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We spent the day packing and cursing the mover. It was invigorating to have such a villain. I didn’t care about his carelessness, only his cowardice: if he’d abjectly apologized I would have forgiven him. “I’m going to tell him,” I told Edward.

“Good.”

“I’m going to say, I just hope no one is ever this cruel to your wife, or your child.”

“I think you should.”

“I’ll say, How would you feel — ”

But he sent over a single hired hand to do the work, and I was spared the pleasure.

At night when I’m tired I still write him angry letters in my head before I fall asleep.

We didn’t want to go back to Bordeaux after Pudding died, but we had to: the autopsy took three days, and only then could we pick up Pudding’s body, to accompany it to the crematorium. On the way to the morgue we had to stop at a pharmacy so poor Edward could negotiate a tube of hemorrhoid cream for me. (Sometimes, when I think back on those days I forget that I wasn’t just a woman who had lost a child, I had given birth to one, too, and was recovering.) This was the last of Bordeaux. We hated the place. It was ruined for us worse than the rest of France was. Edward had mentioned to his parents that we’d like to spend the summer in North Norfolk, near the sea, and within forty-eight hours they had found a cottage for rent in a small town called Holt. It wasn’t free for three weeks, but it felt like a miracle: we had somewhere to go.

The morgue was just by the hospital. It felt — well, dead, but dead in an early-morning dentist’s-office way, clean and deserted. The waiting room was large and sparsely furnished, with a coffee vending machine by the plate glass windows at the front and a windowless double door into the back. We rang a bell; a woman came to see what we wanted; we gave the name in its mangled aitchless French version: R-Vay.

You may see the child again, she said.

We’d been warned by the funeral director that we’d be asked this. No thank you, we told her.

Well then, she said. Please wait.

We sat. It was very sunny out, but the room was so big that the light from all those windows at the front stalled out at the coffee machine. It was in no danger of getting anywhere near us. I remember craning my head to look at the outside. At first there was nothing, and then the most funereal person I have ever seen in my life walked by, a Gallic Boris Karloff. He wore a white dress shirt. His shoulders had a sorrowful hunch. His dark overhanging eyebrows looked carved from granite, like tombstones, monuments to worry. Of course he had something to do with the morgue: he couldn’t have gone into anything but a funerary profession. Maybe this was the family face, and the family business, and who could say whether it was evolution or destiny or an acceptance that one’s face is one’s fortune, or misfortune.

“That’s the screws,” said Edward.

“What?”

“That’s the sound of them screwing the lid down,” and then I could hear the dim sound of a turning power tool. That was good. It meant we didn’t have to wait much longer.

Of course Boris Karloff turned out to be the hearse driver. I couldn’t understand a single word of his French, he mumbled so apologetically. The hearse was a plainish station wagon. He gave directions to the cemetery. Edward seemed to understand him.

We followed the car, a threadbare funeral procession. At every rotary the cemetery was marked, but we checked the map anyhow. What could be worse than to lose sight of our boy now?

In the middle of the cemetery, Boris Karloff pulled up in front of a building that housed both the crematorium and a few chapels for funerals. He shook our hands and directed us inside. The building had the timeless feel of an institutional edifice constructed in good taste, with no heart. It might have been erected in 1952 or 1977 or 2005. The funeral director greeted us. We said our name, we said we were the R-Vays, and he indicated with his hand the direction to walk.

At every turn of the hallway was a sign with the international line drawing of a martini glass, the kind that indicates airport