Luckily I was fairly sure I looked pretty pale after the puke, and as her eyes scanned my face, I realized she was disappointed. She’d wished me more perky, so she could reprimand me. She wasn’t well, I must remember that, I told myself as we both sat back, and as the vicar cleared his throat and came forward. I mustn’t think of her as a manipulative bitch; she was damaged. She couldn’t help herself. I saw Ned murmur a few words of support to her and I caught his eye gratefully.

The vicar reminded us that we were here to celebrate the life of a very dear man. I scanned the order of service sheet in my hand. It wasn’t the one Amanda had shown me in the restaurant. Even though I’d only had a brief look before she’d whipped it away, I could see it had changed. And no, of course she hadn’t sent it to me. Hadn’t asked for my advice, or approval. But then again, I’d said I wanted nothing to do with it. I caught my breath in alarm as I read, but the vicar was enjoining us to stand for the first hymn, ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’. After that – and thank heaven for a splendid choir – we had a few prayers. And then Ned made his way to the front to give a reading.

Having said that he wouldn’t, he’d rung me to say he deemed it better to toe the line, but had insisted on a Bible passage, and not the mawkish poem his aunt had wanted. Amanda had grudgingly suggested the well-known, uncontroversial letter of St Paul to the Corinthians, which he delivered beautifully. The mawkish poem came next, read by a friend of hers, a similarly skinny and expensively dressed woman, with the face of a twenty-year-old and the neck of a fifty-five-year-old. She tried to put as much emotion as she could into the sentimental twaddle Amanda had no doubt spent hours sourcing on the internet, but happily, her taut facial arrangement precluded it. She sat down, no one particularly moved, perhaps too fascinated by the overblown lips delivering it.