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separation of them and us. As others’ lives are often only dreams to us, so also others’ deaths.
    Only occasionally is there agony. And it was Elizabeth’s that day. Grief swelled her face as though all the fluids of the body, lymph and blood, were surging in a wave of revolt, crashing against the rocks of bone structure. Her eyes, however, remained abnormally still.
    It seemed excessive to me. But I could feel its power. I kept my distance.
    I thought of a year hence, or perhaps five years. Hubert, a dreamy ghost of a handsome husband—a memory to be respected by the second husband. For he would most assuredly arrive, from somewhere in the future. To live the life Hubert had lost. Would it make a difference? To her? In five years’ time?
    After the Latin mass, and the searing Dies Irae, Elizabeth—my father’s hand firmly on her elbow, and followed immediately by Hubert’s parents, tall, trembling, not touching each other—led the procession down the aisle of the seventeenth-century chapel in Tours. I walked, profoundly calm, beside my weeping mother. Dominick was not with me. He had, sensibly and kindly, taken a bewildered Stephen and an excited William to friends in Scotland.
    The English mourners whispered as they followed the cortege to the small cemetery where Hubert was to join his ancestors.
    â€œModern plague, car crashes. Biggest killer of men under …”
    â€œNo one else was killed. That was a mercy.”
    â€œIt took hours to get him out—he was badly …”
    â€œHe was terribly … broken. Everything.” The Frenchman searched for words. “Everything … broken …”
    Except the eyes. Which of course they closed.
    Elizabeth allowed herself to be led from the cemetery and sat in total silence on the flight back to London. She had declined to attend the family gathering at Les Cyprès, the Baathus château. Hunched in the back of the car during the drive to Lexington, she neither moved nor spoke.
    When we arrived, she went straight to her rooms. Silently, fiercely, she motioned us to leave. And she stayed there. Hour after hour. Then day after day. In silence.
    No speech, no sound of any kind was allowed. When we entered with food, or tried to speak to her about a doctor … about help … she looked at us as though our words were causing physical agony.
    My parents grew more and more distraught at her muteness. I tried to calm them. I knew Elizabeth would recover. She would see it as her duty. To Stephen, her son, a duty of care. A duty not to cause further suffering to people who had been so full of love for her. Elizabeth even suffered selflessly.
    After four days we heard a scream. Long and high. And then another and another. We raced towards her rooms. When we reached her, she was frantically trying to close the window.
    â€œI have lost him. He’s gone. Just now. He wanted to go. He wouldn’t stay. I couldn’t hold him. I had him in here.” She hugged herself, shaking violently. “Come back, Hubert! Come back! Please, please, Hubert! Come back!” She turned to us, desperate. “I didn’t want to wake him. He was so quiet. He was lying asleep, in me. I was afraid you would wake him. When you came to talk to me. Afraid that … he would waken. And he would go. Oh, Hubert! Hubert! He has just left me. He fought his way out of me. I am empty, Hubert. I am empty. I am empty.”
    We stood there. Petrified, made into stone by her pain. Unwilling, frightened witnesses to extremis.
    Later she agreed to have the family doctor visit her. They remained together quietly talking for hours. When he emerged he told us she would sleep. Possibly for days, on and off. And she did.
    It was finally over.

TWELVE
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    â€œWe’ve been approached by Derwent Harding PLC with an offer for Alpha Publishing. We’re obliged to consider this offer.”
    â€œWe shouldn’t have gone public