‘But don’t misunderstand me, Provost, I am not in the least depressed. Not a bit of it. I am now quite used to funerals. Well, I’ll be eighty-two this year, so that’s perhaps how it should be. How many funerals do you think I have attended so far?’
‘This year, m’lady?’
‘No. In my entire life.’
‘I couldn’t say, m’lady.’
‘Come on. Have a guess.’
‘A thousand, m’lady? Two thousand?’
‘Don’t be silly, Provost. Twenty-eight. One day I sat down and calculated. My doctor keeps telling me I need to exercise the old cerebellum, otherwise it will simply stop functioning. I may have omitted one or two, mind.’ She took a sip of sherry. ‘I will go to Roderick’s funeral, but I don’t think I will attend his memorial service. If there is a memorial service. I cannot imagine anything in Roderick’s life that deserves to be celebrated as such. I have an idea he won’t be much mourned.’
‘Perhaps not, m’lady, but it will be some time before Lord Remnant is forgotten.’
‘Roderick’s personality may have been more forcefully colourful than those of the bland and timid masses, but one does tend to forget people the moment they stop coming to dinner, Provost. Certain people one even forgets during dinner. It’s most disconcerting. You look across the table and you wonder, who the hell is that? You don’t think I am suffering from Old Timer’s, do you?’
‘Old Timer’s, m’lady?’
‘That’s what Mary Gaunt calls it, awfully funny. You know what I mean – the brain-melting disease. I seem to have forgotten its name, which is a bad enough sign.’
‘I don’t think you are suffering from Alzheimer’s, m’lady,’ Provost said.
Lady Grylls took another sip of sherry. She had known Roderick Remnant’s first wife, the tragic Deirdre, rather well. Deirdre had been at school with one of Lady Grylls’s younger cousins. Lady Grylls didn’t care much for Roderick Remnant’s second wife, who was the widow now. She had been younger than him, though no spring chicken, on the wrong side of forty, or so Lady Grylls believed, though forty-five was considered ‘young’ these days. ‘What was her name now?’