I found myself with my fingers wrapped round my now empty glass, fondly beaming back at all of them. And my smile must have been particularly noticeable because there was another surge of clapping and cheering. How Ted would have loved all this.

It was another moment before everyone noticed that they were involved in an outbreak of spontaneous celebration, but when they did the applause gently faded into shuffling and coughing. This was a funeral, after all. Still smiling, Jean Andrews began dabbing her eyes.

My short speech and the clapping were taken as the signal for everyone to make a move. Caz and Mel swept plates and glasses into the kitchen as Lola and I stood by the front door, thanking everyone all over again for coming.

‘If only he could have been here.’ Jean Andrews sighed as she squeezed into her coat. Half an hour later Caz’s and Graham’s Volvo followed Mel’s Audi down the road. Lola and Jack and I were left standing on Ted’s doorstep. The children looked at me, waiting for a lead. I closed the door firmly, double-locked it and dropped the keys into my pocket. Memories were neatly boxed up inside it with Ted’s clothes in the wardrobe and the old tea caddy with the pictures of the Houses of Parliament rubbed away where his thumb always touched the same spot.

‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

In the traffic on the M1 Lola told me, ‘I think that went really well.’

‘Yes, it did.’

I flicked a glance in the rear-view mirror. Jack was sitting sideways with his feet up on the back seat and his head tilted against the passenger window. There was no telling what he thought.

It was after five o’clock when I finally reached work, but that didn’t matter. Penny and I are self-employed and we put in the hours to suit ourselves. Her house is the end one of a pretty Georgian terrace, but it’s East- rather than West-End Georgian. The houses themselves were once fine but have become dilapidated and even recent gentrification hasn’t improved the immediate surroundings, which are grimy, traffic-clogged and unsafe after dark. Not that that worries Penny.

I walked down a small cobbled alleyway past the side of her house, under a sign that reads ‘Gill & Thompson Fine & Trade Bookbinders’. The old brick outbuilding, backing on to a murky stretch of the Regent’s Canal opposite some gasometers, was one of the main reasons why Penny bought the house when we first set up in business together. It had originally been a coal depot, where the long barges down from the Midlands unloaded their cargo, but together we cleaned it up and – roughly – converted it into a book bindery.

That was what I did, and do. I am a bookbinder, in the way that Ted was a perfumer. But without the mystery, of course.