George’s great-nephew Charlie had shown him how to use Facebook in the weeks following Rose’s death, and George had found this one of the most comforting ways to fill the void. He could post photos of their life together (once Charlie had shown him how to use the scanner), share memories with relatives and chat online to anyone who remembered Rose. He even discovered he had a long-lost second cousin, Anton Shmuel Goldstein, an American born in Boston who shared George’s pitch-black sense of humour. Anton called old age “crawling to the endzone,” a term from American Football. George called it “watching the lights go out.”

There was an unending list of things George missed about Rose. The day after her memorial service, he decided to start enumerating them, daily, on Facebook. He missed her readiness with a bandage or ointment whenever he hurt himself. A lifelong klutz, George was always banging his head or stubbing his toe. He’d struggled to open a can of soup yesterday and slashed his hand open on the lid. Bloody and panicking, it had taken him ten minutes, two tea-towels and a trail of droplets before he located the first aid box containing the Dettol and plasters.

He also missed Rose’s keen way with a crossword, as well as the fact that she’d never complete his puzzles unless he asked for her help. Rose did the venerable Times crossword, while George often got stuck on the Express’s much less formidable version. She’d notice him cursing under his breath and rubbing things out. She’d ask “need a hand, love?” and he’d shout over a clue (Rose was quite deaf by the time she entered her eighties).

“Organ through which anger escapes… six letters.”

“Spleen, Georgie, spleen,” Rose would shout back after a moment, peering over her reading glasses as she turned the page of one of her historical novels. Even when she was really ill, Rose had embarked on the new Hilary Mantel. George had gotten a lump in his throat giving it to her, knowing she’d almost certainly never finish it. Rose had turned down the corner of page 242. There were no folded-down corners thereafter.

He even missed her faith. At least, George missed some of the gospel music she played on Sundays when she was too exhausted to get out of bed and go to church. One of the few white women in the Holy Mountain Mission, Rose had been adopted by the warm-hearted Wood Green Caribbean community and many of them had come to her funeral. George had been embarrassed by how many of these men and women he’d never met before, since he had stopped attending church not long after Rose’s third cancer diagnosis. Three cancers in seventeen years suggested to George that if God existed, he was determined to make a widower out of him, and George didn’t see why he had to avidly praise such a spiteful deity. It had been a bone of contention between them, but George had put his foot down. Now he regretted every hour of Rose he’d lost to the songs, the harmonious voices, and the kind black people he’d so assiduously ignored. Not that he begrudged her those consolations, however illusory. More that he wished he’d just swallowed his pride and shared in her joy. She’d always returned from church beaming, hope renewed.

“Have fun with the happy-clappers?” he’d ask.

Rose would just shake her head, roll her eyes in amusement, and go and put the kettle on.

“You’re a determined man, George,” said Anton, in a Facebook message one Sunday.

“What do you mean?” he typed back, slowly, with unsteady and arthritic fingers.

“You keep coming up with reasons you miss your wife,” Anton replied. “Man… I’d be hard-pressed to name a half dozen.”

George knew Anton didn’t really believe that. It was part of his shtick that his second marriage was a ball and chain around his neck, when all he ever did was extol Maeve’s many virtues in the kitchen, at the flea-market, with a 10,000-piece jigsaw. He would kvetch and kvell, but George could tell he really loved “the old battle-axe,” as he fondly termed his wife. Anton was also teaching George Yiddish words, and George found them enjoyably onomatopoeic. He was a schlemiel prone to schmaltz, while Anton was a mensch given to kibitzing.

“I’m at reason 98,” George said with pride. “What Rose could do with her fingers…”

“Not sure I oughta be hearing this,” said Anton. “Keep your bedroom antics to yourself.”

“I mean massage,” typed George, laughing, and managing to find the “shocked” emoji. “She could find and release a knot or a twinge in seconds, that girl. A magician.”

“Was she a nurse?” Anton asked.

“Home help. Thirty years in old codgers’ houses, then nearly twenty looking after me.”

“Poor girl,” typed Anton, and George didn’t know if he was being serious or acerbic.

Later that afternoon it seemed to grow weirdly dark in the flat. On the thirteenth floor of his block, George could usually count on a fantastic view across North London. On a clear day you could even see south of the river to the leafy Surrey suburbs. Now, all was lost in a grey-white cloud that blew past the windows like the breath of an immense dragon. George imagined it curled around the block, wreathing the whole thing in smoke. Like Grenfell, he thought briefly, then banished the thought as unworthy. Those people suffered a living pyre, shocking neglect, pitiful reparations, and a long-overdue enquiry. All George suffered was Rose’s absence.

He decided to go for a walk, to float out into the atmosphere and taste that strange dry-ice flavour that London fog often had. He rarely got depressed, but sometimes George just needed to shroud himself in silence and quietude for a while.

To walk, to remember, to enumerate the things he missed, to celebrate the memories that remained, to add to his growing collection of overdue thank yous.