She hadn’t been inside a church since the funeral. That was seven years ago. And seven years before that she’d been at the same church for her wedding.

Patterns. Could they mean something? Or were they like crop circles, just some joker having a laugh?

At some point during the funeral her mind had started overlaying the two ceremonies. One of her wedding presents had been a vacuum cleaner, beautifully packaged in a gleaming white box. The small white coffin reminded her of this, and as the service progressed she found herself obsessed by the notion that they were burying her Hoover. She tried to tell Alex this, to assure him it was all right, it was just a vacuum cleaner they’d lost, but the face he turned on her did more than anything the words and the music and the place could do to reassert the dreadful reality.

Neither of them had cried, she remembered that. The church had been full of weeping, but they had moved beyond tears. She had knelt when invited to kneel but no prayer had come. She had stood for the hymns but she had not sung. The words that formed in her mind weren’t the words on the page before her, they were words she had seen when she was seventeen and still at school.

It had been a pre-A-level exercise. Compare and contrast the following two poems. One was Milton ’s ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant’, the other Edwin Muir’s ‘The Child Dying’.

She’d had great fun mocking the classical formality of the earlier poem.

It began with child-abuse, she wrote, with the God of Winter’s chilly embrace giving the Fair Infant the cough that killed her. And it ended with an attempt at consolation so naff it was almost comic.

Think what a present thou to God hast sent.

Any mother finding comfort in this, she’d written, must have been a touch disappointed it hadn’t been triplets.

Perhaps her pathetic confusion of the coffin and the wedding gift box was a late payback for this mockery.