A few people spoke about Zoe in turn. Jamal described his sister’s struggle with PTSD, something she’d gone to great lengths to hide, and then a soldier from Zoe’s old unit told of how she had always encouraged him. ‘Once, when I was having a hard time, she made me watch a video of Arnold Schwarzenegger.’ In an attempt at humour, he tried to do Arnie’s voice: ‘“All the time people ask me how many lifts I do, but I only start counting when it begins to hurt.”’

It was sobering for Sebastian standing there to listen. He had spent the preceding days thinking obsessively about what Zoe had done. He thought it the most radically free act he’d ever known someone to commit. As he listened, though, it dawned on him that her act was not free at all, that in fact she’d been driven to escape her suffering; her demons had all but chased her over that cliff. He hadn’t known about her illness. It must have been terrible.

The other thing that struck him was the glaring contrast between this memorial and his own, imaginary one. All his folly, his vanity, descended on him at once. It wasn’t just that he’d been wrong about Zoe’s state of mind. He had been totally seduced by the false romance of death. But here and now he was confronting the unadorned fact of it. Envisioning your send-off was an idiotic diversion, he realised. Anyway, who did he think he was trying to impress? Life was the thing, that was all you had, and once it was gone there wasn’t anything else.

The trouble was, the question of how to live was a lot less fun to dwell on. Life was repetition, struggle, ordinariness. Its problems were open-ended, defying resolution. You couldn’t curate it as you could a big one-off event.

The soldier was still speaking, describing one deployment when they had rolled into a settlement. The place was oddly quiet but then all hell broke loose. They found themselves in an ambush, a unit of eighteen surrounded by upwards of three hundred insurgents and having to withstand five hours of non-stop fire. ‘I probably aged ten years that day,’ he said. ‘I thought, this is it. Game on. Welcome to the war.’ He chuckled nervously, without humour. ‘You know what? All I wanted to do was go out in a good way. That was my thing. I didn’t want to just die on my knees?’ He seemed to appeal to those listening, looking from one face to another. Then he turned his eyes to the propped-up photograph of Zoe. ‘Well, Zoe,’ he said, ‘I didn’t. And you didn’t either.’