It was just after five on a fine Sunday afternoon in July, and a bandstand was blaring away. The park was full of families, trippers, soldiers – though at no point did they form a dense crowd, so George was not made anxious. Nor did he look at young couples flirting with one another, or at sober parents organizing young children, with the same envy he might once have done. When he first came to London, he had not yet given up hope of getting married; indeed, he used to worry about how his future wife and Maud might get on. For it was clear that he could not abandon Maud; nor would he wish to. But then a few years passed, and he realized that Maud's good opinion of his future wife mattered more to him than the other way round. And then a few more years passed, and the general disadvantages of a wife became even more apparent. A wife might appear agreeable but turn out to be a scold; a wife might not understand thrift; a wife would certainly wish for children, and George thought he probably could not bear the noise, or the disturbance it would bring to his work. And then, of course, there were sexual matters, which often did not lead to harmony. George did not handle divorce cases, but as a lawyer he had seen evidence enough of the misery that could be inflicted by marriage. Sir Arthur had long campaigned against the oppressiveness of the divorce laws, and been president of the Reform Union for many years, before handing over to Lord Birkenhead. From one name on the roll of honour to another: it had been Lord Birkenhead, as F.E. Smith, who had asked Gladstone searching questions in the House about the Edalji Case.

But that was by the by. He was fifty-four years old, living in adequate comfort and largely philosophical about his unmarried condition. His brother Horace was now lost to the family: he had married, moved to Ireland and changed his name. Quite in which order he had done these three things George was not sure, but they were all clearly linked, and the undesirability of each action bled into the others. Well, there were different ways of living; and the truth was, neither he nor Maud had ever been very likely to marry. They were similar in their shyness, and in seeming to fend off those who approached them. But the world contained enough marriages, and was certainly not threatened with underpopulation. Brother and sister could live as harmoniously as husband and wife; in some instances, more so.

In their early days together, he and Maud would make the journey back to Wyrley two or three times a year; but they were rarely happy visits. For George they brought back too many specific memories. The door-knocker still made him jump, and in the evening, as he looked out into the darkened garden, he would often glimpse beneath the trees shifting outlines which he knew to be nothing and yet still feared. With Maud it was different. Devoted as she was to Father and Mother, when she stepped back inside the Vicarage she became withdrawn and tentative; she had few opinions and her laugh was never heard. George could almost swear that she was beginning to ail. But he always knew the cure: it was called New Street Station and the London train.

At first, when he and Maud went out together, people sometimes mistook them for husband and wife; and George, who did not want anyone to think he was incapable of marriage, would say, rather precisely, 'No, this is my dear sister Maud.' But as time passed, he would occasionally not bother to make the correction, and afterwards Maud would take his arm and give a little laugh. Soon, he supposed, when her hair was as grey as his, they would be taken for an old married couple, and he might not even care to dispute that assumption.

He had been wandering randomly, and now found himself approaching the Albert Memorial. The Prince was sitting in his gilded, glittering surround, with all the famous men of the world in attendance on him. George extracted his binoculars from their case and started practising. He swept slowly up the Memorial, above the levels at which art and science and industry held sway, above the seated figure of the pensive Consort, up to a higher realm. The burred knob was hard to control, and sometimes there was a mass of unfocused foliage filling the lens, but eventually he emerged at the plain vision of a chunky Christian cross. From there he tracked slowly down the spire, which seemed as heavily populated as the lower reaches of the monument. There were tiers of angels and then – just lower than the angels – a cluster of more human figures, classically draped. He circled the Memorial, frequently losing focus, trying to work out who they might be: a woman with a book in one hand and a snake in the other, a man in a bearskin with a big club, a woman with an anchor, a hooded figure with a long candle in its hand… Were they saints, perhaps, or symbolic figures? Ah, here at last was one he recognized, standing on a corner pedestal: she had a sword in one hand, a pair of scales in the other. George was pleased to note that the sculptor had not given her a blindfold. That detail had often drawn his disapproval: not because he didn't understand its significance, but because others failed to. The blindfold permitted the ignorant to make gibes at his profession. That George would not allow.

He returned the binoculars to their case, and moved his attention from the monochrome, frozen figures to the colourful, moving ones all around him, from the sculpted frieze to the living one. And in that moment, George was struck by the realization that everybody was going to be dead. He occasionally pondered his own death; he had grieved for his parents – his father twelve years ago, his mother six; he had read obituaries in the newspapers and gone to the funerals of colleagues; and he was here for the great farewell to Sir Arthur. But never before had he understood – though it was more a visceral awareness than a mental comprehension – that everybody was going to be dead. He had surely been informed of this as a child, although only in the context of everyone – like Uncle Compson – continuing to live thereafter, either in the bosom of Christ or, if they were wicked, elsewhere. But now he looked about him. Prince Albert was dead already, of course, and so was the Widow of Windsor who had mourned him; but that woman with a parasol would be dead, and her mother next to her dead sooner, and those small children dead later, although if there was another war the boys might be dead sooner, and those two dogs with them would also be dead, and the distant bandsmen, and the baby in the perambulator, even the baby in the perambulator, even if it lived to be as old as the oldest inhabitant on the planet, a hundred and five, a hundred and ten, whatever it was, that baby would be dead too.

And though George was now nearing the limit of his imagination, he continued a little further. If you knew someone who had died, then you could think about them in one of two ways: as being dead, extinguished utterly, with the death of the body the test and proof that their self, their essence, their individuality, no longer existed; or you could believe that somewhere, somehow, according to whatever religion you held, and how fervently or tepidly you held it, they were still alive, either in a way predicted by sacred texts, or in some way we had yet to comprehend. It was one or the other; there was no position of compromise; and George was privately inclined to think extinction the more probable. But when you stood in Hyde Park on a warm summer's afternoon among thousands of other human beings, few of whom were probably thinking about being dead, it was less easy to believe that this intense and complex thing called life was merely some chance happening on an obscure planet, a brief moment of light between two eternities of darkness. At such a moment it was possible to feel that all this vitality must continue somehow, somewhere. George knew he was not about to succumb to any uprush of religious sentiment – he was not going to ask the Marylebone Spiritualist Association for some of the books and brochures they had offered him when he had taken his ticket. He also knew that he would doubtless go on living as he had done, observing like the rest of the country – and mainly because of Maud – the general rituals of the Church of England, observing them in a kind of half-hearted, imprecisely hopeful way until such time as he died, when he would discover what the truth of the matter was, or, more likely, not discover anything at all. But just today – as that horse and rider trotted past him – that horse and rider as doomed as Prince Albert – he thought he saw a little of what Sir Arthur had come to see.