I’d been going to have a bath but I’d forgotten to turn on the hot water. I peeled off my wet clothes and put on a pair of jogging pants and a thick sweatshirt that had belonged to Greg and was vast on me. One of its sleeves was frayed and I put it into my mouth and chewed it. He used to wear it when he went running on winter days and it still held his smell. I went downstairs into the kitchen, feeling a bit dazed. I half expected to see him standing at the hob and this would all have been a feverish nightmare. We had shared the cooking, done it together. Our last meal had been pasta with a chili sauce, nothing special. He only had a few dishes in his repertory: risotto, bean stew, Moroccan lamb, baked potatoes with sour cream and chives, and he cooked them with ferocious concentration, as if they were laboratory experiments that might go badly wrong, with dire consequences.

It occurred to me that since he had died I’d barely cooked beyond making toast. Gwen had made me a vegetable lasagna, Mary had produced salmon fillet with baked tomatoes and watched me as I failed to eat it, and Fergus had brought around a cold roast chicken and garlic bread, which was, I thought, still in the fridge. My neighbor, Annie, had made me too many cakes and soups, as had my mother. Cooking for one is sad when you’re used to cooking for two. I decided to poach myself an egg. Eggs are comforting, I thought, as I waited for the water to boil in the pan, then cracked an egg into it, slid a piece of stale bread into the toaster. The meal took about three minutes to make and three to eat. Now what?