BETTY IS GOING AWAY for the weekend to visit a ‘friend’ and she’s taking Lucky with her. She offered to make pies for George’s freezer, but he is too cross to accept them. He’s furious with Ellen for dying, and Betty for sticking her beak in and getting involved, important, essential. He’s incandescent about the lack of pie. He feels old and bitter. His belly is full of lemons.

When he goes out to do his shopping with Poppy, people smile at him and say hello.

‘Is she a puppy? Isn’t she lovely? How old is she?’ He’s tried dragging Poppy on, but dogs are like their owners, and Poppy is stubborn. She rolls over on the pavement and offers her belly to anyone who’ll touch her. That must have come from all the time she’s spent with Betty, George thinks.

George hates Poppy’s neediness. Hates the way Sophie-from-the-chemist’s talks about Ellen as if she were still alive, then realizes her mistake and covers her mouth. He hates that the church called because Betty gave them his number and they want him to go and look at the allotment.

Ellen would have put Poppy into her handbag with a bloody bow round her neck and let strangers stroke her, wasting hours of a life she was racing to the end of. Ellen would have made him do things to help other people. Box up books, or sand down chairs. Now she’s dead, he doesn’t have to care. He doesn’t want to bloody care.

Ellen.

Betty leaves his house spotless before she goes. She’s cleaned it so many times now, not even a particle of his wife remains. No half-moon fingernail under the sofa, or strand of hair on the rug. Betty has vacuumed her all up, and now his house smells of Dettol, cheap perfume and dogs.

George spends his Betty-less morning searching his house for a piece of dried skin from the sole of Ellen’s foot, for one of her screwed-up tissues, for anything.

There might be some of her in the spare room. Maybe he didn’t wash her favourite mug, with the thin gold-rimmed lip, before ordering Barbara to ‘get it out of his sight’. It might still hold the faintest trace of the Vaseline she would tap on her lip with a fingertip. Her kiss print, like a fossil, like proof that something incredible used to walk the earth.

George stands next to the spare-room door, but he can’t open it. He is not ready to realize she won’t be in there, whole and quietly smelling of lavender and rose.