We gazed at an uninspiring pasta salad. Not that they’re ever inspiring. She ripped the cling film off the second bowl to reveal another one.

‘The manipulative cow,’ she muttered.

‘Who?’

‘Mum, of course! I bet she was like that at primary school. Was she? Did she set you against your best friend, that sort of thing?’

‘I didn’t know her at primary school.’

‘It was unforgivable, the way she played us off against each other, her own daughters! Like a puppeteer. A malign, witchy puppeteer. It so damaged our relationship—poor Lisa, I’m quite sorry for her, really. And then there was that thing with Dad.’

‘What thing?’

‘You know! In Builth Wells. I’m amazed he didn’t end up in intensive care.’ She snorted. ‘Ha! And her a nurse. That would’ve been funny.’

‘What happened?’

‘She was an alcoholic, of course, but you would’ve known that …’

‘Not really.’

‘The way he looked after her when she got ill, he was utterly devoted. Poor old Dad, he forgave her everything, the poisonous bitch. But I didn’t. To be perfectly honest, when she died I didn’t shed a tear.’

At this point the door opened and the others came in, laughing at some joke and bringing a blast of normality.

During lunch I watched Evan, but he didn’t meet my eye. That brief moment of intimacy was gone. He cut up Anna-Belinda’s food—he was obviously a doting grandfather—and discussed cricket with his sons-in-law.

My head was still busy with Gina’s revelations. Who was this Susan? I couldn’t make sense of her. The funeral eulogies still drifted through my head … devoted mother, loving wife, popular member of the community … the bland phrases with which we’re all familiar, and with which we’ll all be posted on our journey into the unknown. Do they ever really capture the person? For Gina’s outburst had bulldozed through it all with the truth. Well, her truth. Each of us has our own truth, and this Susan was turning out to be a somewhat contradictory creature, like the rest of us.

Not that it was any of my concern. I’d never met the woman and she was none of my business. Nor, thank goodness, did anyone seem more than briefly interested in our past so-called friendship. However, my own, fictional memory of Susan was thickening up into something so solid I was starting to believe in it myself. High jinks and apple-pie beds in the nurses’ hostel; giggles in our jim-jams. I’d never been to Nottingham but I was there now, watching me and Susan sashaying down its imaginary streets to a chorus of wolf-whistles. In my real life, back in the 1970s, I’d been a bit of a hippie chick, but this Prudence was a sporty lass who played netball with her fellow student nurses in the spacious grounds of the General Hospital, wherever that was. Susan and I lost our virginity in the very same week. She subsequently stole my boyfriend, a junior doctor, and I never spoke to her again.