People said a happy marriage didn’t leave the one who was left behind as devastated as an unhappy one, but that didn’t seem to be true. They said that time made it better, but that was a lie as well. What they didn’t tell you was that it was the same as when someone was away travelling, or the children went off to uni: the longer they’d been gone, the more you missed them. The first few weeks hadn’t been so bad, apart from the silence in the house. The quiet had a thickness and a weight to it, like wet wool. But there’d been a sense of relief, to begin with, that Owen wasn’t sick any longer, wasn’t in any more pain. And the kids had been around a lot, in that early period. Her maternal feelings had trumped her own grief, then, so that she felt it was her job to comfort Anna and David for their sorrow at losing their dad. Then arranging the funeral had kept her busy, and responding to the nice cards and letters people had written. Everyone had liked Owen. More than they liked her: she knew that. He’d been more outgoing than her, sunnier. She knew she was stubborn and could come across as dry.

She often thought of her mother now, and wished that she could talk to her. She found herself missing her more than she had in years. This fresh loss seemed to open a door to the losses that had gone before. Her mother had known all about grief. Hazel wished that she’d thought to ask her about it, how you got through mourning. Did you in fact get through it? Did it ever go away, or did it – as she now suspected – stay with you like an aching knee, an impediment, a constant pain, that you just learned to live with? Lately, when people asked her how she was, she could see the wary look in their eyes that said: be OK. It wasn’t that people didn’t have sympathy, she got that: it was more that grief was embarrassing to them. It was too raw, too messy. Grief wasn’t just a glassy single tear rolling down a dignified cheek. It was snot and spit and choking sobs and it went on and on and on. In the first months, crying at night, she practically embarrassed herself with the noises that came out of her, more animal than human.

Researching family history had been something to take her mind off the loss of Owen and keep her occupied, now that she’d taken early retirement. She volunteered at a primary school, listening to the youngest kids reading, two afternoons a week. But still, time seemed to hang around her in dusty drapes and folds, like curtains from a big house rehung in a bungalow.