The motorway’s three lanes were almost empty – it was two o’clock in the afternoon – but I held it at a Presbyterian sixty-five. Beside me on the passenger seat was a slim, buff cardboard folder and on top of that was a cling-filmed plate of muffins. This was what you did in New Zealand, Mari told me, for illnesses, bereavements, any kind of mishap. No species of pain that a traybake couldn’t assuage. There’s a book she has at home called Ladies, A Plate, which is what it used to say on party invites in Fifties New Zealand: ‘Gentlemen, a bottle; Ladies, a plate.’ I should have brought a bottle, I reflected, as a truck shuddered past on the outside lane. In the fortnight since Moir’s funeral it had snowed without a break. By the time it all thawed out and a thin white sun lit up the smoking streets, Moir’s death seemed like something from a previous era. You like to think that you’d leave a hole, that your talents would be missed, but it doesn’t always work like that.
