Recent rain had turned the grass boggy. Over by the river, a maple had shaken out its new foliage and under it bloomed a clump of late tulips. I bent down and examined the nearest. Its stamens were swollen and sticky, and greenfly had taken shelter inside on the smooth, convex curve. Insects and bell-shaped petals appeared so still, so set, like a piece of Rockingham china. Like Nathan’s vase.

My calm vanished. It never took much, just a nudge, a glancing allusion, and I was plunged back to picking myself up when Nathan had left.

Longing for an away-day from myself, I turned for home. The breeze had freshened, and I pulled my sweater down over my hands. Then I heard it. Click. Click. For a second or two, my mind slipped free of the net in which it was caught and I glimpsed the prospect of release, a future where I would be empty and clean. It was the cool, fresh wind blowing through a sickroom. The promise of rain over a parched landscape. The splash of a fountain. It was only for a moment and then I was back, plodding with muddy shoes over the wet grass.

When I woke on Monday morning Parsley was not on the bed. I went in search of her and found her stretched out on the blue chair. ‘Parsley?’ She did not respond. She smelt odd, and her flanks were labouring. With a shock, I realized she was in pain. ‘Parsley…’

On my last visit to the vet, Keith had warned me, ‘You can’t expect miracles at her age.’ But I had. I did.

I stroked one of her paws. I knew her well enough to understand that she would not want me to interfere, and she would wish to handle her diminution and death in her own cat terms. I knew, too, it was useless to imagine that behind the green eyes lay an emotion as deep for me as mine for her. I tried again. ‘Parsley’.

My voice penetrated her shadowy limbo. With an obvious effort, she raised her head and looked at me, the one who loved her most.

When he saw me with the basket in the waiting room, Keith’s eyebrows climbed towards the haircut that the family swore was based on Henry V’s portrait. It is the type of haircut that people, having spent their youth being disgusting, adopt when excess has become too exhausting. Keith had the perfect look for a vet whose functional, clinical rooms sheltered the love, nonsense and wild feelings between humans and their animals.

I coaxed Parsley out of the basket. Keith placed a bony hand on my shoulder. ‘You know what I’m going to say, Rose. I could pump her full of vitamins and antibiotics, which would boost her for a day or two. But that’s all you can steal at her age.’

He pressed my shoulder and I turned away. Where were the family?

‘Do it now,’ Sam would be likely to say.

‘No, not yet. We have no right to intervene in a natural process.’ That would be Poppy.

Nathan would ask, ‘Exactly how long does Keith think he can keep her alive?’

‘All right,’ I said to Keith. ‘But quickly, because she’s frightened being here.’

As gently as we could manage, we wrapped Parsley in a towel. She struggled briefly and Keith shaved a patch off her front paw, bent his Henry V head and kissed her. ‘Ready?’

I would never be ready but I held my cherished cat as the needle slipped in. That much I owed her. I owed her far more but there was nothing I could do to pay the debt. Parsley was the companion to maternity, noise, children: a silent, sensuous, feminine commentator. A witness to a heated, physical, domestic world.

Almost immediately, her head sank back against my shoulder. The green eyes widened, let in the light, then dimmed, shuttered, and Parsley went into the night.

Keith stood back and I cradled her until the final rill of pulse fluttered to a standstill.

Back home, I carried Parsley into the garden and laid her under the lilac tree beside the black hellebores and double anemones. Then I went upstairs to Poppy’s room and searched in the chest for the white wool shawl in which I had wrapped my shouting babies and walked them up and down to hush them.

I fetched the spade and fork and dug into the knotty, insect-ridden, bindweed-infested earth. The fork tines severed white, stringy roots and drove the insects from their subterranean refuges.

A fine and private place. Parsley.

Forget the click in my mind, the cool promise of the future. I had had enough. I wanted my grief dead, my longings finished, my body shrouded from the gaze of others.

I dug on.

I was burying a past, a marriage, a job. That funny, exhausted, desperate slice of my life when Parsley slunk beside me on paws that clicked on the stone and wooden floors and kept me company through the night when the children cried and Nathan slept.

When the hole was large enough, I laid Parsley in it, and I fussed over the ends of the shawl, wrapping it round until I was satisfied. The wool was soft, the texture of much washed baby-clothes, and still retained that faint, oh-so-suggestive smell of yeasty, milky children.

I threw in a spadeful of earth, then a second.

Parsley’s grave did not take long to fill in.

