He was dismissive of his surroundings – I could already feel Lou had passed beyond Conrad Flats and into another phase of his life. Already he was wandering through memories there. Surprisingly, he threw his arms around me and hugged. I heard the liquids gurgling vividly inside both open-topped hip flasks, somewhere at the middle of my shoulders. I put my arms more cautiously round his back and said, ‘Jesus. How the fuck are you?’

  He looked me in the face. ‘I was in shock. Then the drink finally got through, thank God. Like my coat?’ He thrust out one of the hip flasks – the old one – and I grabbed it and held it in my hand. I was trying not to turn and look at Aoife, behind us, though everything inside me made me want to do so.

  ‘The coat’s a beauty,’ I quietly admitted.

  ‘Isn’t she just? Isn’t she just a beaut? It was my father’s. Gran had it hanging in the wardrobe, shrouded in brown paper and mothballs. Never would let me near it.’ He lowered his face to the lapel and took a sniff. ‘Drenched it in Aoife’s perfume.’ He held out the sleeve and obliged me to inhale. Yes, it smelled like his wife’s breasts and her neck. Lou flicked a smile and walked closer to the front-room windows.

  Aoife was carrying a tartan-lined holdall – the type of baggage that could only emanate from the house of an old woman. I nodded to her and smiled, then she gave me a look and a gesture I have never forgotten. The head was turned slightly down to the left shoulder and she smiled, but she frowned simultaneously – utterly helpless. I reached out my hand extremely quickly and she shot her hand forward and squeezed my fingertips so hard they hurt, then suddenly she let go and our hands fell apart; we looked at each other and I turned away and heard a groan inside myself.

  Lou was standing, surveying the great tumble of the city before him, as if checking it for small changes.

  I came up to stand beside him and I tipped the hip flask back into my mouth like the old days. It tasted good. He had his face turned to me in satisfaction. ‘That’s better, eh? That fucking house. Our house, it now appears.’ He turned round to include Aoife in this new property-owning class. ‘It’s full of mad Welsh relatives we’ve never heard of. Flo’s even got them billeted in her house too. Can’t wait till after tomorrow and it’ll just be us. Eh, love?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  He looked around the apartment as if he were considering taking these rooms on a rental basis. ‘I should have sent some relatives over here to torture you. I would have, if there had been a single example of young female stock. Or even a more mature, well-preserved woman. But these Taffies are all bloody pensionable and without issue. I guess you have Abingdon on your case anyway. So we thought we’d escape over here chez Cunningham for the night. Got some goodies for you too.’

  Aoife was offloading bottles of wine and cans of beer onto the dining table.

  ‘I’ve got to sort out my clothes for tomorrow,’ she declared.

  ‘Okay, love.’

  I listened as she moved silently away up the corridor and then through in the bedroom I heard coat hangers able to slide in the emptier wardrobes.

  Lou nodded his head. ‘Know what’s going on over there?’

  ‘Twickenham?’

  ‘Nah. Gran’s house.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A vigil on the coffin.’

  ‘You are joking?’

  ‘Oh no. I can’t face it. Sat up there, with the old lady and those ones. All old ex-miners. Great fellas, but not all night, inhaling their farts. They’re chowing down the black pudding something awful.’

  ‘A vigil. I never knew that went on still.’

  He nodded. ‘Ah. Twilight, arbiter ’twixt day and night, or whatever Milton farted out.’

  Lou and I stood drinking, watching night come down over the city and the frantic spread of its lights. Every so often, one of us turned and walked to the table in the growing gloom to replenish a can of beer or swig from a bottle. Neither of us moved to switch on a light.

  ‘I quit at the language school.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes. Think I’ll sign back on from Gran’s house for a spell.’ He crossed to the fitted shelves and lifted up the dusty binoculars on which only one lens functioned; we had sometimes used them for spotting the Heathrow-bound aeroplanes on clear days, reading the names of the airlines. He put the binocs to his face and scanned out over the night. ‘I can’t see it,’ he announced in a general manner, using a hushed voice.

  ‘What?’

