All of this time Matthew kept his voice in a soft mellifluous measure. ‘And please don’t swear like that. It’s totally unnecessary.’

It’s one of the most enraging things a man can do to a woman, to place himself on the pedestal of logic and reason while refusing to listen to a word she’s saying.

‘We’re grown-ups, Matthew! We can talk like grown-ups!’

‘I am now going to warn you that I will be having a conversation with HR about your interpersonal skills, to seek advice about training that might be able to help you develop them.’

‘You know you look like you’re going to a fancy dress party dressed as a beatnik? Go and seek some fucking advice on that,’ she said. And she walked back through to the office to pick her bag up from her desk, and caught the lift downstairs to the basement where she kept her bike, and she rode it home and made her flat available on Airbnb and booked a flight to Thailand.

*

‘Wow,’ I said.

We’d reached the Cons club by now and walked in through a foyer I remembered from the long-ago weddings of school friends who’d married in their teens, in the summers I still spent at home.

‘It’s one of the reasons I changed my number when I lost my phone,’ she said. ‘I thought it would clear away the repercussions, get rid of some of the other rubbish in my life at the same time.’

‘Anyone else in particular?’

She waved her hand. ‘Where to start?’

I gave her a meaningful look.

‘Not you,’ she said.

‘Good. What do you want?’

‘Just a lime and soda, please.’

‘Very restrained for a funeral round here.’

‘I’m on a diet.’

‘Why?’

‘Lime and soda, please.’

I got myself a pint of Guinness, looking over at Carl’s parents, Mike and Janine, in the corner of the pub. People were coming over to hug Janine, while Mike studied the table surface in front of him.

‘Do you understand how he went?’ I whispered to Amy. She’d been to see Leia the night before.

‘Pills. Opiates. Not the kind of thing you usually get round here but someone had a big bag of them. Leia thinks he didn’t know how strong they were and did a handful, thinking they were just like Valium or something. Or that he stepped up a dose and got it wrong. That’s her theory. Not suicide, just an accident. She knew he’d been taking Xanax and Valium: that’s how he relaxed in the evening, how he slept. He got at least one of them on prescription. I’ve been wondering if it might have been something in-between. Let’s see what happens if I do this. You know: would it be so bad if I went all the way over?’