Jack paused and now he did look at his audience, letting his eyes slide over us. He had got into his stride. We all sat without moving.

‘Anyway, after that I got interested in birds. I liked the idea of the freedom of the sky. I wanted to think about them not being all vermin with diseased feet from living on our mess. So I started watching them and learning about them, and he was right, they are beautiful. Seabirds especially because the sea belongs to them as well as the sky, if you think about it. So it’s because of him. That I like birds. I owe it to him.’ He nodded sideways to the coffin under the purple drape. ‘That’s what I wanted to say, actually. Grandad knew about things. He didn’t always let you know that he knew, but he still knew. He was interesting, like that.’

The rush of confidence subsided as quickly as it had come. Jack’s voice trailed away and his gaze returned to the floor. We sat in silence for a few long seconds, waiting to see if he wanted to add anything else. At last the officiator cleared his throat and stepped forward, and at the same moment Jack’s head jerked up and he swung round to face the coffin. ‘I love you, Grandad,’ he blurted out. There were tears on his eyelashes. Then he turned round and marched back to his place between Lola and me. I tried to put my arm round his shoulders but he shook it off.

The piped music started up again. The curtains at the back of the chapel slowly parted and with a faint mechanical creaking the coffin slid forward. I kept my eyes fixed on it, feeling the faint tremors of Lola’s weeping.

Then I began to think about my mother.

I could remember her calling me in from the garden – Sadie? Sa-aa-die! – where I was playing some complicated and solitary only-child’s game.

I was ten when she died. I have so few memories of her and yet this tiny moment was suddenly crisp and rounded out with the sound of a radio playing in a neighbour’s garden, and the suburban scents of dusty shrub borders and cooking. It was exactly as if I were standing there beside the rosebushes again, torn between playing and responding to her call.

Yes? I answered now, silently and pointlessly, but there was no more. It was strange that Ted himself, who had been so vividly alive and such a forceful presence all my life, should seem absent from these proceedings, while my shadowy mother, dead for more than forty years, was close at hand.