I shifted in my seat, blushing furiously. I’d been hemmed in by some late arrivals and couldn’t sneak away.

So I sat it out. Dawn was obviously a wonderful woman, but then everyone’s wonderful when they’re dead, aren’t they? Despite being fearful of discovery I found myself drawn into Dawn’s life story, which seemed one of battling against a series of personal tragedies that would have defeated a lesser spirit. When it was over I made my escape into the drizzle. As I did so, a stranger turned to me and said: ‘I don’t know half these people, do you?’

Maybe it was then that the seed was sown. At the time I was just filled with suppressed giggles as I hurried away. I remember thinking: I wish Greg were at home, so I could tell him about it and we could have a laugh.

But there was nobody at home. When I arrived back, having sat through the next funeral, the one I was supposed to attend, the roofer had gone. He’d taken his cash and left an ashtray full of cigarette butts and a turd in the lavatory.

I rang Azra to tell her about it but she was away. She was away a lot that spring. It turned out she was in France, yet again. One of her money-making schemes was trawling brocantes, buying old lace and linen bedsheets—apparently they’d become popular again now people had forgotten what a pain they were to iron. She’d bring them back in her van and sell them in antique markets.

A week later she was home. Her door was open and I glimpsed her in her kitchen, leaning against the draining board, reading a magazine and eating cold tortellini out of a saucepan. I was flooded with love.

She turned round. How great she looked! Radiant, in fact, with that wild hair and big, generous mouth. She was one of those sexy women who looked as if they have a secret, like a child sucking a forbidden sweet, up to something that only they find amusing.

I was suddenly suspicious. ‘You got a fancy man out there?’

‘What?’

‘In France. Is that why you keep going?’

Azra laughed so hard she ended up coughing, her thin shoulders shaking. This seemed an overreaction and I was mildly surprised. When she recovered, however, she assured me it wasn’t true. I couldn’t help feeling relieved. I realised, yet again, how much I needed her. The thought of her disappearing into a love affair filled me with desolation.

I told her about being an imposter at Dawn’s funeral and how I’d started to feel weirdly close to this unknown woman. How it seemed somebody had to die before people travelled across the world to express their love—why didn’t they do it when the person was still alive?

‘And nobody questioned me being there,’ I said, ‘because at funerals all sorts of people crawl out of the woodwork: people from the past, from bits of the past nobody knows about. We have such different compartments in our lives.’