When we were spilling out afterwards, we collided with another group about to come in and I realized that in another hour they would be colliding with yet another. We were on a conveyor-belt of grief.

Everybody was invited back to my place where we had the worst party of all time. It wasn’t that the food was bad, far from it. At first I had planned to hit a supermarket and buy everything ready-made but then I’d decided to do it myself. I’d spent the evening and night before making tart-lets with goat’s cheese and red onion and cherry tomatoes and mozzarella and salami. There were toppings on little pieces of dried toast. I’d stuffed red peppers and baked cheese straws. I’d bought a kilo of olives with anchovies and chillies. I’d bought a case of red wine and another of white. I’d baked two cakes. There was coffee, tea, a selection of infusions, and yet it was still the worst party of all time.

It combined the ingredients of different kinds of bad party. For a start, quite a lot of people didn’t turn up. Some friends weren’t even at the funeral. Others didn’t come to the house. They might have felt embarrassed by the circumstances, by the humiliation. It gave the party a forlorn, rejected atmosphere.

Once people started arriving, I was reminded of those awful teenage parties where the boys cluster in a corner, giggling among themselves, staring at the girls but not daring to approach them. Something tribal had happened. Maybe my perspective had been poisoned, but I felt that it was as if Greg had left me for Milena and there were those who were taking his side against me.

Gwen and Mary were there and, of course, they were entirely in my camp. They fetched drinks and food and hovered around me, murmuring words of support. I half expected us to put our handbags on the floor and dance round them.

My parents were there, old and crumpled, and my sister Maria, looking furious – as if Greg had done her a personal wrong by dying in the way he had. Then there was Fergus, whose eyes were swollen with grief; I envied him that. He had wanted to read something at the funeral but at the last moment pulled out. He said he didn’t think he’d manage it. I got the impression from Jemma, his hugely pregnant wife, that he had been sobbing on and off since it had happened.

There were people like Joe and Tania, who drifted between the camps, making heroic and doomed efforts to bring them together. There were groups of Greg’s and my friends, but everything seemed forced and awkward.

In a strange way, the people I took most comfort from were not friends, certainly not family, but those I had never met before. There was an old primary-school friend whose name I recognized as the James with whom Greg had run three-legged races; there was a large man with a face like a bloodhound’s who had taught Greg piano when he was a teenager. There were several clients, who came up to tell me how much they had depended on Greg, trusted him, liked him, and would miss him now that he was gone. It was such a relief to be with people who didn’t know the back-story to his death, and were there simply to say goodbye.

‘He was a very dear young man,’ said Mrs Sutton, in a piercing voice. She wore a black silk dress and seamed stockings, and had a creased face and silver hair in an immaculate bun. She looked very old and very rich, with an aquiline nose and straight-backed bearing that seemed to belong to a different era.

‘Yes, he was,’ I agreed.

‘I always looked forward to his visits. I’m going to miss him.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said absurdly.

‘As a matter of fact, he was going to visit me the day after he died. That was how I heard – when he failed to arrive I rang his office to ask where he was. It was such a shock.’ She gave me a piercing glance. ‘I’ll be eighty-eight in two months’ time. It doesn’t seem right, does it? People dying out of their turn.’

I couldn’t speak and she lifted a hand like a claw and placed it lightly over mine. ‘You have my sympathy, my dear,’ she said.

For the main part, however, it was a funeral party where nobody seemed able to do the sort of things that funeral parties are for. They couldn’t offer their condolences without seeming embarrassed or creepy; they couldn’t engage in uncomplicated, emotional reminiscences about the deceased. They couldn’t do anything else either. Some picked at the food, others gulped the wine (the woman who had approached me outside the crematorium had much more than was good for her, whether in remorse or some perverse kind of revenge). And gradually they just peeled away.

In the end, Gwen, Mary and I were left with a handful of Greg’s relatives I didn’t know; they had ordered a taxi that kept not arriving. They sat on the sofa with empty glasses, refusing top-ups and more food because it would spoil their dinner. They phoned the cab company repeatedly while we cleared and wiped and finally vacuumed around them. In the end they left, muttering something about finding a taxi in the street or catching a tube.

Gwen and Mary stayed on and I opened some more wine and told them about the woman outside the crematorium and what she had said, and Mary said, ‘You don’t have to fight it, you know.’ I asked her what she meant by that and she said I had nothing to feel bad about. Men were bastards. My friends loved me and would support me. I would get through this. I can’t remember making much of a reply. Instead I just poured myself glass after glass of wine and drank it as if I was insatiably thirsty. They asked if I wanted them to stay and I said I wanted them not to stay, so they left and I think I drank one more glass of wine, a big one, though, filled almost to the lip, so that I had to hold it with both hands.

When I was ten my grandfather had died. I didn’t want to go to the funeral but my mother said funerals were where we went to say goodbye to people who had died. We thought about them and we cried for them and we said goodbye to them and then we went back to our lives.

I lay on my bed fully clothed and couldn’t decide whether the room was rotating around me or whether my bed was rotating inside the room or whether in deep, philosophical terms it made a difference. But as I lay there, drunker than at any time since my first year at university, I knew that on that day I hadn’t cried for Greg, and, above all, I hadn’t said goodbye to him.

Chapter Nine

In the middle of the night I suddenly sat up in bed, straining my eyes in the darkness. I didn’t know what time it was. I had turned off the digital alarm clock because, over the past weeks, I had come to dread waking in the small hours and gazing at the time clicking past. I only knew that it was dark and that something had roused me. A thought, which must have wormed its way into my dreams. A memory.

Like most couples, I’m sure, Greg and I used to have conversations about which of our friends were unfaithful. After all, if one in three partners cheats on the other, or something like that, we figured we must be surrounded by people who were betraying each other. Now I remembered a conversation so vividly it was like being there again, and there we were in bed together, warm under the duvet and facing each other in the grainy half-light, his hand on my hip and my foot resting against his calf.

‘My parents?’ he was saying, and I giggled: ‘No way!’

‘Your parents?’

‘Please!’

‘Who, then?’

‘Fergus and Jemma?’ I suggested.

‘Impossible. They’ve only been together for a couple of years and he’s not that kind of guy.’

‘What kind of guy is that? And, anyway, it doesn’t need to be him, it could be her.’

‘She’s too moral. And too pregnant. What about Mary and Eric?’

‘She would have told me,’ I said firmly.

‘Sure? What about if it was him?’

‘She would definitely have told me that too. Even if she didn’t, I’d know.’