My next memory of the funeral places me inside, right at the front, next to Greg’s parents. I could feel the crowd of mourners behind me, staring at the back of my head. They were sorry for me, but what else did they feel? A little bit of embarrassment, contempt? Poor old Ellie. She hasn’t only been made a widow: she’s been humiliated, abandoned, her marriage exposed as a sham. Would they be speculating about us? Was it Greg’s roving eye? Was it Ellie’s failings as a wife?

Greg’s brother Ian and his sister Kate had both rung me with suggestions for the service. I had resented this at first. I felt possessive, territorial. Then, suddenly, I’d thought of the funeral as a nightmare version of Desert Island Discs, choosing music and poetry to show what a sensitive and interesting person Greg had been and how well I’d understood him. The idea of choosing poems with an eye on what it would make people think of my good taste repelled me so I rang Ian and Kate back and said I’d leave it to them.

Ian came to the front and read some Victorian poem that was meant to be consoling but I stopped paying attention halfway through. Then Greg’s other brother, Simon, read something from the Bible that sounded familiar from school assemblies. I couldn’t follow that either. The individual words made sense, but I forgot the meaning of the sentences as they unfolded. Then Kate said she was going to play a song that had meant a lot to Greg. There was a pause that went on too long and then a rattling in some speakers on the wall as someone pressed play and then what was clearly the wrong song came on, perhaps a song from the funeral afterward or the one before. It was a power ballad I remembered having heard in a movie, one with Kevin Costner. It was completely alien to Greg, who had liked scratchy songs played on steel guitars by wizened Americans who had served time in prison, or looked as if they had. I glanced across and saw panic on Kate’s face. She was visibly wondering whether she could run out and switch off this awful song, find the right CD and put it on, then deciding she couldn’t.

It was the only bit of the funeral that really meant anything to me. For just one moment, I had a vivid sense of what it would have been like if Greg had been there, and how he would have looked at me, and how we would have struggled not to laugh, and how we would have cackled about it afterward, and how it would have become a standing joke. It was the closest I got to crying all day, but even then I didn’t cry.