It’s Luke’s and Sam’s turn. Helped by Dad, their memories are simple and unaffected: how they miss Mummy getting them up in the morning, making sure they eat their Crunchy Nut Cornflakes (she wanted them to eat something healthy, they refused, she surrendered), Mummy doing funny impersonations of cross Dad, reading them Where the Wild Things Are in their ‘Max’ sleepsuits, singing them to sleep with ‘Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you’. It’s too much to bear, but I want them to keep going because as long as they speak, Clare is alive and I am catching up on so much of her life that I missed.

The chapel is still after they finish, except for muted sobs. Tim tells us there will be drinks and a bite to eat at Charles and Clare’s family home in Primrose Hill. We are all welcome. He asks most of the congregation to stay where they are until the family has left the chapel.

We file past the coffin and I turn and whisper ‘Goodbye, I love you,’ to the box, and again seven more times in my head. And then I am outside in the colonnade behind the chapel, with a view over a huge rolling green field. Floral tributes lean against the walls, though none of them are for Clare. In my family’s utilitarian way, my parents requested donations to Oxfam instead.

The mourners gather in threes and fours. Except for one older man with immaculately swept-back grey hair in a tan Daks raincoat, on his own at a distance from the other guests. He looks around with the awkward air of someone normally the centre of attention. One of us has to thank the Chancellor of the Exchequer for coming. I know my duty.

‘I didn’t know the Hardy,’ Keith Kendall says. ‘It was a good choice. These things are tricky.’

‘Thank you. I agonised over it. Some would say it wasn’t suitable, because there’s a theory that although Phena was Hardy’s cousin he may have had an affair with her. As you know, he had affairs with almost everyone.’

To my surprise, the Chancellor turns bright red and coughs. Have I committed a faux pas? It wouldn’t be the first time.

‘I don’t suppose there were too many Hardy scholars here today,’ he manages. Because we’re Jews? No, he can’t mean that.

‘It was good of you to come,’ I say, changing the subject. If I look in any direction, I can see my parents’ network: disappointed former Labour ministers, ageing trade union leaders, once-feted sociologists refusing to let go of the glamour of 1968, all disenfranchised by the Thatcher hegemony. ‘Not your normal social circle, I would imagine.’

‘It was important to be here. Clare was a superstar. What’s happened, it’s just . . .’