‘Are you crying or is it the rain?’ Azra’s words were whipped out of her mouth.

‘Just saying goodbye to Greg.’ Together we shook the urn.

‘Goodbye, darling!’ shouted Azra.

The ash blew back into our faces.

‘Ha ha!’ I shouted. ‘He always got up my nose.’

Afterwards we lay in bed in a seafront hotel, the rain rattling the window. Like many momentous events, it hadn’t been as significant as we’d hoped. Bit of a damp squib, to be honest. We lay side by side, deep in our own thoughts. Drunken voices boomed in the corridor and a door slammed.

‘Where did you disappear, after the funeral?’ Azra asked.

‘Some B&B, God knows where.’

‘I knew you wouldn’t stay for the wake.’

‘No.’

Lights from a passing car chased over the ceiling. She was waiting for me to speak.

‘I had the nearest I’d got to a lesbian experience there,’ I said, ‘in the B&B.’

‘What happened?’

‘I rummaged under a shepherdess’s skirt, trying to find the bog roll.’

She didn’t laugh. She hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. Nor had I, actually.

‘You should have come. You were missed.’ She spoke into the darkness. ‘If you’d come to the cottage it might have helped you, to see that nothing had been changed.’

I froze. No way was I going to tell her that I’d been there, to the cottage, that day in June.

There was a constrained silence. We lay there side by side, not touching.

‘Well, too bad,’ I said. ‘Night-night.’

I kissed her cheek and turned away, pulling my half of the duvet with me.

The next day, back in London, I had a phone call. It was Barry, the estate agent.

‘I have some news for you,’ he said. ‘You’d better speak to your solicitor.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘You know about this virus thing, this flu thing, in China?’

‘Of course.’ I’d seen it on the news, everyone had.

‘Your buyers want to move the completion date forward, to a week after exchange. January the twenty-second. You OK with that?’

‘Sure, but why?’

‘There’s rumours of a lockdown where they live, a place called Wuhan, and they want to finalise the sale before it happens.’

It didn’t give us much time.