She persuaded him that his aversion to parenthood shouldn’t stop them getting married, but he’s never been able to put his anxiety aside. Two months before their wedding, Gloria told him if he offered her a get-out clause one more time, she’d stand in the street and scream. He believed her, so he stopped.

William stands up now and walks to the coffin, unhooks Barbara’s manicured hands. He breathes in the cool chemical whiff of the varnish.

‘It’s for her sake we shouldn’t go, Barbara,’ he says, ‘not mine.’

45

Oddly, they’ve never actually argued about not having children. In the run-up to their wedding, it was a bust-up about Evelyn that he wasn’t sure they’d recover from. Gloria had made it clear early on she wanted the full lowdown on his small, complicated family. It was hard, telling her the little he remembered about his father’s shockingly quick death from cancer, about the close relationship that had existed between him, Uncle Robert and Howard, about his mother’s insecurity, and him, slap bang in the middle of it all. Gloria was the only person in the world he’d told about his chorister days, about Martin and the horror of Ash Wednesday. She hadn’t said a thing when he’d told her, just opened her arms and held him for a long time. He’d been so grateful for that; the feeling that no matter what, she was on his side.

But it was different a few weeks later, when he said it would be too awkward, too painful to have his mother at their wedding. He actually put into words that his mother was the villain in all this. She had cut short his time in Cambridge. She had broken up the family. She had left him to go to Swansea. It was all her fault.

Gloria looked horrified. He’ll never forget the way she looked at him when he said that.

‘You said she asked you to go with her to Swansea.’

‘But she didn’t have to go. She could have stayed in Sutton.’ He got flustered and suddenly very angry. ‘If you love me, Gloria’ – his voice was quivering – ‘you won’t raise this again and you’ll never ask me to forgive her.’

‘I can’t promise you that,’ she said, as quiet and angry as him, ‘but I pray to God that one day, you’ll grow up and face this like a man.’

He stormed out of the house and didn’t come back until late that night. But she was waiting for him, as if seconds, not hours had passed. She said if he wanted to marry her, then his mother wouldn’t just be welcome at the wedding, she’d sit at the top table.