The next occasion had been better planned. Knowing better than to attempt the deed at home surrounded by photos of those she’d loved and lost, she’d spent a hundred quid of her savings, figuring she couldn’t take it with her, and booked a hotel room. The irony of that expenditure was that if she’d simply locked herself in her own bathroom, the suicide might have been successful. As it was, a member of housekeeping had failed to deliver a full set of clean towels that morning, so the woman knocked on the door while Fenny was slitting her wrists and entered when no response came.

An ambulance had been called and Fenny had been whisked away to a nearby hospital. A psychiatric consultant had been engaged and she’d spent the following four months as an inpatient at a unit where the staff wore pink, smiled a lot more than was normal, and insisted that she do a series of daily classes including yoga, meditation and mindfulness. By the end of it, Fenny had been such a flawless student that she was released with cake and good wishes.

They had no idea that she’d have done anything at all never to have to go back to yoga classes again, with a teacher who constantly talked in sing-song hushed tones and insisted that she should love her body and listen to it. Fenny’s body, she was pretty sure, fucking hated her and she didn’t want to listen to anything it had to say, but compliance had got her out of the unit, with a side-effect of making her truly angry. Angry that her husband had smoked forty a day and left her alone as she marched towards old age. Angry that the daughter she’d cried for every day for more than a decade was gone for no good reason at all. Angry at the neighbours who blasted rap music out day and night.

Anger, it turned out, was a cure in itself. She didn’t want to die any more. Countering the rap music with Italian opera, she’d bought a speaker that would drown out a whole festival. She’d joined a bingo club because her husband had spent his life bitching about women who spent money on such frivolities. It had turned out to be rather good fun, too. And she’d stopped looking for her daughter through missing persons websites and family reunion agencies, accepting the reality that there was nothing she could do to bring someone back who was either dead or who wanted to remain lost. Let fate play its games, was her new philosophy. She would simply be carried along on the tide.