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being one of the most famous of our famous TV stars right now. On screen she plays one of the leading characters – a nurse, funnily enough – in the long running soap-drama A & E , and off screen she fills more column inches of glossy than just about anyone else you’d care to name. From the contents of her handbags to the labels on her thongs, to her protracted and much documented battle-with-drink-and-drugs. No wonder the paparazzi followed her here. They follow her pretty much everywhere.
    ‘And him,’ my mother added. ‘I know his face as well.’
    ‘Whose face?’ I asked.
    ‘Him! That man with his arm round her. Him .’
    I didn’t know who the him was. Tall, broad-shouldered, wavy goldy-blond hair, and – yes, I was right – a slight limp. I always spot limbs that aren’t working on message. Another knee was my guess. Though I suspected that this one was a real one. They moved on then. Were walking arm in arm towards Hugo’s daughter.
    ‘I know who that is,’ said Mum’s friend, Celeste, who’d come to join us, swishing festively across in a strawberry two-piece. ‘He’s that new weatherman off the telly. Always wears such lovely ties. They’re an item, they are. I read it in Depth .’
    ‘ That’s it!’ said my mother, whose state of animation by this time was beginning to border on the unseemly. ‘I knew I knew the face,’ she said, fanning her own. ‘Goodness! How exciting this all is!’
    But the excitement was soon over. Once the photographer had been ejected, and the celebrity contingent ushered into the crematorium (without reference to us at any point – we were beginning to feel like a bunch of local peasants who just showed up at a hanging on the off chance), the service itself went pretty much as services at funerals do. We sang a bit, the vicar spoke a bit, and someone (in this case a someone called George) told a couple of anecdotes that were in somewhat bad taste. But it was a gathering that lacked any real sense of gravity, because so many heads kept swivelling around to try and clock the stars in our midst. To her credit, my mother did weep copiously as the casket rolled off stage, but even then I detected a slight touch of the theatricals, which should have alerted me, though it didn’t, that all was not quite as it seemed.
    And it seemed I wasn’t wrong. We filed back out into the sunshine. We filed past all the flowers. We stopped to read the notes. We were just moving off to get back into the car when a tell-tale plume of smoke started spouting from the chimney. My mother glanced up at it and stabbed a finger in the air. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish!’ she said firmly.
    ‘Honestly,’ said Pru, as we hastily wheeled her back to the car and bundled her inside. ‘What a thing to say! Supposing someone had heard you?’
    ‘No one heard me,’ my mother replied testily.
    ‘God did, Nana,’ observed Chloe.
    ‘God will understand,’ Mum told her, patting her knee. ‘God sees and hears everything . God knows .’
    Unless you’re God , and I’m not, it’s never a good idea to think you’ve seen and heard everything. Mainly because God moves in mysterious ways, and we’re fools if we think we can predict them.
    But the many mysteries of the universe are the last thing on my mind when we get back to Mum and Hugo’s, occupied, as it is, with that most delicate of delicate social occasions, the post-funeral gathering over tea. As is often the case (unless you’re Irish, of course) nobody seems to know quite how to be.
    And this gathering – this non-party – is even worse than most. Peopled, as it is, by two factions of mourners who were it not for certain parties’ late forays into matrimony (and the presence of celebrity, of course), wouldn’t have anything to do with one another, let alone engage in tea and Battenburg.
    I’m not sure quite why it is that the atmosphere feels so uncomfortable; whatever our private thoughts about our respective parents’