No mention of her mother. Before Carla’s death, Leena would have come up to see Marian once a month at least. When will this end, this miserable feud between them? I’m so careful never to mention it – I don’t want to interfere, it’s not my place. But …

‘Did your mother call you?’

Another long silence. ‘Yes.’

‘About …’ What was it she’d settled on in the end? ‘Hypertherapy?’

‘Hypnotherapy.’

‘Ah, yes.’

Leena says nothing. She’s so steely, our Leena. How will the two of them ever get through this when they’re both so bloody stubborn?

‘Right. I’ll stay out of it,’ I say into the silence.

‘I’m sorry, Grandma. I know it’s hard for you.’

‘No, no, don’t worry about me. But will you think about coming up here at the weekend? It’s hard to help from so far away, love.’

I hear her sniff. ‘Do you know what, Grandma, I will come. I’ve been meaning to, and – and I really would love to see you.’

‘There!’ I beam. ‘It’ll be lovely. I’ll make you one of your favourites for tea and clue you in on all the village gossip. Roland’s on a diet, you know. And Betsy tried to dye her hair, but it went wrong, and I had to drive her to the hairdresser’s with a tea towel on her head.’

Leena snorts with laughter. ‘Thanks, Grandma,’ she says after a moment. ‘You always know how to make me feel better.’

‘That’s what Eileens do,’ I say. ‘They look after each other.’ I used to say that to her as a child – Leena’s full name is Eileen too. Marian named her after me when we all thought I was dying after a bad bout of pneumonia back in the early nineties; when we realised I wasn’t at death’s door after all it got very confusing, and so Leena became Leena.

‘Love you, Grandma,’ she says.

‘You too, love.’

After she hangs up the telephone, I realise I’ve not told her about my new project. I wince. I promised myself I would tell her the next time she called. It’s not that I’m embarrassed to be looking for love, exactly. But young people tend to find old people wanting to fall in love rather funny. Not unkindly, just without thinking, the way you laugh at children behaving like grown-ups, or husbands trying to do the weekly shop.

I make my way back to the dining room and, when I get there, I look down at my sad little list of eligible Hamleigh men. It all feels rather small now. My thoughts are full of Carla. I try to think of other things – Basil’s tweed jackets, Piotr’s ex-wife – but it’s no use, so I settle down and let myself remember.

I think of Carla as a little girl, with a mass of curls and scuffed knees, clutching her sister’s hand. I think of her as the young woman in a washed-out Greenpeace T-shirt, too thin, but grinning, full of fire. And then I think of the Carla who lay in Marian’s front room. Gaunt and drawn and fighting the cancer with all she had left.

I shouldn’t paint her that way, as if she looked weak – she was still so Carla, still fiery. Even on Leena’s last visit, just days before she died, Carla would take no nonsense from her big sister.

She was in her special hospital bed, brought into Marian’s living room one evening by a group of gentle NHS staff, who put it up with astonishing efficiency and cleared out before I could make them so much as a cup of tea. Marian and I were standing in the doorway. Leena was beside the bed, in the armchair we’d moved there once and never shifted back. The living room didn’t centre around the television any more, but around that bed, with its magnolia-cream bars on each side of the mattress, and that grey remote control, always lost under the blankets, for adjusting the bed’s height and shifting Carla when she wanted to sit up.

‘You’re incredible,’ Leena was telling her sister, her eyes bright with tears. ‘I think you’re – you’re incredible, and so brave, and …’

Carla reached out, faster than I’d thought she could, now, and poked her sister in the arm.

‘Stop it. You’d never say that sort of thing if I wasn’t dying,’ she said. Even with her voice thin and dry, you could hear the humour. ‘You’re way nicer to me these days. It’s weird. I miss you telling me off for wasting my life away.’

Leena winced. ‘I didn’t …’

‘Leena, it’s fine, I’m teasing.’

Leena shifted uncomfortably in the armchair, and Carla raised her eyes upwards, as if to say, Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’d grown used to her face without eyebrows by then, but I remember how strange it had looked at first – stranger, in some ways, than the loss of her long brown curls.

‘Fine, fine. I’ll be serious,’ she said.

She glanced at me and Marian, and then reached for Leena’s hand, her fingers too pale against Leena’s tanned skin.

‘All right? Serious face on.’ Carla closed her eyes for a moment. ‘There is some stuff I’ve wanted to say, you know. Serious stuff.’ She opened her eyes then, fixing her gaze on Leena. ‘You remember when we went camping together that summer when you were back from uni, and you told me how you thought management consultancy was the way to change the world, and I laughed? And then we argued about capitalism?’

‘I remember,’ Leena said.

‘I shouldn’t have laughed.’ Carla swallowed; pain touched her features, a tightening around the eyes, a quiver of her dry lips. ‘I should have listened and told you I was proud. You’re shaping the world, in a way – you’re making it better, and the world needs people like you. I want you to kick out all the stuffy old men and I want you to run the show. Launch that business. Help people. And promise me you won’t let losing me hold you back.’

Leena was crying, then, her shoulders hunched and shaking. Carla shook her head.

‘Leena, stop it, would you? Jesus, this is what comes of being serious! Do I have to poke you again?’

‘No,’ Leena said, laughing through her tears. ‘No, please don’t. It actually kind of hurt.’

‘Well. Just know that any time you let an opportunity slip, any time you wonder if you can really do it, any time you think about giving up on anything that you want … I’ll be poking you from the afterlife.’

And that was Carla Cotton for you.

She was fierce, and she was silly, and she knew we couldn’t manage without her.

3

Leena

I wake up at six twenty-two, twenty-two minutes after my usual alarm, and sit bolt upright with a gasp. I think the reason I’m freaked out is the strange silence, the absence of my phone alarm’s horrendous cheery beeping. It takes me a while to remember that I’m not late – I do not have to get up and go to the office. I am actually not allowed to go back to the office.

I slump back against the pillow as the horror and the shame resettle. I slept terribly, stuck in a loop of remembering that meeting, never less than half-awake, and then, when I did fall asleep, I dreamt of Carla, one of the last nights I spent at Mum’s house, how I’d crawled into the bed and held Carla against me, her frail body tucked to mine like a child’s. She’d elbowed me off, after a bit. Stop getting the pillow all wet, she’d told me, but then she’d kissed me on the cheek and sent me off to make midnight hot chocolate, and we’d talked for a while, giggling in the dark like we were kids again.