The minister takes the lead by shaking my hand, then Marianne’s. This starts a slow chain reaction of formal greetings that draws in everyone in the lobby, as they filter past us and up the stairs to the chapel. Marianne and I stand at the base of the steps and nod and shake hands, nod and shake hands, trying to wrench our faces into some semblance of appropriateness. Who are all these people? Am I supposed to remember them from before? Not wanting to meet their gaze, I focus on their mouths, watching painted lips and wrinkled chins form the same words over and over: So sorry for your loss. Sorry for your loss. I was so sorry to hear about your loss. Their hands are extraordinary to touch, the skin warm and alive but the flesh pared down to bone and sinew, sometimes deformed with arthritis but still surprisingly strong. Most of them have worked out who I am now. I can tell by their poorly hidden disapproval of me, which softens into tenderness as they take Marianne’s little paw within their own.
People lie best with their mouths, which is what makes life among other humans bearable. Imagine if what we said aloud was as honest and true as what we say with the rest of our bodies. You’re a cold-hearted bitch, these women tell me as they take my hand, and you broke Lily’s heart. I hope you’re happy now she’s dead; I hope you don’t choke on the money she left you. It’s not your fault, little one, they add as they move on to Marianne. Your mother stole from you too, when she never let you get to know Lily. Perhaps when they look at her they’re imagining their own potential descendants, and wondering if they’ll live long enough to meet them. Perhaps they’re praying that the bonds they’ve built will be strong enough to hold. Or perhaps they’re hungry for the touch of young flesh. Sometimes, even now, I still give in to the urge to steal a taste of my daughter; a sneaky little lick when I kiss her cheek, a pat of her leg, a nibble of her outstretched finger. The last remnants of the days when I was allowed to smother her in kisses. Marianne and Daniel, they’re what’s real, not this stone space that smells of face powder. Today is simply something I have to get through. I hold in my head the picture of Marianne as a newborn in Daniel’s arms, a talisman against the dark.
The last of the parade has filed by. It’s our turn. Lily, in her pale ash-coloured casket, will travel separately. As we climb the stairs, I realise I haven’t seen James Moon. Perhaps he decided not to come after all. Or perhaps he decided to continue his policy of outrageous rudeness and simply walked past me without speaking.
Good for you, I think reluctantly. The world’s more interesting when people speak and act how they secretly want to. In my experience, funerals give everyone a free pass to follow this principle to its most terrible conclusions.
The man who opens the door for me looks familiar. Within the nest of wrinkles, I see the face of Harry Rose, who used to greet me with a dry kiss on the cheek every Sunday morning of every summer, and who also (I now realise) used to discreetly flirt with Lily. He would hold her elbow as he guided her into the pew, and she would smile at him from underneath her hat before settling down for a good talk with me. Fascinated onlookers always assumed Lily was translating the sermon but in fact we were gossiping about the poorly chosen outfits and terrible husbands of the rest of the congregation.
He’s a wicked man, Harry. Lily, settling herself into the pew beside me. A pause, a quick glance around, and then she turns towards me like a conspirator. Do you know, he parked right in the middle of town the other Sunday morning, where there used to be car parking at the weekends. Only now it’s pedestrianised, but he parked there anyway. Then the traffic warden came in during the service and asked him to move it or else they’d have to tow his car. Her wicked smile as she told me this story; the mischievous gleam in her eye. She was always on the side of the law-breakers, never the traffic wardens. I don’t want to remember how funny she was, how bewitching, how lovable. I can’t afford to. This is an administrative duty. Once today is over I’ll never come here again.
Thank God for Marianne, tugging gently on my sleeve to prompt me. Lily’s pew is at the back and on the right, but I don’t look into it. I don’t want to see someone else in her place. I’d prefer to imagine it perpetually empty. Actually, now I stop to think about it, I’d prefer it to be torn up and burned. We walk down to the front of the church instead. The air throbs with the deep notes of the organ and when I put my hand on the back of the pew, I feel the wood buzzing beneath my fingers.
