I sat with him for a little while; then there seemed no point in staying when Ted himself had gone. I took the framed photograph off the locker and tucked it under his arm where he could hold it close to his heart. Then I kissed him on the forehead and touched his lips with my fingers, as Lola had done. I closed the door of the room very quietly.

Dr Srinivasar and the Night Sister were waiting for me.

‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor said. He shook my hand, very formally.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

The Sister put her arm round my shoulders and led me into the empty visitors’ room.

‘Would you like to sit in peace for a while? Let me bring you a cup of tea?’

I shook my head. ‘No, thank you, Sister.’

‘There is a chapel in the hospital.’

I shook my head again. Ted had never been very godly and I took after him.

There was only one place I wanted to be and that was at home. We established that I would come back to complete the formalities relating to the death and I thanked her for everything that had been done for my father. I went out once more to the car park, now deserted under a heavy dark sky, climbed into my car and drove back dry-eyed to London.

Lola was waiting up for me. I told her that Ted Thompson was dead, then we sat down and cried for him together.

THREE

The room was light and bare, with tall, plain windows. Rows of wooden seats faced a pair of non-committal flower arrangements on either side of a secular-looking lectern. The atmosphere was subdued, naturally enough, but also utilitarian. The light-wood coffin under a purple drape was utilitarian too, which was inappropriate for Ted, whose life had been many things but never that. And at the same time as I was thinking about the crematorium chapel and the flowers, and the coffin I had selected with the undertakers’ discreet guidance, I was also reflecting that Ted wouldn’t have cared what arrangements were made for his funeral. Or would have affected not to.

‘I haven’t got to sit through it, have I?’ I could hear him snort in the half-irritable, half-jovial way that he adopted in his later years. ‘Just do the necessary and make sure all and sundry get a drink at the end of it.’

I also wondered how abnormal it was to be standing at a funeral and thinking like this. But then our life together, Ted’s and mine, hadn’t been usual. Mel’s family had been normal, or Caz’s, or Graham’s. Not ours.