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without looking back. She followed him down the path but when he let himself out of the gate, stopped and turned away. The front door was swinging in the wind and she had no key with her. She ran back, grabbed her bag with her key in it, and without attempting to find a coat, ran down once more to the gate and the pavement outside. Eugene had disappeared from view.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Until now, his journalistic experience had been confined to answering readers' letters; and when no letters from people with emotional and sexual problems came, to inventing suitably lurid substitutes. But now Uncle Gib was confronting a new challenge, the composition of Reuben Perkins's obituary. He sat in Maybelle's former dining room, now allotted him as a study, at work on the computer the Children of Zebulun had bought him. Its ivory-white keys were already dyed pale yellow from his cigarette smoke and stubs mounted in the pottery fruit dish Maybelle had provided as an ashtray. A life of selfless service and generosity to the community, he had typed, unparalelled single-minded devotion to one and all, regardless of age, sex or creed, when Maybelle came into the room with a cup of tea for him and a black pudding and cheese sandwich.

'How d'you spell "unparalleled"?' he asked her.

'I don't know, Gilbert. I'm not intellectual like you.' She scrutinised the screen. 'Like you've done it. That looks right.'

Uncle Gib thought it looked wrong. The trouble was he didn't know how. Maybe he'd put 'unrivalled' instead. 'You going out?'

'I can do,' said Maybelle eagerly.

'Get me forty fags, then, will you?'

Maybelle said she would, smiling at him fondly. Uncle Gib lit a cigarette and set down a few episodes in Reuben Perkins's life, which bore no likeness to reality. He ended with words he calculated would get him into even greater favour with Reuben's wife: Cut off in his prime, he leaves a widow, the lovely Maybelle, some twenty years younger than himself.

Now to attend to the final arrangements for the funeral.

The first thing Ella had done after he went was take off his ring. She took it off and immediately put it on again. This was ridiculous. He would come back, if not that night, next day, he would come back and say what a fool he had been and could she forgive him. Perhaps she believed this and perhaps not, for she couldn't sleep. In the sad mad hours between two and four, panic struck her and she sat up in bed sobbing, with tears running down her face. The ring had come off again in the morning and she had gone into work, bare-fingered, weak with crying and lack of sleep. If any of the others in the practice noticed they said nothing.

In between patients she asked herself what she should do. Get in touch with him? Go to the gallery? Leave him to come to his senses? Mrs Khan arrived with a different child to interpret for her. This time it was a girl wearing a hijab, though she was no more than nine, her small pale face looking as if the black veil pinched it. Ella thought it very unsuitable that this little child should have to talk about her mother's heavy periods and agonising cramps but she said nothing. In normal circumstances she might have commented but these circumstances weren't normal. But no, she wouldn't run after Eugene. It would be useless. He would come back, she was sure of it, or told herself robustly that she was sure of it. Mrs Perkins was next, inviting her to come along and view her late husband's body and please not to fail to attend his funeral.

There were no calls to make in the afternoon. She went home, that is to Eugene's house. She hardly felt she could continue to call it home. This reminded her that on the following day she was due at her solicitor's to sign the contract for the sale of her flat. But was this the time to sell? Suppose Eugene had meant it and wouldn't change his mind? Whatever he may have said, she couldn't live in his house, occupy his home, if they were not to be together, not to be married. For the first time she put it plainly into words: we are not to be married. It seemed utterly unreal, yet the only real thing in her world at the moment. She went upstairs and in their bedroom – she