Immacolata went past the family chapels, where small candles burned and plastic flowers bloomed, where photographs of old and young fought against time’s ravage. She crossed an open space where the sun shimmered on white stone grave markers. She went towards the far wall, using the pathways between the stones. She approached a small group, their backs to her. She saw two ladders above the shoulders of the mourners. An elongated bundle, wrapped in white sheeting, was lifted and two men climbed the higher steps of the ladders and took its weight.

Immacolata remembered the shape of Marianna Rossetti’s body, where it was full and where it bulged, the width of the hips on which a skirt would twist when she walked, but the men on the ladders lifted her corpse as though it weighed nothing. The Rossetti family vault was on the fourth level. The bundle went above the names and dates of the lower levels, the plastic flowers commemorating strangers in life and companions in death, then was level with a gaping hole. It had been hard to believe, when Silvio had telephoned, that her friend was dead, harder now to believe it as her friend was lifted level with the hole, then given a decisive shove towards the back of the burial place. As the men came down the ladders, she heard women weeping. Now the men went back up the ladders and grunted as they raised the hole’s cover, slotted it into place, then gave it two loud thwacks to satisfy themselves that it was securely fastened. Perhaps an aunt of Marianna Rossetti, or a grandmother, or an elderly friend of the family, would come to the elevated grave in two years’ time to clean the bones of the last decayed flesh and gristle, then stack them in a small space further back against the rear wall.