Christian put Marlon on his lap and held him, gently turning his face from the coffin that waited by the altar, as I looked at the order of service. Mary’s face was grinning at me from the cover and I remembered exactly when that fleeting happy moment was captured and I knew she had never looked lovelier. It was the day we went to the photo shoot for the magazine cover and we had both tried to look our very best. Mary had been cutting down on the carbs for a couple of weeks, she had had her hair cut and her teeth whitened. We had gone for a facial together and I recalled the pair of us rolling down Oxford Street with our newly exfoliated faces, howling with excitement. The photo was taken when they were still setting up for the shoot and I was in that picture too, although of course I had been cropped out for the order of service. But I knew I was there at the moment the photo was taken, and I could still see one hand lightly resting on Mary’s shoulder. Then five minutes later the photographer’s assistant broke the news that they were only going to be using me for the shoot. And, looking back, I don’t think I saw my old friend ever smile quite like that again.

I looked around the church. It was a full house today, because Mary was loved and she deserved to be loved – smart, kind, funny Mary – and I remembered the real laugh Mary and I had every month looking at the faces of the men, all those vain smiling men, and we sometimes laughed until we wept. There were a lot of people in the church who had worked with her. Nobody who ever worked with her ever disliked her. I could see Michael and his boyfriend on the far side, sitting with Skyla, who was already in tears, and there were people who had worked with Mary all the way back to her first job on some long-gone women’s magazine, and then towards the back were Ginger and Spike, who had met Mary when we were setting up the business, and who knew that she was the rock I built everything on. All come to say goodbye, Mary, goodbye.

Mary had dropped in front of a train on the Underground. A tragic accident, we were told, one of those random assaults of bad luck that can rip apart any life at any moment. Not suicide, that was the line, definitely not suicide, because there were no notes, no bitter recriminations, no acknowledgement that the last blog from the Accidental Dater read like a suicide note. ‘Excuse me,’ two witnesses had heard Mary say, the inquest was told, ‘Excuse me,’ and then she was falling, falling, falling as the train was coming into the station. But it was an accident, that was the verdict, and that’s what we said, and that’s what we would say for the rest of our own lives, and do our best to believe it because anything else was too horrible to contemplate. But I contemplated it anyway, and I knew I would contemplate it forever, and I would always feel that I could have said something or done something so that it did not have to end this way. Because I knew what had happened, or I thought I knew, and I tried hard to push that knowledge aside, and I wanted to be wrong. But this I knew to be true – I should have loved you more, Mary.