I went upstairs and chose my clothes: black skirt, stripy gray shirt, black woolen waistcoat, flat boots, patterned tights, hair tied back. I was so nervous that it took me three attempts to thread my earrings through the lobes of my ears; my hands trembled so that I smudged my lipstick. I felt as though I was about to be put on trial: what kind of wife were you, anyway, that your husband was with another woman? What kind of fool, that you never had the slightest idea?

WHEN WE REACHED the coroner’s court, a low, modern building that looked less like a court than an old people’s home, the feeling of unreality continued. At first we couldn’t find the entrance, but pushed uselessly against glass doors that refused to budge until a policeman on the other side mouthed something at us and pointed, indicating we should try further on, the next entrance. We went into a corridor that led through a series of swing doors into a room where lines of chairs faced a long table. The air-conditioning hummed loudly and the fluorescent light shimmered overhead. I had been expecting something impressive, wood-paneled perhaps, with an air of formality, not this blandly cheerful room with louvered blinds. Only the crest of the lion and the unicorn, squeezed between the two windows, gave any hint that this was a court. Several people were already there, including a couple of middle-aged men wearing suits and ties, with folders on their laps, and two police officers in the second row, sitting up stiff and straight.

To one side there was a table with a piece of lined paper taped to it, reading PRESS. Behind it a bored-looking young man was reading a tabloid newspaper.

A gray-haired man in a suit was blocking our way. He had a moustache and the air of a sergeant major. “Sorry to bother you. Can I take your names, please?”

“I’m Eleanor Falkner. I’m Greg Manning’s wife. These are my friends.”

He introduced himself as the coroner’s officer and pointed us to seats in the front row. Mary sat on one side of me, Gwen the other. A middle-aged woman in fawn slacks and a red sweater came to the front of the room and tinkered with a huge old-fashioned tape recorder. She pushed cables into sockets and fiddled with switches. She looked up at the room and smiled vaguely at us. “It’ll be all right on the night,” she said, and bustled out again, throwing bright, complicit smiles around the room, as if we were all in on a tremendously good joke.

Two women with identical bright blond helmets of hair positioned themselves just behind us; they were whispering to each other and occasionally giving discreet chuckles. It was like a register-office wedding, I thought. I wiped my palms down my skirt and pushed invisible strands of hair behind my ears.