His sermon was about the good soldier who became a man of peace - the warrior who learned to be the loving husband, the kind father, the caring neighbour. And I could tell that he had worked hard at this speech, that he had talked to my mother and my uncles and Auntie Ethel next door who wasn't really my auntie. But the vicar had never met my father, and so he could never really capture him and his life.
It was only when the old song that my mother had chosen echoed through the crowded church that I had to get a grip of my heart, that I felt the weight of all that we had lost.
More than the hymns or the sermon or the well-meant platitudes or the faces of all the people he had ever known, it was this old song that got to me. Sinatra's voice, very young, very pure, lacking all the swagger and cynicism of his later years. It rose and soared around that little church.
And my mother didn't move, but I could feel her holding Pat more fiercely, as if she were afraid of being swept to some other place and time, somewhere in the lonely future when she could only sleep with the bedroom lights blazing, or somewhere in the lost, unrecoverable past. Someday When I'm awfully low, When the world is cold, I will feel a glow Just thinking of you, And the way you look tonight. And I could hear my father's voice complaining at the choice, his voice full of wonder at this woman he had shared his life with but who never ceased to amaze him.
'Not early Sinatra, woman! Not all that swooning bobby-soxer stuff he recorded for Columbia! If you've got to pick Sinatra, then pick something from one of the Capitol albums of the fifties - "One For My Baby", "Angel Eyes", "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" - one of the great saloon songs. But not that early stuff! And what's wrong with Dean Martin? I always preferred old Dino anyway.'
It was true. My father's favourite was Dean Martin. Sinatra, as much as he liked him, was a bit too much of the smooth romantic for my old man. He far preferred Dean Martin's hard centre. But of course the song wasn't my father's choice. It was my mother's. It wasn't about how he saw himself. It was about how she saw him, knew him, loved him. But you're lovely! With your smile so warm And your cheek so soft There is nothing for me But to love you Just the way you look tonight. The undertaker's men carried my father's coffin out of the church - gently, gently - and into the graveyard as we followed, dazed by the rituals of death, to the latest grave in a sloping field of headstones.
The freshly dug plot was at the end of a long line of graves, and one day, after this church had seen many more funerals, it would be difficult to find my father's resting place because it would be in the middle of a forest of headstones, just one among the many. But not now. Not today. Today my father was the latest arrival in this eternal place. It was easy to find his grave today.
And there was his headstone - white and new, my father's epitaph carved in gleaming black on the top half, leaving space for another inscription - for his wife, my mother, Pat's grandmother - to one day be carved.
PATRICK WILLIAM ROBERT SILVER, DSM, it said, a name from the days when ordinary families gave their children as many names as they could remember, as many names as they could carry, and below the dates of his birth and death, BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER AND GRANDFATHER.
The vicar was talking - ashes to ashes, dust to dust, come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world - but all I could hear was a scrap from one of the old songs, a song asking someone to never, ever change.
We were on the edge of the open grave, at the front of a large crowd of mourners. Some of them I didn't know. Some of them I had known all my life. And yet the faces that I knew were changed - I remembered laughing uncles and good-looking aunts in their middle years, the good years of new cars and bright clothes and summer days on the coast, their children growing or perhaps already grown.
Now these faces I knew were older than I had ever expected them to be, and the confidence of their thirties and forties had somehow slipped away with the years. They had come to see my father buried, the first of their generation to go, and their own deaths must have suddenly seemed very real. They wept for him and also for themselves.
In the distance I could see the fields where I had roamed as a boy, dark brown in mid-winter and as rectangular as playing fields, bordered by scrawny bare trees.
Did children still play on that ragged farmland? Somehow it seemed unlikely. But I remembered every brilliant stream, every muddy ditch, the stagnant pond inside the thick spinney, and all the farmers who chased us away, me and my friends, those city children with suburban lives.
Up here there was no sign of the housing estates and shopping centres that were very close by. Up here all you could see were fields. Up here this place felt like real country.
This was why my father had escaped the city. Those fields where I had played as a boy - that was what my dad had dreamed of, and now he was going to be buried among them.
There was crying all around now - louder, uncontrolled, more stung with grief - and I looked up and saw the tears on faces that I loved. My dad's brothers. Our neighbours. My mother and my son.
But I stood there dry-eyed as I watched them lower my father's coffin into the freshly dug grave, one arm wrapped tightly around my mother, who had her own arms around her sobbing grandson, and my free hand stuffed deep into the pocket of my black suit, my fist holding my father's silver medal as though I would never let it go. thirty-eight 'The world is changing,' said Nigel Batty. 'It's not the seventies any more. This isn't Kramer versus Kramer. In residency disputes, the law still favours the mother - and it always will. But there's a growing awareness that not every lousy parent is a man.'
T hate the thought of my son growing up around some other guy,' I said, more to myself than to my lawyer. T hate the thought of him being in the same house as someone who hasn't really got any interest in him at all. Someone who's only interested in his mother.'
'That's not going to happen. No matter what she says -she left both of you. And you've done a good job while your son has been in your care. No matter what she tells her solicitor.'
T can't believe she's making me out to be negligent. If she kept it clean, I could respect her. But this - it makes my blood boil, you know what I mean, Nigel?' T know.'
My lawyer was no longer Mr Batty to me. Now he was Nigel. Now he had told me his story.
Seven years ago he had married a French woman who he had met while she was working for a barrister in London. They settled here and had twin daughters within a year of their wedding. But when their marriage came apart two years ago, his wife - soon to be ex-wife - decided she wanted to return to France. And with the Court of Appeal's approval, she had received permission to take their daughters out of the country. Nigel Batty hadn't seen them since.
'So my children end up losing one parent and no doubt loathing the other one,' he said. 'Thanks to some dumb fuck of a judge who thinks that the mother is the only parent who counts. And there's nothing special about me - plenty of fathers lose contact with their children. Because the women they married want to punish them.'
I made sympathetic noises. It was late in the evening and the cleaning staff were shuffling around his empty office in the West End. He sat on his desk and stared down at the traffic clogged up on Hanover Square.
'My children would certainly be better off with two parents. But working that one out - the impossible task of letting them keep both parents - that would have taken a degree of compromise. And residency disputes are not about compromise. And they are not about what's best for the children. They should be, but they're not. They are invariably about what the mother decides she wants.' He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.
'Although the law tries to take the sting out of a residence order, it has to end in victory for one parent and defeat for the other. It has to. The one who loses is usually the man. But - and this is what has changed over the last twenty years - not always. And we can win this one. We deserve to win this one.' 'But she does love him.' 'What?' 'Gina loves Pat. I know that she loves him.'