‘Maybe Lisa,’ I said.

‘Maybe it’s his father. Lord Soulford.’

‘If Lord Soulford had done it, you’d have read about it in the papers,’ I said bitterly.

‘We should have stopped at a petrol station or something and picked some up.’

‘I think cheap flowers would be worse than no flowers.’

‘Well I don’t,’ she said.

‘They’d be garish and ugly,’ I said, suddenly wanting to make her cry, ‘they pick up the smell of petrol from the forecourt. Hideous, nasty. Francis would have hated ugly flowers; I would have thought any friend of his would know that.’ I found I hated her for snivelling, and thought that one great heave with my aggression would be enough to get her over the lip of a breakdown – after that the weight of her own problems would carry her down like stones in her pockets. But she didn’t cry. She rubbed my back with a flat palm and otherwise ignored me, looking straight ahead at Francis’s headstone.

‘Francis killed Francis,’ she said, her arm coming to rest on my shoulder. I felt the weight of it even through the thick wool and cashmere husk of my overcoat. ‘I wish there was someone to blame, I even wish I could blame myself sometimes. But I can’t. He fucked up, and I hate him for it.’ She sounded as if she was thinking about something else. She patted me absent-mindedly and repeated, ‘He fucked up,’ under her breath like a mantra. Tears crept up on me and took me by surprise, springing out of my eyes before I could take steps to contain them. Then she said, ‘Christ, those angels are camp, they look like something on a flyer for a gay nightclub,’ and we both started to laugh, and held on to each other. I didn’t want to turn my back on Francis’s grave, but I found that when I did I walked away without looking back.