This feels wrong, all wrong. I want to be at the back, where I can see what’s happening but no one can see me. Suddenly I see Lily, not tall and upright and elegant but hidden away in the ash-coloured box I picked from a webpage and ordered by email. She is riding on the shoulders of four solemn-suited men, all supplied by the undertaker, all strangers. I can smell the pollen from the heap of lilies. Lily pollen stains terribly and is poisonous to cats; if you have them in a flower arrangement, the advice is to cut out the stamens. Marianne is holding my hand. I clutch it tightly for a minute, then force myself to let go and give her a reassuring smile. I don’t want to frighten her. Death is part of life. This is simply a task I have to get through.
The coffin is lowered onto a stand. The bearers melt discreetly away. Dwarfed by the lilies, two other floral offerings have made their unauthorised way into Lily’s final public appearance. A cluster of long-stemmed red roses, swathed in gypsophila and tied with ribbon, scentless and soulless, the overpriced choice of clueless or guilt-stricken men. And beside them, a wilting tangle of green leaves and stems, like a bunch of stinging nettles.
The lily pollen tickles my nose and I rummage for a tissue, aware of the subtle rearrangement of faces and upper bodies as my actions are misinterpreted and judged. Too late for tears now, say the shoulders of the woman in the navy-blue coat. Theatrical, like that hat of Lily’s you’ve helped yourself to, although you didn’t bother to make sure your daughter was dressed appropriately, says the hand movement of the woman on the left, minutely adjusting her own black hat, sitting atop her sensible short-clipped grey hair like an upturned dog bowl.
I can’t begin to follow the sermon, and singing has never been my strong point, so I float through the service in a determined haze. My spine prickles with memory. That’s where the choir sit; remember that summer when Lily’s friend was in the choir and you saw her sing a solo on Easter Sunday; that’s where that baby was being christened and it was sick over the minister’s shoulder and down his back and he said it was a badge of honour and wore it all through the rest of the sermon and next week you could see the patch where he’d washed it out; that’s the window where they had the Harvest of the Sea display and the cardboard mackerel fell off on everyone’s heads.
I distract myself by thinking about the flowers. Who sends red roses to a corpse? If I’d expected anything, I’d imagined mixed bouquets in shades of white, blue and yellow, inexpensive and unobjectionable. Red roses mean passion, sex, occasionally guilt. Do these things still happen to you when you’re ninety-five? They draw my eye like a fluttering flag.
And what’s the deal with the nettles? Are they from the same person? Taken together with the roses, do they form a message? I love you, but you’re wild and dangerous and painful to touch? Lily would have enjoyed that. Or are the nettles from some other wronged soul? You were an unwanted poisonous invader in the perfect garden of my marriage, perhaps. You stung me whenever I got near you. I hated you so much I sent weeds to your funeral. Also possible.
You can’t buy a bunch of nettles. They must have been picked by hand. I remember the bony strength of the hands I shook earlier, the warmth and the clumsiness, and the skin that was thin like wrinkled silk. The sender must have worn gloves. Marianne is bored but hiding it well. I can tell she wants to get her phone out, but she knows better than to actually do it. She sits up straighter in her pew and neatens the cuffs of her cardigan as if reminding herself of her duty.
From above his round white collar, Robert the minister gives me the nod that tells me the service is coming to an end. It’s time for us to leave. Lily will ride s
olemn and stately to the crematorium, where she and the flowers will be burned to a fine grey ash that I’m supposed to scatter into the ocean where she once taught me to swim. Her will explained it all, simple and suitable; the gathering in the Memorial Hall downstairs afterwards, the catering supplied by a firm she knew from her hotel-owning days, a respectably lavish menu and a chance for everyone to relax into their natural selves after the strain of the service. I will go through the motions as correctly as I can – trying to make up for all the years you never bothered with her, says the lifted chin of the woman in grey in the pew to the right – to properly honour the Decencies, those terrifying well-dressed maiden aunts who stand between us and their wilder cousins, the Furies. I will keep this last goodbye dignified and quiet. I won’t let anyone see how I really feel. I won’t descend to Lily’s level. I follow Marianne out of the pew and think how strange it is that Lily’s funeral should be so much like the dark companion of a wedding: guests, formal clothing, an entrance and an exit, beautiful flowers and the knowledge that in the time we’ve spent together, a profound change of state has occurred.
