Kate smiled. ‘That,’ she said, ‘surely counts as philosophy.’

Rose arrived. ‘You don’t look like you have drunk nearly enough.’

‘I’m trying.’

‘Was that David Johnson’s wife?’ She was looking at Emma as she gathered her coat and slipped out of the door.

‘Yes.’

‘Why was she here?’

‘Guilt, I think.’

‘About your mother?’ Rose looked incredulous.

‘Me.’

Rose nodded. ‘Good for her, I suppose. Cutting you off was hardly fair.’

Kate steeled herself. ‘Right, I must circulate.’ She moved on. She drank several more glasses of champagne, until she felt as if she was actually floating through the wake, rather as her father might have done. He’d always known how to drink his way through an emotional crisis. She made small-talk with Sir Alan, who said quietly he’d been worried at her decision to step back into old territory and had wanted to be there to say she would always have his support in all aspects of her life. This almost made her cry.

The wake ground on for too long and she was exhausted by the time they had cleared up the village hall and loaded everyone back into the car for London. Rose and Simon were absolute Trojans, insisting on quietly and seamlessly doing the lion’s share of the work, and Rose’s goodbye hug was particularly heartfelt. The only complication was that Kate had intended to drop Stuart back at Heathrow for his return flight to Moscow, but was too drunk to drive. They returned instead to Battersea in silence, both children lost in their headphones in the back and Kate half asleep in the passenger seat.

Kate ordered Stuart an Uber, aware he no longer had the wherewithal even to pay for a taxi, and they were left with an awkward few moments alone on the doorstep as they waited for its arrival. ‘You going to be okay?’ he asked.

She wanted to ask him what he’d meant by holding her hand, not once but several times in the course of the day, but managed to restrain herself. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘It was good of you to come.’

‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. She was a difficult old bat, but she was your mother.’

The car arrived. Stuart plainly wanted to linger, to embrace, to engage in the kind of slow farewell only lovers can. But that wasn’t where Kate was at, so to his visible disappointment she gave him a friendly peck on the cheek and stepped back towards her doorstep.

He smiled wanly, but took it like a man – and with a shrug, which seemed to suggest he accepted reconciliation was never going to be easy.

Gus, who had been lurking unseen in the doorway, rushed forward to embrace his father. And when he was finally released, Stuart asked, ‘Where’s your sister?’

‘In a mood. You know how she is.’

By the time Kate had closed the front door on the emotional complications and confusion her former husband represented, she felt overwhelmed by tiredness. But after making a cup of tea and losing her son to Netflix, she went up to check on Fiona. Her daughter sat cross-legged on her bed, headphones on. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, without removing them.