I was alone when a rosy-cheeked vet arrived—just married, she told me—to put down the dog. I played Joni Mitchell, that song about her lover sniffing his fingers as he watches the waitress’s legs, Sidney’s head lowered and rested, a dead weight, in my lap.

So that was it. I was sixty-nine, and alone for the first time in my life. My friend Azra said: ‘Good sodding riddance. Greg was a tosser, I can say that now. You’re not too old to find another man. Go to the park. There’s plenty of them there, walking their dogs.’

‘I haven’t got a dog any more.’

‘You’ve still got his lead, haven’t you? Walk about calling “Sidney, Sidney.” Somebody’s bound to come and help.’

I laughed—a startling sound; I hadn’t laughed for weeks. Azra could do that to me. Glorious Azra, sprawled on my sofa in a fug of cigarette smoke. God, I loved her.

Greg didn’t fight me for the house. He’d moved onto a higher plane; he made me well aware of that. Our family home had mausoleumed into a repository of junk.

‘Who needs all this stuff?’ he’d said. ‘People bust their guts doing jobs they don’t like to buy stuff they don’t need, just to help corporate criminals ruin the planet.’

He said he was shedding his possessions and going on a silent retreat in Rutland.

‘Rutland?’

He was already removing himself to an unknown county. We’d never said the word ‘Rutland’ in our lives. So many unknowns he was going to discover without me. His tone was sorrowful but weirdly exultant.

‘I need solitude, to start my spiritual journey.’ He’d said this without a glimmer of humour. I knew then that I’d lost him. ‘I don’t want anything, you can have it all.’

That wasn’t quite true. He’d kept the cottage in Dorset. That’s where he was going to live. We’d talked about retiring there but decided we’d die of boredom.

Not now. Greg had moved beyond boredom. Gazing at the immensity of the ocean would restore him to himself, a prelapsarian Greg, unmuddied by compromise and familiarity, by a mortgage and a thickening waist, by family rows, by the chronic hopes and disappointments of simply weathering the years. By me.

‘It’s not you,’ he’d said. ‘It’s nothing you’ve done. It’s just that since my cancer scare I’ve realised that life is so very short, one must live each day fully, concentrate on what’s important—’

‘So I’m not important?’

‘Be honest, Pru. You’ve felt it too, I can tell. We only have the one life—’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘And you must admit that our marriage has run out of steam. It’s become stale and predictable. We’ve lost that joy in each other’s company. To be brutally honest we haven’t been happy for years. Isn’t it time we had the courage to part as friends—’

‘Friends?’

‘And rediscover the aspects of ourselves that have lain dormant all these years, nurture them and let them flourish—you as well as me. Don’t we owe it to ourselves—’