I was going to simply lead the congregation out, but instead I find myself taking five quick steps to Lily’s coffin. Amid a ripple of interested and disapproving faces and movements, I pinch off a leaf from what I thought was a bunch of stinging nettles but that I now see is something else, something with tender green serrated leaves and a minty, herby scent that’s maddeningly familiar. I tuck the leaf into my sleeve. Marianne looks at me, unsure if this is some arcane funereal rite I forgot to mention and that she’s supposed to follow me in. I shake my head and lead the way down the aisle as if nothing has happened.
Someone else is leaving ahead of me. Someone who’s had the brass neck to take over the vacancy in Lily’s pew, someone wearing a dark suit and a crisply ironed shirt, someone tall and upright with a shock of white hair. The man who knew what Lily’s rings looked like, who shouted at my daughter for seeing him cry and then apologised with a glass of lemonade. He must have come early and hidden himself away in the chapel. There’s no way I would have missed him if he’d waited in the lobby with everyone else. As I watch him disappear from the service, the identity of the leaf tucked into my sleeve suddenly comes to me. It’s catnip.
“So what happens now?” Marianne frowns at the plates of dainty sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the canapés, the quivering slices of quiche Lorraine. “Are we supposed to eat all this? Have we got to stay?”
“Of course we’ve got to stay,” I say, a little more sharply than I intended because today’s gone on for too long already. I want to tell my fellow mourners exactly what I think of them and their judgement, then march straight out and leave them all to it. Instead I have to stay here and make some semblance of polite conversation with a gaggle of elderly people who have no interest in me beyond a vague malice for the way, as they see it, I heartlessly abandoned Lily. This isn’t how Lily would have put it to them. Admitting that I’d walked away from her would have been too difficult for her pride to swallow. More likely she wouldn’t have mentioned it at all, instead behaving as if I was a welcome and expected visitor who had simply been unavoidably detained for a few days or weeks, but who would be arriving very soon. The other mourners are assessing the food with greedy glances.
“It’s all covered with cling film,” says Marianne.
“We’d better take it off then.”
“Do you think we should?”
“I’m paying for it, so I’ll do as I wish.”
“You’re paying for it? You don’t get it for free?”
When Marianne asks questions like this, I remember how young she is.
“Of course we have to pay for it. Why would anyone give it to me for free?”
“I just wondered. You know, because it was a funeral.”
I don’t laugh. I used to think funerals would bring out the best in other people too.
The other guests are staring at us, in that way they do stare. Wondering what I’m saying, and if I’m taking advantage of knowing no one else can understand us. They’re all hungry but none of them like to be the first ones to descend on the food. I begin to offer round plates of sandwiches.
“A very beautiful service,” says a woman in a severe grey dress and an elegant black coat. She is far younger and looks much richer than the others, and her perfume has the subtle lingering elegance that you only get with the most expensive scents. “It’s all right, you’re not supposed to know me. I’m Laura Crane. I was Mrs Pascoe’s doctor.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say, then bite my lip. I’ll never be here again, but I still wish I’d thought ahead about what to say to people. I glance down, and discover I especially like Doctor Crane’s shoes. Black patent leather, with a thick high heel and a low-cut front.
“It was quite quick and painless,” she tells me, the movements of her mouth very clean and precise. “She was as sharp as a tack, very fit and healthy, right up until the end. Then one day I called round, and she wasn’t. Into hospital within a day, a week on the ward, two weeks in a respite home and then gone in her sleep. Very efficient, exactly how she’d have wanted it. I hope I don’t sound too blunt. People go all round the houses trying to work out how to ask, so now I just tell them straight.”
