Though Emma Sands had been Fanny's childhood friend, Hugh had seen little of her in the early years of his marriage. Emma had been away school-teaching, first Abroad, later in the north of England. Then she came to London; and Fanny, who always feared bluestockings, had treated her remarkable friend with a mixture of timidity and casualness: and Hugh had seen Emma as awfully nice, awfully clever, but awfully absurd. Then he looked again. From the moment when, in Emma's dark over-furnished flat at Notting Hill, he had with a burst of illumination which came quite suddenly, and with a deep prophetic groan, taken her into his Anns, until the moment when he had walked away down the long corridor in a coma of misery, had been a space of two years. It sometimes seemed to him that that time had been his only real life, and what began and ended it his only real actions.

Emma had never married; and Hugh had not met her since, though he had, at strangely regular intervals, seen her: distantly at a party, in the National Gallery, from a passing bus. He had occasion, of course, abundantly to know of her, since it was after their parting that she had begun to write the detective stories which had made her by now so famous. By this inconvenient fame, if by nothing else, her image had been kept vivid and even unnervingly up to date. Hugh was aware too, and this was more disturbing, that Randall, somewhere in the mysterious private maze of his London existence, had run across Emma. What his son and his former mistress made of each other he did not know. It was a subject from which he averted his mind.

We commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Hugh fell silent in his thoughts. He was aware, in the greater stillness of attention round about him, of the steady sound of the rain, as for a brief moment all present seemed to confront the mystery of their last end. They muster steadily, the dead. Yet in such a scene the dead person is defenceless, outfaced by the sturdy solidarity of the living. Hugh had wished to think of anyone but Fanny. Now for one moment he saw her, perhaps for the last time, face to face. He saw her sitting up in her bedroom at Grayhallock, playing patience on the counterpane, her cat Hatfield curled purring in the crook of her Ann. He saw her face lifted to his, after the doctor had gone, in an entreaty which both sought and feared the truth. And in those last drugged delirious days at Grayhallock, before they took her to London, there had been the endless questions about the swallows. Oh God, the swallows. Had they remembered to open the doors of the loft for the swallows to come in? Would the swallows come again at all, would they ever come again? Perhaps they would never come. Had they come yet? Had they come? Hugh had told her truthfully day after day, no it was too early, they had not come yet, they would come soon. But today again they had not come. And poor Fanny had been moved to London before they came. Perhaps he ought to have lied to her about the swallows.

The relaxation of the dying hand. He jumped to feel Ann's clasp upon his Ann. She had been saying something to him. It was all over. He had seen the coffin awkwardly descend into the watery pit and heard the earth fall upon it. It was allover. He turned stiffly about and let Ann lead him slowly into the quietly shifting crowd. The priest who had performed the ceremony murmured something inaudible to him. Douglas Swann came up beside him and took his other Ann. He was an old man being led away. This was what was conveyed to him by Ann's gentle pressure, by the bowing, melting, solicitous, curious crowd. He shuffled along, seeing in front of him now the gate of the cemetery, the rows of cars outside in the road. Douglas Swann was putting up an umbrella over him and making some remark. about the rain. In another moment or two he would be out again in the ordinary world.

He turned round to know if Randall and the children were following, and saw like a shaft of light through a cloud a momentarily opened vista between the rows of dark figures. Something at the far end of that vista arrested his attention for a second before the opening was closed again by the movement of people towards the gate. Two women he had seen like bats clinging together, their glasses glinting under the black canopy, two women facing him in grotesque stillness down the rainswept vista. One of them was Emma. Hugh stopped. The vision had gone, but as if to confirm its reality he caught sight of the intent averted face of his son, and his son's hand descending after a gesture of greeting. Hugh stood still for another moment. Then he set his feet in motion.

He passed slowly along the line of cars. He passed Randall's Vauxxhall and Felix Meecham's very dark blue Mercedes. Here at last was his own clumsy capacious Standard Vanguard.

Oh, spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence and be no more seen.

Hugh staggered slightly as he came towards the car. Ann was still tugging his arm and insisting that she should be allowed to come with him and drive the Vanguard. Close behind them Clare Swann was absently humming Abide with me.

Chapter two

'I THOUGHT this lot for the refugees, said Ann, and these perhaps I might offer to Nancy Bowshott. What do you think?

They were sorting out Fanny's things. Ann had been very firm that they should do it at once and 'get it over, and Hugh supposed she was right; though when it came to it he could hardly bear it. At the funeral he had felt unreal and detached while Ann sobbed. Now when he wished to give himself up to a small frenzy of grief Ann was being calm and busy and practical. That was just like a woman. All the same he was deeply grateful to Ann, grateful to her for having insisted on having Fanny at Grayhallock, for having insisted on nursing Fanny. Without Ann the last six months would have been for him an almost unendurable torment.

It was Sunday morning and they had all been back at Grayhallock for three days. Some pale sunshine made the soaked garden glitter and the steaming spongy lawn warm to the touch. More distantly, between the beech trees, the bleak lines of spiky rose bushes could be seen, sloping away below the house, scattered with a confetti of multicoloured points; and below and beyond there stretched towards the invisible sea the flat pale green expanse of Romney Marsh, crossed with reedy dykes and dotted with distant sheep and presenting to the, eye towards a bluer horizon a remarkable number of tree-shielded and variously shaped church towers. It was still early in the month of June.

'And I thought we might give some little thing to Clare as a memento, said Ann. 'She was so terribly good to Fanny.

'Whatever you think best, said Hugh. 'But what about you and Miranda?

'Somehow, I'd rather not, said Ann, 'for myself I thought perhaps Miranda might have some of the cheaper bits of jewellery, if you didn't mind? I remember a painted bead necklace —’

'Why ever should I mind? said Hugh irritably. 'Everything belongs to the family. Naturally I assumed you'd have all the jewellery. There's no point in sending it out to Sarah.

'But some of it's valuable —’

'Oh, for God's sake, Ann, said Hugh, 'don't make a fuss! Everything to do with money and possessions was so depressing. He knew Ann was incapable of resentment, but how tactless she was all the same. This was no moment for scrupulous counting.

He sat down on the bed. It had been odd, coming back into this so familiar room in which he had seen the season change from winter to spring, and now finding the bed all folded and flattened. There had been the mornings when he came in fearing to find Fanny dead. And there was Fanny's poor old dressing-gown still hanging on the door. Ann had given her another one for going to London. Of course he had loved his wife. Any idea he might have had to the contrary was romantic and irresponsible and absurd. That was what was hollow. His marriage, whatever its shortcomings, had been a real living thing and not an empty shell. He had imagined that now, when it was all over, he might have felt, all the same, a sort of relief. But what came to him instead was a quite new sorrow, a dreadful sense of her absence. He kept missing her, searching for her. But she was nowhere now.