I was absolutely sure Mary hadn’t asked me. On the other hand, such was the chaos of my life, the fact that I was absolutely sure didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t asked me. Every impulse in my mind and body was screaming at me not to go. What I really wanted was a bath, bed and hours of heavy, dreamless sleep. What was more I had already eaten a solid meal and drunk several glasses of wine. I cursed obscenely and loudly as I had a thirty-second shower, pulled on a dress and ruffled my hair in the hope that it would look artfully arranged. I put a coat on, ran out of the house and got a taxi at the end of the road.

Mary greeted me rather frostily as she opened the door, but she couldn’t shout at a widow in front of Eric and her four other guests. I knew two of them: Don and Laura were old friends of Mary and she always seemed to invite us together so that we could become friends with each other, but for reasons I didn’t understand it had never quite happened. Then there was Maddie, who worked in Mary’s office, and Geoff, who explained to me that he had met Mary and Eric on a cycling holiday in Sicily a couple of years back and that they’d stayed in contact. I wondered, with a touch of resentment, if Mary was already trying to set me up, then quickly became cross with myself. What was she meant to do? If she had invited two couples, I might have been cross at being excluded.

As Mary introduced me, I saw the now-familiar concern passing across everybody’s face. It was clear that Mary had briefed them in advance about my situation. But I soon had other things to worry about. Mary said we must eat and muttered something under her breath about everything being spoiled.

I was grateful, in theory at least, to Mary for inviting me. It can’t have been the most enticing prospect. She must have known I wouldn’t be the life and soul of the party. The others seemed constrained as well, perhaps with the effort of avoiding any subject that might seem inappropriate: death, funerals, marriages. And I now knew rather too much about the state of Mary’s marriage; I kept glancing at Eric, then looking away when he caught my eye. Geoff told me in unnecessary detail about the cycling holiday he had gone on in the year after he had met Mary and Eric, and in even more unnecessary detail about the cycling holiday he was planning for the summer. “Do you cycle?” he asked finally.