For some days Molly McKenzie did not get dressed, as if grieving should be done undressed. She sat in Clapham. She had no routine to keep to that could automatically help her, force her to think of other things. She listened to the radio, watched a bit of television, sometimes she read. Often she had to turn back the pages: she had not taken in what she was reading. She waited for the pain to go away. Surely this kind of pain had to go away eventually.

She heard news of Terence’s case on Radio 4 in the mornings, sometimes saw him on TV leaving the court, disappearing into a taxi, at the end of a day’s hearing. He looked very much thinner she thought, still very much showing the effects of the stabbing. She even laughed briefly one day at a report that Ronnie McDermott, a Scottish comic who had been a year ahead of them at the Drama Academy, had been called by the defence to describe Simone banging her shoe on the bannister as she lay draped across the stairs screaming I LOVE HIM I LOVE HIM in 1959. The court laughter had to be silenced several times, the complainant was in tears, the judge reminded everybody that rape was a serious crime, and that love was not.

Molly wandered in her dressing gown around the Clapham house that seemed so large and so empty. She had not waited to see where Banjo and his new love might live: she had packed up every single piece of musical equipment still there, every single item of clothing, all the furniture that belonged to him, and, knowing the mode of transport would embarrass that household, had arranged for everything to be sent to him at Pete and Nancy’s small council flat in a Harrods removal van. She knew she was behaving badly, she didn’t care. I am a rejected mistress, not a storage depot.

She wept every day. Her eyes were permanently red and swollen, she remembered how she felt when her mother died: jagged, unjoined together, sometimes seeing a part of her body – a hand, a leg – as if it belonged to somebody else. Then Banjo had held her, let her talk incoherently, comforted her, over and over again. This time she did not feel there was anybody she could talk to about how she was feeling, Banjo had been the one she always talked to about how she was feeling. She was absolutely alone with the pain

Sometimes she drank large vodka and tonics

She never answered the telephone, not even Anthony’s calls about the television series; she knew that she must answer them, that work and such a job as he seemed to be offering, would be her salvation. But she literally could not pick up the telephone.