The tenderness of the kiss after the vows. The weight on her chest when she remembered.

Where was Lucy now? she wondered.

Christ. It just poured through, didn’t it? This slippery thing we called the mind. Words and pictures gathering and wheeling like murmurations of starlings. No centre, no purpose, just shapes against the dusk.

She had believed, once upon a time, that it would all become clear, that she would finally reach a point on the gravelled strand where she could turn and see it whole. Though why should anyone expect answers? The insoluble yearning was what drove us. Or all this would still be grassland and wild horses and sea-wind.

Shitting shit.

She’d burnt her finger. She flicked the butt out onto the lawn where it died swiftly in the dark of the grass.

Four dances in, Nikki had wandered over and sat in the adjacent chair. The Daisy Chain were playing a cover of Chic’s ‘Good Times’. Balls of scrunched gold paper from the mint chocolates which had come with the coffee lay scattered over the tabletop. The faint smell of cigar smoke from beyond the canvas. Her sister and her brother-in-law were dancing enthusiastically and it was not pretty.

Nikki put an arm around her. She had indeed been a difficult teenager, determined to be taught nothing by other people and to learn it all for herself, from drugs to algebra. Hitchhiking through Spain, four trips to A&E.

You OK, Mum?

She squeezed her daughter’s hand. I’m so happy for you.

She and Philip had been married for nineteen years. He had accepted her completely in a way that no one else had done. It took a long time to realise that his acceptance was, in truth, a lack of interest. And an even longer time to realise that this was precisely what she had been looking for. If only it had crashed and burned a little more dramatically, then she could have consoled herself with the knowledge that she had possessed something worth the effort it had required. Wife Number Two, whom she was seeing in the flesh for the first time, was younger and thinner and less qualified, which was simultaneously satisfying and dispiriting. She had a name, of course, as Nikki pointed out repeatedly. They lived in a four-bedroom house in Clifton which she had looked at on Google Street View perhaps more times than was healthy.

She rolled a second cigarette, running her finger along its length to seal the wet glue, then striking a match. The surprise of her lit hands in the dark, like a tiny Caravaggio. The burning paper flared and settled. She shook the flame out, slotted the dead match back into the box, dropped it in the blanketed valley of her lap and took a sip of whisky.

She should be thankful. She owned her own flat. No mortgage, two bedrooms, an allotment. She knew married friends who had been lonely every day for the last ten years.