  He whispered, ‘The glow. From the Lucozade advert’ – as if it was a secret between us. He added. ‘So you rolled Abby. She told Aoife. She likes you.’

  ‘Aye.’

  He turned and listened, we both heard a bump through in the bedroom. He put his lips to my ear and whispered, ‘Abby is noisy.’

  I smiled and nodded, ‘Aye, she was,’ then I looked back out the glass. A train sparked below – the light almost purple.

  Aoife was coming along the corridor. ‘What are you two up to in the pitch dark?’ She clicked on the light. I didn’t turn round. I kept looking, squinting straight ahead, watching them both in the dark reflection.

  ‘Have you eaten, Douglas?’

  ‘I’m not hungry. Thanks.’ I turned and smiled.

  She yawned. ‘We’re stuffed with endless Flo sandwiches.’

  ‘Yeah. Let’s turn in early tonight, Eeef.’

  From the camp bed, hands resting on my chest – doubtless in exactly the same recline as Myrtle Smith in her coffin – I listened to Aoife and Lou having vigorous, undisguised sex. The pillow was not inserted behind the headboard.

  In the morning they had a bath together.

  I dressed in Lou’s old suit. He wore the suit from his wedding day. Aoife had on a black dress and a hat with a long black feather which went up straight. The dress was not especially long and her black heels were not short, and the black stockings were the hold-up type. I was sure of it because we took a cab to the church and I was on the fold-down seat in front of her. Lou and I were drinking from the hip flasks, holding on with our other arms as the cab swung corners. We’d been drinking steady all morning and when we got out of the cab at the church, I felt a surge in my bladder. Lou leaned down and reached in to pay the driver and the cab drove off.

  ‘I really need to pee,’ I said.

  ‘Oh I do too, come to mention it. Look, there’s Father Petrie, the scourge of Ampleforth.’

  The priest, stooped, was striding up the side of the church beside a tall boundary wall, into the strongly contrasted shadows – it was a beautiful day.

  ‘You go in, love, and see who’s there.’ Lou made off after the priest, up the side of the church building, lighting a cigarette as he strode. I took a step then I stopped, and turned back to Aoife.

  She was standing very still in her dark dress and hat, looking at me. I said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ The moment I said it, I thought she was going to mistake my words for a question about how to make myself useful during the funeral.

  She nodded gently. The expression on her face created by our indecision had suddenly found its ideal location at a funeral. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ she suddenly told me, nodding like a convinced Christian.

  I turned around and looked up the side of the church. ‘You haven’t told him, have you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then how will it be okay? What we did was not okay. And it was never okay. I want you, right now, but it’s not okay.’

  She looked left and right and she began crying, then continued to look at me. I said, ‘You are very beautiful all in black. I just want you so much. I’m sorry, I really am bursting,’ and I walked away from her.

  I caught up with Lou at the back corner of the church. I was suddenly struck by how serene that old graveyard there is. The leaning, ancient limestone walls overhung with late-flowering magnolia trees and it was breezy with a coolness in the air – creamy petals fluttering steadily into the fringes of the graveyard and drifting all around.

  ‘Father,’ Lou called out.

  The priest was just at the wooden door, which was studded with big nails. ‘Llewellyn. Sad day.’

  ‘Yes. Father, this is my friend Douglas Cunningham, who I’ve told you about.’

  ‘How do you do. Sorry. Sad circumstances.’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded. I wondered if he could detect a full-scale sinner like me.

  Lou was standing still, smoking. He said, ‘Father Petrie and I often have long talks.’

  The priest nodded. ‘We do we do, indeed we do. Books. I tend to have read the same ones again and again and Llewellyn many divergent ones. I understand books mean a great deal to both of you?’

  I nodded seriously. ‘They have probably ruined our lives with ideas,’ I said. I was surprised myself to hear it come out.

  ‘Well, lads. It depends what ideas they are and how you act upon them.’

  Lou smiled and turned to me proudly. ‘Cunningham. Father Petrie has read Sartre’s fiction. In French. And Adolphe.’

  I nodded, impressed but disappointed they hadn’t affected the priest with any visible form of spiritual crisis.

