'They were very close. You know that. It's a big loss for him. I don't know - he's dealing with it. Same as my mother. I'll be glad to get the funeral behind us.'
'After the funeral can be the worst part. Because everybody goes home and life starts to go on again. Except, for you, it doesn't. Is there anything I can do?' 'Yes.' 'What's that?' 'You can let me walk you home.' 'You've got to stop following me around,' she said as we walked through the silent white side streets of Notting Hill. 'It's got to stop.' 'I like your hair.' She grabbed her fringe in her hand.
'It's no good for you and it's no good for me,' she said. 'Oh, I don't know. It doesn't look that bad.' 'You know what I'm talking about.' 'I want us to be a family.'
T thought you hated that kind of family - the kind of family that is full of other people's children and ex-partners. I thought you wanted an uncomplicated life.'
T don't want an uncomplicated life. I want a life with you. And Peggy. And Pat. And maybe a kid of our own.' 'One of those families? With your kid and my kid fighting our kid? You'd hate it. You would really hate it, Harry. You'd last - well, I don't know how long you'd last.'
'I could never hate my life if it was with you. Listen, there was a tattoo on my dad's arm, some words written under one of those long, thin Commando knives. And it said - United We Conquer. And that's how I feel about us.' 'You're getting a tattoo?' 'No.' 'You're joining the army?'
'What I'm saying is that if we're together, then everything will be all right. I don't know what kind of family life it will be - because there have never been families like this before. But I know that it would be better than any other family we could ever have apart. Just think about it, okay?'
'Sure, Harry. I'll discuss it with my husband over dinner tonight.'
We had stopped outside an old white town house that had been chopped up into flats forty years ago. 'This is it, Harry,' she said.
And then Jim was suddenly bursting out of the front door, his arm in a plaster cast and a sling, screaming, 'Stay away from my wife, you bastard!' as he smoothly swung round in a full circle and his motorcycle boot exploded in my mouth.
I reeled backwards, my gums split and bloody, my legs gone to jelly, and two things were immediately clear.
Jim knew a bit about martial arts. And he had fallen off his bike again.
I bounced off some dustbins and lifted my fists as he came at me, but Cyd had moved between us and he howled with pain as she grabbed his broken arm. 'Leave him alone! Leave him alone!' she shouted at him.
'Watch my fucking arm, will you!' he shouted back at her. But he let her lead him back to the door. He turned to growl at me. 'If ever I see your face again,' he said, 'you lose all your teeth.' 'It wouldn't be the first time.'
I didn't explain that a friendly dog had pushed me on my face when I was five years old. That wouldn't have sounded quite so impressive. He went back inside the house, holding his plaster cast.
They must have been living in the ground floor flat because I could hear what sounded a lot like Peggy crying. Cyd turned to look at me. 'Please leave me alone now, Harry.'
'Just think about what I said,' I slurred through my fat and bloody lips. 'Please consider my offer.'
She shook her head and - I know it's dumb - but I felt that she was starting to really like me. 'You don't give up, do you?' she said. T get it from my father,' I said.
Then she closed the door of the big white house and went back to her life. thirty-seven A mile from our family home, there is a small church on a hill.
As a boy, wandering where he wasn't supposed to wander on light summer nights, I had sometimes lurked in the graveyard of this church, drinking cider and choking on a Number 6 and peering down the sights of my friend's.22 air rifle.
We were not as cocky as we looked. At the slightest sound - the wind in the trees, the rustle of leaves across the cold stone of a grave, some ancient wood creaking inside the church - my friend and I would bolt in panic, terrified that the dead were about to reveal themselves to us. And now my father was going to be buried here.
I woke to the sound of the paper boy's bike, the Mirror roughly shoved through the letter box, the low hum of the radio coming from the kitchen. For one moment between sleep and waking, it felt like just another day.
But after breakfast we donned our bleak uniforms of mourning, my son and I, both awkward in our black ties and white shirts, and we sat on the floor of my old bedroom, thumbing through box after box of photographs, consoling ourselves with images of my father, his grandfather.
Time ran backwards, unravelled. There were bright colour pictures of my dad with Pat - opening Christmas presents, riding his Bluebell bike with the stabilisers still attached, Pat as an impossibly blond toddler, and as a sleeping baby in the arms of his grinning grandfather.
And lots of pictures with the colours fading now - my dad and my mum with Gina and me on our wedding day, me as a smirking teenager with my dad, a fit fifty-odd, our arms around each other in our back garden - proud of his garden, proud of me - and still further back, me as a goofy eleven-year-old with my parents, still young, in the crowd shot of some cousin's wedding.
And all the way back to the beginning of memory and beyond - a black and white shot of me as a crop-haired child with my dad and the horses on Salisbury Plain, another black and white picture of my dad laughing as he lifted me up on some windswept beach, and pictures in shades of grey of him in uniform and my parents on their wedding day.
No pictures of him as a child or a baby. I knew it was simply because they had been too poor to have a camera, but it felt as though his life had only begun with our little family.
Downstairs the flowers had started arriving. Pat and I went to the window of my parents' room at the front of the house and watched the florist unloading them from his van. Soon the cellophane-wrapped bouquets covered all of the front lawn, and I thought of Princess Diana and the sea of flowers that had washed up against the black railings of the royal palaces. It was just another job for the florist, and the first job of the day, but he seemed genuinely moved.
'I wish I had known this man,' I heard him tell my mother, and I knew that he meant it. 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?'
Then we went inside the coolness of the church and it was like stepping into a dream, a dream where everyone you have ever known - relatives, friends of the family, neighbours from the present and the past, men in Royal Naval Commando ties who had met as teenagers and were now seventy - had gathered together for one last time, row upon row of them, some starting to cry at the sight of my father's coffin.
The three of us were in the front pew. Once the three of us would have meant my parents and me. Now it was my mother, my son and me. Their heads were down, staring at the flagstones, the laughter all gone, but I watched the vicar as he began to quote from Isaiah - 'They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.'