I told myself I should eat something, but I had lost the habit of regular meals. Anyway, my fingers were stiff and ice cold. I poured myself a large slug of whisky, which finished the bottle, and dragged myself upstairs to bed.

During the night, I was violently sick. Panting and covered in sweat, I sat back on my heels. I was burning, burning up. In my haste, I had blundered from my bed into the bathroom without switching on the light and the neon glimmer from the street painted the porcelain a thin, unappealing orange. I pressed my hands to my face.

I was slipping. Where had I read that women who were slipping drank too much, wept too much, wore too much lipstick, dealt with their solitariness in empty neon-lit rooms?

At dawn I was sick again, and a pain in my stomach took up residence. By morning, I had a raging temperature and I spent the day huddled in bed. On the second day, my temperature rose even higher and I floated through the fever, in and out of heavy but fitful sleep. I could feel my heart thudding and banging in my chest. Was I dying from grief? Was I dying because I had been discarded? From time to time, I imagined the telephone rang – but it was the church bell tolling for my father’s funeral.

Nathan materialized in my dreams. Tall and drivingly ambitious. ‘I am going to leave you, Rose,’ he said. I told him that he already had. But it’s not that easy, Rose.

During this exchange I appeared to have grown a pair of wings and rose above Nathan, who vanished into a dot.

Now Minty poked and tugged at me. She seemed unsettled. ‘What do you think of me, Rose? What do you think of your former friend?’

‘If you must know, I think you’re ignorant,’ I replied, adding kindly, ‘but it’s not your fault. Wait until you are older.’

Big tears splashed down her face. ‘I refuse to get older. I shall always wear tiny tops and short skirts.’ I shook my head, and she wailed, like a child, ‘It’s so unfair.’

With a mighty beat of my excellent wings, I soared up into the sky, which had replaced the bedroom ceiling. Far below, Minty’s wet, upturned face was as flat and featureless as a swamp.

‘Rose…’

Nathan was bending over me and I blinked. My tongue had turned into felt, and my lips were so cracked that I tasted blood, and it seemed to be evening. ‘What are you doing here, Nathan?’

‘You look awful.’ His eye lit on the thermometer by the bed. ‘Here, stick this in.’

I tried to raise my head. ‘Can’t.’

He took a step back. Nathan was one of those men who hated anyone to be ill except himself, and he was never at his best in these situations – ‘You’re not that bad,’ he would protest, if I dared to mention that I was not feeling up to scratch, and assume his suffering expression. For a day or two, there were sighs and looks that meant, I am carrying this family entirely on my shoulders. Pretty soon after that, he developed identical symptoms, which were worse, much worse than yours, Rosie. As a result, I rarely took to my bed. Anyway, mothers do not have time to be ill.

‘We’re on our way to dinner with Timon and I thought I’d just check as I’ve been ringing and ringing.’

‘I’ve been ill,’ I pointed out helpfully.

‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I’d better get some help.’ He disappeared and, a few minutes later, reappeared with Minty.

I was too weak to feel rage, too distanced to care that she was there. They conferred in the doorway… temperature… awful… doctor. Minty shifted from foot to foot and threw me pointed glances from those slanting eyes.

I made a huge effort. ‘Nathan, could you get me some water?’

It was always a smart move to give a Nathan a task. It settled him.

While he was gone, Minty maintained her distance. ‘I wasn’t going to come in,’ she confessed. ‘Nathan made me. But I wouldn’t have done…’

I closed my eyes. ‘I don’t care what you do.’

She was silent. I opened my eyes. She was examining the room – a glimpse of Nathan’s remaining clothes through the partially open door of the cupboard, a photo of Sam and Poppy, taken in a rare moment when they were enjoying each other’s company, a stack of books on Nathan’s side of the bed. There was a hungry, siphoning look on her face, and I knew she was trawling for the clues she needed to understand Nathan.

It was then I realized how deadly intent on Nathan she was, how elated by the task of making it work but also secretly terrified at how little she knew.

I could not blame her for wanting Nathan. How could I? I wanted him too.

But this was the Minty who had said, ‘Commitment? Don’t make me laugh.’

She must have read my mind. ‘People do change, Rose, particularly if someone like Nathan is involved.’ She fussed with her jumper, a low-cut blue mohair that only just reached her waist. Every time she moved a little flesh was revealed. You can look at me, she was saying, my beauty and ripeness, and you may envy and desire. ‘I’m twenty-nine,’ she said, in a wondering voice.