I wish I had been able to go to my mother’s funeral. I think Ted sent me to a neighbour’s, although I can’t remember the precise circumstances. He excluded me, anyway and later he swept my mother out of our lives and made it as if she had never existed.

Ted’s coffin had travelled the full distance. The curtains swished shut behind it and we all stood silently while the organ voluntary wheezed to an end.

Afterwards we walked out into the bright daylight. There was some more handshaking and subdued conversation. The family and neighbours already knew that there was to be a gathering back at Ted’s house, and there was a slow movement towards the handful of parked cars. Polished shoes crunched on the gravel path and two or three people patted Jack on the shoulder as they passed.

The old woman in the black hat was waiting with the sun showing up the dust on her defiant fox fur. She came towards me with her head tilted expectantly. She had purply-red lipstick, gamely applied to pursed lips, and powdered cheeks. ‘You’ll be his daughter,’ she said. ‘I am Audrey.’

This meant nothing to me. I had never seen her before. She wasn’t one of the aunties. It occurred to me that it was her snuffle of laughter I had heard when Jack launched himself into his pigeon speech. ‘Thank you for coming,’ I murmured. ‘Would you like to join us for a drink, back at …’

But Audrey had already turned her attention to Jack. ‘And you’re his grandson. I liked what you said about him. You were quite right, Ted knew about things and it was one of the games he liked to play, not letting you know what he knew and then surprising you when you least expected it. Birds, or whatever it might be.’

Jack nodded, looking at her and sizing up the unwinking fox eyes and sharp fox faces that hung down over her bosom. I turned away because I had to speak to the undertakers, and when I had finished doing that and was ready to shepherd the last of Ted’s neighbours back to his house, Audrey was nowhere to be seen.

‘She went,’ Jack said and shrugged, when I asked him.

Ted had lived for the last seven years of his life in a red-brick terraced house in a side street within two miles of both the hospital and the crematorium. He liked to joke in his deliberately bluff, I-dare-you-to-be-bothered way about their convenient proximity. On my infrequent visits there I felt that, like all Ted’s places, it was too full of wedges of memory, bits of furniture or ornaments or even kitchen implements, that propped open doors of recollection and so let images back into the daylight that I would have preferred to remain in darkness.