  Lou nodded. ‘Father. A few glasses of wine, a few cans of communion beer were taken this morning.’

  He chuckled. He had hairs growing out his nostrils.

  ‘Could we quickly use the toilet?’

  ‘Of course, of course. Well, actually the old sacristy toilet is broken, so you’d need to use mine, so that’s up the first set of stairs then past the blue door then up again onto a next set of stairs then take a left and go down that corridor. Oh, lads. Lads. If you don’t mind, just go against the wall over there. But between the graves. Between the graves if you please.’

  As Father Petrie shouted these instructions, Lou and I walked ahead, out into the blossom fall.

  ‘Yes, over there. Left a bit if you please. Not next to old Ben Barnham, died eighteen thirty-seven. He was a big temperance man, in the friendly unions I read.’

  Lou and I stood side by side but with the distance of a grave and a gravestone lying between us, pissing down at the base of the wall, frothing magnolia blossom round and around in the accumulating puddles. Lou called out as we faced the stone. ‘Douglas plays centre forward for Glasgow Rangers.’

  ‘I do not, Father,’ I called. ‘When it comes to the Church, I’m strictly freelance. I’m up for sale to any club.’

  Father Petrie chuckled behind us and called, ‘Llewellyn and I are QPR bigots.’

  I was impressed the way Lou had pissed while still smoking. He walked back towards the priest.

  ‘Poor Myrtle.’ Father Petrie nodded.

  I noticed they’d both turned to look across at something. I pulled up my zipper and stepped gingerly over the graves towards them and I saw they were in fact staring at a freshly opened gap in the earth, its maw daintily fringed with glistening new green Astroturf.

  I looked at Lou. ‘Is your gran actually to be buried here as well? I thought it was just the service.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Lou seriously. ‘She’s coveted that grave since nineteen fifty-nine.’

  The priest smiled. He and Lou seemed to share an overly relaxed relationship, I thought.

  It was a very nice spot to be laid to rest in. Right up against the wall at the bottom of the churchyard, a steady curtain of white petals snowing upon it and into it. Father Petrie said, ‘And blessed with the blossom today, Llewellyn. We all hope for such a peaceful spot ourselves.’

  ‘That’s true, Father.’

  ‘What are you reading from today, Llewellyn?’

  ‘Settled on a short William Morris poem. One of the most beautiful things in the language, Father.’

  ‘A good man. A good man and there’s Manley Hopkins himself, who would be my favourite. Of course. He spent some years in Glasgow now. Did he not?’ The father turned to me sharply.

  ‘He did.’ I nodded obediently.

  ‘Gran had a tiny little Everyman book of Morris poems that was in the house when I was young. Even before I could read I used to leaf through it, looking at the decoration. Looking at the shape of the poems. I caught her once, reading them. Glasses on. Lips moving to the words.’

  ‘Very poignant, Lou. Very poignant. Well, lads.’

  ‘Will you come up to the house afterwards, Father?’

  ‘Of course, of course. Your lovely wife. Coping?’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  I saw it then, that Father Petrie could have married them both in that beautiful church within a year; but how was I to know that medical science would be proved wrong, and I would soon return to this graveyard once again.

  Flo was within the church, guarding Lily. Rhys was standing at the front with Aoife. He’d been crying. Lou walked straight up to his brother and they embraced. Abby walked out, genuflected, then came straight up the aisle to me, she linked arms and led me without any choice down to the front. I glanced over at Aoife.

  When she had genuflected her way back in, Abby and I sat together, halfway along the pew, pointedly behind Aoife and Lou.

  Lou read from the Bible very beautifully in his smoker’s voice. The night before he’d joked with me that he was going to quote the two excerpts of the Bible which feature haemorrhoids: one in Romans and one somewhere else. But he did not. He read from Proverbs. Chapter 24.

  I listened carefully to Father Petrie’s words but Abby kept leaning in on my shoulder, confident and proprietorial. Yet when I put my hand on her thigh she lifted it off immediately.

