I thought: you should have seen it before I cleared it up.

He fixed things and glued things and replaced things, dashing around in his blue overalls. The energy of the man! When he couldn’t sort something out, he got a guy in to do it. A lot of people seemed to owe him a favour.

I surrendered myself to this hurricane of activity. It blew away the cobwebs and the sadness. Calvin had brought me back to life. I looked back with wonder at the woman who’d gatecrashed funerals in her little black dress. What a surreal thing to do! For now I’d returned to the real world. I was a normal person at last, with a man who I’d met in a normal way, who stroked my knee when he was driving and who reorganised my kitchen and fixed my computer. Who took me shopping and bought me underwear and, when he wasn’t around, texted me six times a day.

‘I miss our little chats,’ said Pam one morning. She seemed to have materialised from behind her hedge. ‘Still, I quite understand you’re too busy for me, now you’ve got a boyfriend. I’m so pleased for you, because I’m the sort of person who likes to see people happy, even if it means they’ve got less time for others.’ She buttoned up a toggle on her cardigan. ‘And a very fancy car, I have to say. He’s obviously wealthy. At least you can be sure he’s not after your house.’

What was he after? My self-confidence had taken such a battering that I asked myself this question. What did he see in a woman my age? Of course he was the same age himself, but I still felt insecure. I shrank from Calvin when he kissed my wrinkles but he told me I was beautiful.

‘But you said my elbows were beautiful and they’re even more wrinkled than the rest of me.’

‘That’s their tragedy,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave them to deal with that one. At least they’ve got each other.’ Suddenly serious, he pushed the hair back from my face. ‘I can’t believe a man would leave a woman as beautiful as you. He must have been a frigging moron.’

I’d told him that my husband had run off with my best friend, but Calvin hadn’t asked me any more. That was fine. Calvin wasn’t interested in other people; he lived instinctively, in the moment. It was part of his attraction. He had that in common with Azra, a woman he would have otherwise found incomprehensible. In fact they had more in common than he realised. They’d both had difficult childhoods, pulled up the roots and reinvented themselves. No wonder there was a certain recklessness about the two of them.