Consumed by self-pity, I sat there sobbing; once I started I couldn’t stop.

I had to shake myself out of this. There were worse things than living in a five-bedroomed house in Muswell Hill with bookshelves and shutters and an open fire, with an apple tree in the garden and nice middle-class neighbours I’d known for ever. What right had I to sob in my car when the world was burning and migrants were drowning and hedgehogs were becoming extinct? Every day when I read the Guardian I felt another plughole opening and the hope draining away, thousands of bath-tubs and gallons of tears. And here I was, fretting about my marriage.

So the next week I asked Azra if I could help with her Syrians. Every Saturday she drove to supermarkets where she loaded up her van with leftover food, which she distributed to families around her neighbourhood, and then helped out in the community hub in the furthest reaches of Tottenham.

Azra had already collected the food. I buckled up for another Wild West ride through the mean streets of North London.

‘Fatima likes peanut butter,’ Azra said. ‘So I nicked her a jar when I was signing for the other stuff. She has a son with cystic fibrosis and her husband beats her up.’ We swung round a corner. Behind us, the bin bags shifted and slumped. ‘We always have too much bread. Trouble is, they can only take the sliced loaves because most of them don’t have chopping boards.’

How I loved Azra that day! All was forgiven, for although she could be snippy with people like me, with the vulnerable she was at her best: warm and solicitous, asking about their children and helping them rummage in the bags for the choicest items, like punnets of strawberries.

When we’d finished the deliveries we drove to the community hub. It was in a former carpet shop on a particularly desolate stretch of road. Lorries thundered past in clouds of exhaust fumes. Its interior was decorated with murals of sunflowers and skipping kids. There was a café, where Azra stored the food we hadn’t given away. Men played backgammon and mothers bent over exercise books with their children.

Azra seemed to know them all and went round shaking hands and chatting. I lingered by the door, distracted by the thought that I might never have sex again. I looked at a little girl who was sucking the leg of her teddy bear. When I was her age, seventy years was unimaginable. You’d be dead by then. When I was a schoolgirl, our teacher was forty and that meant practically dead, too. No doubt, all those years I was teaching, my schoolchildren thought the same about me. The thought of sex would not only be disgusting but inconceivable. If, that is, it ever crossed their minds, which I doubted.

Azra was on her mobile again. She stood hunched against the wall by the toilets, her back to the rest of us. Her shoulders shook with laughter and my warmth towards her evaporated. She wore her green leather jacket and the long lacy skirt she’d bought at the Oxfam shop. It was one of her less successful purchases, with its foolish cobwebby hem. Why did she agree to this trip and spend the whole time on the phone?