Mary greeted me rather frostily as she opened the door, but she couldn’t shout at a widow in front of Eric and her four other guests. I knew two of them: Don and Laura were old friends of Mary and she always seemed to invite us together so that we could become friends with each other, but for reasons I didn’t understand it had never quite happened. Then there was Maddie, who worked in Mary’s office, and Geoff, who explained to me that he had met Mary and Eric on a cycling holiday in Sicily a couple of years back and that they’d stayed in contact. I wondered, with a touch of resentment, if Mary was already trying to set me up, then quickly became cross with myself. What was she meant to do? If she had invited two couples, I might have been cross at being excluded.

As Mary introduced me, I saw the now-familiar concern passing across everybody’s face. It was clear that Mary had briefed them in advance about my situation. But I soon had other things to worry about. Mary said we must eat and muttered something under her breath about everything being spoiled.

I was grateful, in theory at least, to Mary for inviting me. It can’t have been the most enticing prospect. She must have known I wouldn’t be the life and soul of the party. The others seemed constrained as well, perhaps with the effort of avoiding any subject that might seem inappropriate: death, funerals, marriages. And I now knew rather too much about the state of Mary’s marriage; I kept glancing at Eric, then looking away when he caught my eye. Geoff told me in unnecessary detail about the cycling holiday he had gone on in the year after he had met Mary and Eric, and in even more unnecessary detail about the cycling holiday he was planning for the summer. ‘Do you cycle?’ he asked finally.

‘No,’ I said, which was a bit of a conversation stopper – at least, that was what it was intended to be. I turned to Laura who leaned towards me, put her hand on mine and said, ‘Ellie, how are you?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I mean, as fine as can be expected.’

‘I just wanted to say,’ said Laura, ‘that if there’s anything I can do, then just ask.’

I made myself respond appropriately to her: I thanked her and said it wasn’t really about help, just about getting through it and about friends being there for me, and by the time I’d got to the end of the sentence I couldn’t remember how it had begun. In the meantime, I wasn’t doing full justice to Mary’s cooking. The first course consisted of a selection of Greek mezes: hummus, rice wrapped in vine leaves, taramasalata, little slices of fried haloumi, olives attached to lumps of feta with cocktail sticks. It would have been mouth-watering if I hadn’t just eaten a huge buttery baked potato. Eric filled my plate for me, as if double helpings were a cure for grief. I nibbled at things, cut them up and rearranged them on my plate, in the hope that this would give the impression of lots of eating.

The Greek theme continued with the main course. Mary had cooked a hearty moussaka, and Eric spooned a huge slab on to my plate. I made him spoon half of it back and devoted much ingenuity, effort and clutter to cutting up the food and occasionally moving it towards my mouth. I put the same effort into not drinking the wine, because I was already about three drinks ahead of everybody else.

I toyed with the cheese and biscuits, too, and Mary finally asked if I was feeling unwell. I said I was fine and she let it go at that, probably attributing my lack of appetite to grief. I didn’t hold back on the coffee, though. I drank three strong mugs, after which my hands were trembling and I felt fiercely, inhumanly awake, yet tired at the same time.

At the end of the evening, I turned down Geoff’s offer of a lift home. I wanted to walk to clear my head, work the coffee out of my system. Anyway, I liked walking at night in the city and I needed to think, to sort things out in my head.

I’d half decided I wasn’t going back to Frances’s office, because it was wrong in every way, but looking back on the evening at Mary’s, I also felt I couldn’t continue like that. From the outside, I probably seemed all right, like a robot that had been fairly well programmed to behave like a human being: I hadn’t made a scene, I hadn’t cried, I hadn’t embarrassed anybody. From my point of view, from the inside, it was a different story.

Perhaps it was a sign of success to make it through the day and then to the end of the evening without cracking up, or screaming, or having a flaming row. But that wasn’t what I wanted from my life, that horrible feeling of dissociation, of acting a part that didn’t belong to me, of being a person I no longer knew. That and not knowing the truth about Greg. They seemed to be separate things, but in my mind they were linked. If I could just discover that Greg and that woman had been having an affair or that they hadn’t, I could start my new life as a real person. If I could find the letter or the email or the postcard that showed he had slept with her, because I had been too much for him or too little, I could be angry with him and maybe, just maybe, forgive him.

So the next day I put on clothes that were business clothes, but not too much like business clothes because, anyway, I didn’t own any – you don’t dress up for restoring furniture in the shed in your garden. I selected black canvas trousers with a thin, pale-grey jersey, and tied back my hair in a messy bun, put on earrings, a silver chain round my neck, even eye-liner and mascara. Now I wasn’t Ellie but Gwen: helpful, calm, practical, discreet, ever so mathematical. I took my purse out of my bag; if, for no reason I could envisage, I needed it, I could pretend to have forgotten it. I just took a fistful of cash. I went through my shoulder bag carefully, removing anything that identified me by name. I looked at my left hand. No wedding ring.

At five past ten, when I arrived at her house, Frances opened the door with a smile of such welcome and relief that it made me smile back. ‘I thought you wouldn’t come,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe I’d hallucinated you yesterday, out of desperation. It’s such a disaster zone. I have to work here but you don’t.’

‘I’ll help out for a day or two,’ I said. ‘I’ve got work of my own to get back to, but you’re having a bad time, so if there’s anything I can do…’

‘I am having a bad time,’ said Frances, ‘a terrible time, and part of what’s terrible about it is that I don’t know what you can do to help, what anyone can do, apart from putting a match to it all.’

‘I can’t organize a party,’ I said, ‘or dress up as a waitress, or cook a five-course meal for forty people, but if someone could give me a cup of coffee, I’ll go through every piece of paper in this office and reply to it or do something about it or put it in a file or throw it away. And then I’ll get back to my own life.’

Frances’s smile changed to something of a frown. ‘What have I done to deserve you?’ she asked.

I felt the tiniest shiver of apprehension. Was I being too obvious? ‘I’m trying to do as I would be done by,’ I said. ‘Does that sound too yucky?’

Frances smiled again. ‘I’m a drowning person being dragged to the shore,’ she said. ‘Who cares?’