  Lou went up a second time, and read the Morris poem. The very beautiful one which begins: Pray but one prayer for me, ’twixt thy closed lips. It started to break me up – not on account of Myrtle Smith.

  Come the Mass and people crowded to the front as if a rock star like Marko Morrell were there, happily giving out autographs. Flo and I were the only non-Catholics.

  The closest members of the family – Rhys, Lou and Aoife – held back, and Abby presumptuously joined them. They all stood aside until the Welsh visitors had finished, then each of our group – except me – went up to take the holy sacrament. The four of them almost rushed to kneel before the father. I also realised, strangely, that I wanted to join them there. I too wanted my wild shot at salvation.

  As usual I watched the dimensions of both Abby and Aoife’s bodies through their dark dresses as they moved and it was hard in that place not to feel self-satisfied that I had explored those potentialities so fully. The church makes you meditative but I was drunk and couldn’t help a bad thought. When I saw the back of Aoife’s erect neck, I thought she was like all the used-up perfume, risen in the air and now gone for ever.

  Abby genuflected her way back to my side and placed her head on my shoulder again, as if we’d been married for years.

  The blossom still drifted in the breeze, coming in as shoals which billowed when Myrtle in her coffin was carried by the pall-bearers that short distance out of the church. I saw white petals rested in Aoife and Abby’s hair. Lily started crying, of course, but Aoife lifted her from the buggy and it was the blossom falling around the child’s head which stopped her cries and caught her attention as the fingers grasped out curiously at the petalled air and the swarms of little multiple shadows which it surely cast.

  One of the men sang solo in Welsh, deep, damaged-sounding and noble; then we were all leaving the graveside, heading back to Lou and Aoife’s inherited house.

  I could see Aoife ahead of me, surrounded by mourners and with Lily hitched in her arms. In an eerie echo of the wedding day when she had picked confetti, Abby now walked behind Aoife and picked blossom petals from Aoife’s clothes and hat. The sun made the black feather on the hat glow along its edges. We retraced that path beside the church and people began to walk on along the road towards Myrtle Smith’s house, following Flo, who was shouting and gesticulating to the Welshmen in their dark baggy suits and hats. Suddenly Lou seized my arm. ‘Christ sake. Bells,’ and he guided me in another direction.

  Too fast I said, ‘But shouldn’t we tell Aoife?’

  ‘Then Abby will be on your case. Just a quick pint.’

  Lou and I were stepping it the other way, looking backwards guiltily then dashing round the corner where The Bells was up ahead.

  I said, ‘You read beautifully.’

  He only nodded.

  The pub was almost empty and our seat under the window was free. As we sat with our pints of Guinness, Lou nodded, then he turned directly to me. ‘Yeah. Abby’s all over you, squire.’ He chuckled. ‘Love’s tear, let it not dry.’ He spoke in a voice like a quote: ‘“Cunningham retained, until his demise, a pure Pre-Raphaelite taste for dark bags beneath the eyes of pale and slender women.” We would make two crazy couples, no?’

  I smiled.

  Lou chuckled. ‘We won’t tell Abby you’re living at the new place. We’ll tell her you’re still over at Conrad Flats, so you might get a few days’ respite till she kicks the door in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you move over to Gran’s house with us. We won’t tell Abby.’

  I looked at him. ‘You want me to? Move over.’

  ‘Of course. Where else are you going to go, boyo? Need to clear out the back room for you cause it’s full of bloody junk. Aoife said she’d do it tomorrow, when I’m at the lawyers’.’

  Then I said, ‘That Morris poem was— The way you read it. Beautiful.’ I turned and looked him in the face. ‘It nearly broke my heart.’

  He smiled. ‘Better get back, see if there’s any booze left; peel those Welshies off the wall and try to herd them to a bloody Cardiff train. Father Petrie’s good fun when he has a drink.’

  ‘You go on ahead. I’ll have another.’

  ‘You lucky devil.’

  As he made for the door I said after him, ‘Lou? Thanks.’

  He lit another cigarette and he turned towards me and gave me a silent military salute, straightening and stiffening his whole body to do so. Just as well the old boys were not in or some would have struggled to their feet to return the gesture.