But he could hardly stop the car and risk losing track of the vehicle ahead – the small white private ambulance which contained his mother’s coffin. He had tried as far as possible not to be parted from her body. He had taken leave from work, so as to devote every waking moment to her: sorting out her things; checking through her address-book for all the friends he should contact; arranging her funeral in England via a series of long-distance phone-calls. Then, just this morning, he had accompanied her on the plane from Paris, resentful that he’d had to sit beside a young canoodling couple who’d spent the entire journey exchanging kisses and sweet nothings, while she lay in the cargo-hold, alone. The English undertakers had met him at Heathrow – a pair of sombre-suited men with plaster-lily expressions and fulsome voices to match – and they were now on their way, in convoy, to the small decaying south coast town where his father was already buried. The grave would be opened and the second coffin laid on top, reuniting his parents in death after their forty years of life together.
