Azra lived alone but there was nothing pitiful about her. Quite the opposite. She was a fierce, feral creature. Long legs and masses of hair, which she streaked pink and blue, or sometimes dyed jet black. She didn’t give a toss about her age. Both men and women had fallen under her spell and been spat out when she’d finished with them. I’d known her for ever and her adventures had thrummed through my marriage like a distant tom-tom in the jungle. How timid my own life seemed, compared to hers! She was my best friend and I loved her with all my heart—even more so now that I was on my own.

For Azra was my inspiration, my role model for this new me. ‘Who needs men cluttering up the place?’ she said. ‘Go, girl. Eat what you like, do what you like. Reclaim your territory. Stay in bed all day if you want to. Go out all night if you want to. Fart in bed, pamper yourself, don’t pamper yourself, who gives a shit? Come on holiday with me, get drunk, have a laugh. Get rid of his stuff and make the house your house. It’s fun, and you haven’t had much of that with boring old Greg, have you, sweetheart?’

Her contempt for Greg surprised me. Azra wasn’t normally the soul of tact but in this case she’d kept her feelings hidden, out of consideration for me. Now it all gushed out.

‘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? And how he let everybody know he’d been a professor at the LSE? He always got it in somehow. And how he’d met Mick Jagger—he got that in, too. He was such a starfucker.’

‘Was he?’

‘God, Pru, didn’t you notice? But much, much worse was the way he undermined you.’

‘Did he?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘All the time. Little squelches. Squelch, squelch, squelch. Contradicting you in front of other people, putting you down, that sort of thing. Being a control freak. No wonder you felt so inadequate.’ She gripped my arm. ‘But you’re not, you’re so not! You taught for twenty years in the toughest comprehensive in Hackney—catch Greg doing that—and you’re funny and clever and gorgeous, and you’ve brought up two fabulous children—’

‘He really wasn’t that bad.’ Ridiculously, I felt a throb of loyalty. ‘I think, deep down, he felt inadequate. That’s why he was so moody and difficult. It’s all the fault of being sent away to boarding school, feeling abandoned. He was so damaged by that. I could’ve killed his parents. He was depressed for years—you know that—but he was trying to sort himself out. Better late than never. I think it was the cancer that shook him up. He was trying, honestly. He was going to a therapist.’

Azra shrugged. ‘I don’t know why you’re standing up for him when he’s been such a shit. I was only trying to help.’