Margaret was drinking too much. I knew the signs. Lili had commandeered a bottle and went around filling everyone’s glass as soon as it emptied. Before we left I had a brief discussion with Cynthia about the uncleanliness of the water in foreign lands and strangled at birth Derek’s desultory attempt to reminisce about the old days. I could hardly bring myself to look at him, ordinary and unexceptional as he was. I felt my throat flushing with the drink and a primeval distaste. His presence seemed both purposeless and dangerous, like a cinder from which all visible glow has gone but which is still too hot to touch.

Pleading weariness, I left. Syl walked me home and then went off somewhere. God knows where.

Dog died the next morning. I found him in his basket, stiff and cold as a graven dog, and all the losses and all the deaths came back and washed over me in a flood. I forgot that death brought peace to the dead and wept uncontrollably for the anguish of the living. Syl found me on my knees, unable to rise.

‘What on earth is it?’ he asked and I thought he probably imagined I was weeping because he was going to marry Margaret that day. As indeed I was: amongst other things.

‘Oh dog,’ I wept, ‘dog, dog.’ I liked him now. I wanted him back, snuffling with his bad breath and his hair coming out on my skirt.

I said so, and Syl grew alarmed. He took me up to my room and said he’d send for Mrs Raffald.

I pulled myself together and said I was all right. I said he was to take dog and bury him at once—at the bottom of the garden where the crocuses would grow. He was to do it now before he put on his wedding clothes. Syl left me reluctantly, looking back over his shoulder perhaps to make sure I wouldn’t die also on his wedding morning.

I went to the window and watched him walk down the garden, carrying dog and a spade. He began to dig, stopping frequently to straighten his shoulders and look around. He was probably taking deep breaths to remind himself that he still lived. He looked notably free, like a prisoner just released and I felt compunction at my ingratitude. Perhaps he was as constricted as I by our relationship. I wasn’t surprised, when he had filled in dog’s grave, to see him go out of the garden, along the path to Monica’s summerhouse, and thought he must have decided to snatch Mrs Raffald from her duties to come and minister to me. I began to dress for the wedding, not wanting to be too obvious a skeleton at the feast.

Breathless, Mrs Raffald came into my room.

‘I’m nearly ready,’ I said, trying to give an appearance of sense and decisiveness. ‘You needn’t have come.’