Mel was sitting a few seats behind me. She had never met Ted, but she insisted that she wanted to come, out of respect and to keep me company. Caz and Graham were with her. They had met him a handful of times, at my wedding and the children’s birthday parties, and the occasional Christmas celebration in the intervening years.

‘I liked your dad. Of course I’m coming to his funeral,’ Caz declared.

Ted had liked her, too. I remember him flirting with her at my wedding reception. He had probably cornered her in some alcove, before cupping her round face between his two hands and breathing in the scent of her skin as if she were some exotic flower. ‘I could create such a perfume for you,’ he would have murmured in her ear. This routine worked like a charm with a surprisingly wide range of women. Not with Caz, of course, although it would have been a matter of pride for him to have a go. But with plenty of others. More than I could or would want to remember.

Lola and I sat on either side of Jack in the front row of seats. Lola was wearing black trousers and a tight red jersey that made her glow like a damask rose in the colourless desert of the chapel.

Rosa damascena, from which the essential perfume oil attar of roses is distilled. In Bulgaria, principally. I was surprised by how much I remembered about Ted’s craft.

Lola blotted her tears with a folded Kleenex and glanced down at the two black feathered wings of mascara printed on the tissue. Jack sat upright and stared straight ahead of him, dressed in a tidied-up version of his school uniform.

When I broke the news to him, on the morning after Ted’s death, he said, ‘I see.’ And after a moment’s thought, ‘It’s very final, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Although he’s still here in a way, because we remember him and because we’ll go on talking about him as long as we are alive.’

Jack gave me one of his withering looks, as if he saw right through this threadbare platitude, but he didn’t pass any comment.

Apart from the six of us, the other mourners were Ted’s two first cousins on his mother’s side, who had come down from Manchester. There was no other family left. Then there was a handful of Ted’s neighbours, led by the large and forthright Jean Andrews, and the landlord and a couple of regulars from the pub Ted used to go to. I had never met any of these people before, but they filed up to me at the chapel door, and shook my hand and told me how sorry they were. A great character, your dad, they said. Thank you, I murmured. And yes, he was.