In a quiet voice he apologised for the tediousness of the day, for the marching bands and the pipers, for the choirs and the speeches and the dreadful cacophony of the morris dancers on the cobbles; for the boring gifts. In a whisper he told her he wished they’d been able to conjure something new for her, something splendid and fascinating and unthought of instead of the dull nonsense she must have seen a thousand times before in a thousand other places.

At ten o’clock he had been at the station with the rest of the town to greet her and had known not to expect a happy smiling face. He’d known to expect something miserable and grim-looking, and with her short neck and her pouchy eyes and her sad downturned mouth she’d reminded him, emerging slowly from her compartment, of a hundred-year-old tortoise he and Alice had once seen at the bottom of a dusty pit at the zoo in Calcutta.

He’d wondered if it was true what people said, that she had her husband’s clothes laid out for him every morning, his stockings and his shoes, his diamond star, his sash and garter, as if she could not let go of the hope that he would come back to her one day from the dead.

Arthur had never laid out any of Alice’s clothes.

He had some of her things that he’d brought back in his trunk from India, a dress and a cotton wrapper that smelled of soap and dust and heat and happiness. He looked at them often, hanging in the armoire in his room, and most days he lifted a sleeve or a hem and held it for a few moments between his fingers. It had never occurred to him though, to lay out any of her things, in spite of his dream that she would come strolling in one day wanting to put them on.

Ahead, in the square, the pipers in their furry headgear were still at it; he could hear the dismal grating moan of their instruments. The town had been informed that Her Majesty was very fond of a bagpipe but looking at her now, at her grey stony profile, he found that hard to believe. There was the same look on her face as there had been all day – the same look as when she’d sat enduring the shrill repeated notes of the Manchester Flute Band; as when she’d had to put up with the morris men cantering back and forth across the cobbles like escaped lunatics in their noisy wooden shoes, shaking their foolish ribbons and their bells; it was the same look she’d worn through all the shouts and cheers and hoofbeats and the pealing of the church bells; it was a look that seemed to be asking, When for pity’s sake is this all going to end?