To feel so bereft, so disorientated for the loss of one’s ex-wife’s mother verges on the eccentric, I suppose, but I loved her; for all her manifold faults, I loved her. The day before she died I felt both oppressed and depressed and London sweltered in a grey, sticky heat. I did a bit of shopping in the Kings Road in the morning, then squash with Jack Pemberton, from the office, in the afternoon. He asked me back to dinner afterwards, but I refused. I wanted, suddenly, to be on my own. The storm started around seven o’clock. I sat by the sitting-room window and watched the lightning crackling over Chelsea Reach and great globules of rain slowly turn the river from slate grey to muddy yellow. I was on my third Martini when George rang. ‘Guy? I’ve been trying to get you all day. George here.’ ‘Sorry, I was playing squash, but I’ve been in since six thirty.’ Somehow George always manages to put one on the defensive; it was none of his damned business where I’d been.
