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innocent quality that was really attractive; it drew you in and at the same time it kept you at a certain distance. It’s hard to explain, but whatever you feel about your mother and this charity she got involved with, I hope you know that she was a good person with the best intentions.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Patrick, accepting the simplicity of Henry’s affection for a moment, ‘I think “innocent” is exactly the right word.’ He marvelled again at the effect of projection: how hostile Henry had seemed to him when Patrick was hostile towards everyone; how considerate he seemed now that Patrick had no argument with him. What would it be like to stop projecting? Was it possible at all?
    As he turned to leave, Henry reached out and touched Patrick’s shoulder.
    ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said, with a formality that was by then infused with emotion. He nodded to Nancy and Nicholas.
    ‘Excuse me,’ said Patrick, looking back at the entrance of the crematorium, ‘I have to say hello to Johnny Hall.’
    ‘Who’s he?’ asked Nancy, sensing obscurity.
    ‘You may well ask,’ scowled Nicholas. ‘He wouldn’t be anybody at all, if he wasn’t my daughter’s psychoanalyst. As it is, he’s a fiend.’

3
     
    Patrick walked away from his mother’s coffin, aware that unless he rushed back hysterically, he had stood beside her for the last time. He had seen the cold damp contents of the coffin the night before, when he paid a visit to Bunyon’s funeral parlour. A friendly, blue-suited woman with short white hair had greeted him at the door.
    ‘Hello, love, I heard a taxi and I thought it was you.’
    She guided him downstairs. Pink and brown diamond carpet like the bar of a country house hotel. Discreet advertisements for special services. A framed photograph of a woman kneeling by a black box from which a dove was only too pleased to be set free. Bolting upwards in a blur of white wings. Did it return to the Bunyon’s dovecote and get recycled? Oh, no, not the black box again. ‘We can release a dove for you on the day of your funeral’. Gothic script seemed to warp every letter that passed through the door of the funeral parlour, as if death were a German village. There were stained-glass windows, electrically lit, on the stairs down to the basement.
    ‘I’ll leave you with her. If there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate. I’ll be upstairs.’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Patrick, waiting for her to turn the corner before stepping into the Willow Chapel.
    He closed the door behind him and glanced hurriedly into the coffin, as though his mother had told him it was rude to stare. Whatever he was looking at, it was not the ‘her’ he had been promised with solemn cosiness a few minutes before. The absence of life in that familiar body, the rigid and rectified features of the face he had known before he even knew his own, made all the difference. Here was a transitional object for the far end of life. Instead of the soft toy or raggie that a child uses to cope with its mother’s absence, he was being offered a corpse, its scrawny fingers clutching an artificial white rose whose stiff silk petals were twisted into position over an unbeating heart. It had the sarcasm of a relic, as well as the prestige of a metonym. It stood for his mother and for her absence with equal authority. In either case, it was her final appearance before she retired into other people’s memory.
    He had better take another look, a longer look, a less theoretical look, but how could he concentrate in this disconcerting basement? The Willow Chapel turned out to be under a busy pavement, pierced by the declamatory brightness of mobile-phone talk and tattooed by clicking heels. A rumbling taxi emerged from the general traffic and splashed a puddle onto the paving stones above the far corner of the ceiling. He was reminded of the Tennyson poem he hadn’t thought of for decades, ‘Dead, long dead, / Long dead! / And my heart is a