‘Us.’ Lovely word. Azra seemed to have put her life on hold and was devoting herself to me. ‘Devoting’ seemed another unusual word, certainly when applied to my scratchy friend, but as I said, she’d changed. Sometimes I caught a thoughtful look in her eye that I’d never seen before; sometimes she seemed positively needy. She’d given up smoking; gone were the eccentric outfits and painted fingernails. Day after day she wore the same jeans and sweatshirts, like a wife who no longer made an effort. The sort of clothes a Linda would wear. I didn’t mind; during those weeks I didn’t mind anything. I was still intoxicated with her and the vision of our life together.

Besides, most days we were busy sorting out the house. In mid-January contracts were exchanged and we had a week to pack up the furniture and put it into storage. When the house was sold I’d move in with Azra until we found somewhere to live in Deal. I felt, then, that our adventure was just beginning.

Such was our self-absorption, and physical exhaustion, that we hardly turned on the radio. We were too busy heaving boxes of books and hauling wardrobes through doorways. As the house emptied, the past flooded back. The joy when Greg and I moved in; the ghostly laughter of the children when they were little, their footsteps pattering on the stairs. With the carpets gone the rooms echoed with lost voices, I was living in a haunted house. And look—the old stains on the walls, the children’s scribbles, and the hole in the corner where Lucy’s gerbil disappeared for ever. No doubt every house in Muswell Hill has a mummified gerbil under the floorboards.

So we had no idea what was happening in the world. January 21 was our last night in the house. Only the bed remained—I was giving it to Azra’s niece, who would be collecting it the next day.

We spent our last night in it, the room empty around us. Moonlight shone through the uncurtained window. Azra snored but I lay awake. In this bed I had dreamed a thousand dreams and made love a thousand times. I’d conceived two children and now it was all over in the blink of an eye. The house no longer belonged to me. Another family was moving in and our occupancy that had so briefly fluttered into life was now extinguished. As for me and Azra—we were flimsy creatures at the end of an era; our presence had barely registered.