the children, a cold roast lunch fit for a wake, and bottles of wine open on the table. I was grateful to them and held Dorothy tightly in my arms. But the echo of Miriam’s bones in her sister’s face, and the Cambridge crispness in her voice, made me feel that I and the children had returned to a parallel world that tried too hard to mimic its original.