To be honest, there were tensions from the start. Looking back, I can see some early signs, but I chose to ignore them. My cat, for instance. Azra had always disliked Flossie. She said she gave her the evil eye. And the litter tray stank. Azra was fussier about such things than I had expected. She was forever wiping down surfaces, brushing crumbs into her cupped palm with a sigh. We’d never lived together, of course, and I realised now how much tidier she was than me and how she needed to keep things under control. Maybe the cancer had changed her; she said she was nervous about picking up an infection, that’s why she hadn’t returned to her Syrians. Sorry I snapped, she’d say, I’m just so used to living alone. This is your place as much as mine, you know that, don’t you?

I also realised that she had few friends. Those long phone calls, I guessed, had been to my husband, a subject we never discussed. Now her mobile was silent for days on end. But then so was mine. Few people knew that I’d gone to ground in Tottenham. Autumn had been a time of such upheaval—emotional as well as physical—that I’d lost touch with people, and had no desire to go back to Muswell Hill, least of all to see my empty house.

Besides, there was a strange feeling in the air, a sense that people were retreating from public spaces back into their own lives. Azra didn’t listen to the news so I didn’t either, but by the first week of March it was becoming clear, even to us, that this flu thing was more serious than we’d imagined. Now we had a stronger desire than ever to move out of London. We were visiting Deal every week, looking at properties, but hadn’t found anything yet. Too small, too dark, not enough garden. Our hunt united us. We’ll know it when we see it, we said.

No, we didn’t talk about Greg. I didn’t want to hear about their time together, God, no. But I thought about him, obsessively. I thought about him with Azra. It was uncomfortably prurient. I remembered her lounging on the sofa in a fug of cigarette smoke, cradling a cushion against her belly as if it were her baby. She was telling me what a tosser Greg had been and how I was well rid of him. He’d become such a pompous old git. Didn’t it annoy you, the way he cleared his throat before giving his opinion on anything? Was my husband’s semen still inside her as she elaborated on his shortcomings? Was her bush still moist? By now I was as intimate with it as with my own.

As with my own.