‘Thank you, Gilbert’ she says. ‘I’ll pull myself together in a minute.’

There are no religious icons in the chapel, but two poster-size pictures of Clare are on stands at the front. One is a headshot of her looking indomitable in a long mauve dress, declaiming at a Cambridge Union debate; the other is her, Charles, Samuel and Luke, all beaming proudly at an ornate sandcastle they’ve meticulously constructed on the beach at Broadstairs. The boys and Charles are in the front row, though across the aisle from us. Sam’s hand has disappeared into Charles’s. They are both staring straight ahead, trying to fight back the tears. On their right is a wriggly Luke. Charles’s mum, next to Luke – and immaculate in a grey tailored suit and blow-dried swept-back hair of similar hue – is sensibly trying to shoosh him rather than insist he become catatonic with grief like the rest of us.

One of Clare’s friends from Cambridge, Tim, a famous actor, is the secular vicar of our eccentric service. As the Mahler fades, he tells us that it is the saddest and greatest honour of his life to be the master of this tragic ceremony. It was always his assumption that if he ever had to stand in front of an audience and discuss Clare, it would be because she had just been elected prime minister, or been made head of the civil service or Secretary General of the United Nations. There was, he says, something obviously prophetic in how he and Clare first properly met, in Footlights, as writers and performers of a sketch about a young female civil servant being patronised by a stuffy male mandarin. In the sketch, she explained the intricacies of quantum physics to the permanent secretary, who then asked her to be a ‘love’ and make him a cup of tea, ‘two lumps’. ‘I always thought she would turn those tables and end up running the country,’ Tim intones. ‘That is what should have happened. She was the best of us.’ His voice is a melodic tenor with a faint Welsh accent. It’s like listening to a song. Much of what he says is to me calming noise, devoid of meaning.