“Thank you.”
“Something else,” Doctor Crane says. “She was adamant that when the time came, you weren’t to be bothered until it was over. She made me write it into her medical notes. And she asked me to tell you that she loved you. That was how she ended every appointment. In fact, those were the last words she said to me before the ambulance came. Remember you’re not to bother my granddaughter with any of this and when I’ve gone, you tell her I love her.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s no trouble.” Doctor Crane reaches into her immaculate handbag and hands me a tissue. “I don’t get involved in my patients’ private business but you know how Lily was. And she meant it, you know. She didn’t hold a grudge. She loved you very much.”
Her words have unlocked a floodgate and now all the tears have no choice but to gush out. I squeeze my face up tight to try and keep myself together. Doctor Crane pats my arm.
“It’s all right. You’re allowed to cry. All quite normal. Best get it out of your system. Okay, I have to go before people start mobbing me for extra consultations.”
A subtle queue is already beginning to form, little clumps and clusters of two and three, waiting in ambush to capture a few moments with the doctor. She picks her way unerringly through them with clean quick steps, turning her head to the left and to the right, smiling and nodding but never pausing long enough for a conversation to start. I stand uselessly by the buffet table, a clump of tissue clutched in my hand, and try to stop the tide of sorrow that’s pouring out of me. I hope I’m not making a noise.
There’s a warm hand on my back, rubbing gently as if I’m a small hurt child. It’s Marianne, her face tight with anxiety but doing her best. I want to stop the tears but it takes me a few tries. I’m grateful for the veil of my hat, which will go some way to concealing the wreck of my make-up. At last I have the torrent back under control.
The other mourners are carefully not looking at me. An unexpected kindness, from a group of people who have no reason to be kind. Or perhaps they’ve turned away from my grief in the same way a hungry dieter looks away from the baker’s window. Perhaps the scent of my tears will rouse them to vengeance, and if I get too close to them they’ll turn on me and rip me to pieces with their harpy claws.
Chapter Ten – Lily
I’m fourteen years old and I’m lying on a towel on the sand, my seawater skin prickling and drying in the heat. I’m thinking drowsily about the boy, a year or perhaps two years older than me, who looked at me earlier as I bought ice cream. His two friends wrestled and kicked sand at each other, but he was watching me, transfixed as I licked a dribble of ice cream off my wrist. When our eyes met, my stomach turned ov
er.
My mother has firm views on what I’m allowed to do with boys, which is essentially to share classroom space with them and absolutely nothing else. She says she doesn’t trust them, but in fact she doesn’t trust me, either to know how to behave or to keep myself safe; the same battle we’ve been having since I was six. The more female my body grows the crosser and more anxious she becomes. What would she say if she knew this boy had looked at me? What would she say if she knew I’d looked back?
I roll onto my front and squint through my sunglasses at the ancient canvas chair where Lily sits with her dress turned up two inches above her knees. Her wardrobe makes no concessions to the beach. When her strappy cream kitten-heeled shoes become too irksome she simply takes them off and packs them into her handbag, then unclips her filmy stockings and folds them away too, revealing feet ruthlessly crushed by decades of painful footwear. I’m always slightly frightened of Lily’s feet, which seem like an awful warning of the price of elegance. It occurs to me that, in her way, despite her age, Lily is still beautiful.
“Did you ever want to get married again?” I ask her, then bite my lip in case this is rude. According to my mother, I’ve become very rude recently.
Lily looks at me, then at the ocean, then at the sky, and then back at me again. She is silent for so long that I wonder if she hasn’t understood my question.
“I suppose I could have done,” she says at last. “I did have offers. But it never quite seemed worth the effort.”
“Is it hard work being married, then?” This is definitely a question my mother would class as rude, but Lily laughs.
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