This is how it works, I thought. You break up and your child becomes a kind of castaway, set adrift in a sea of daytime television and ducked responsibilities. Welcome to the lousy modern world where the parent you live with is a distant, contemptible figure and the parent you don't live with feels guilty enough to grant you asylum any time things get too tense at home.

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We had a laugh when the coffin arrived at the church. It was a desperate laugh, one of those laughs that is there as a dam against tears which you are afraid will never stop if they are allowed to start, but a laugh all the same.

We were following the coffin into the old church, my mother, my son and I, but for some reason the four pallbearers stopped at the entrance. Although Pat and I had her between us, our arms around her, my mother kept going, her eyes on the ground. And she only stopped when she smacked her head hard against the end of her husband's coffin.

She staggered backwards, holding her forehead, looking for blood on her fingertips, and then she looked at me and we both laughed out loud. We were both hearing his voice, that old London voice full of weary affection. "What are you doing, woman?"