She knew it wasn’t fair to blame Drew. She should have thought of it, at least as much as he should. It was, after all, her problem and not his. They were her painful memories and sudden associations, from a time years before she even met him.
But she felt it, all the same. His careless, hurried words – ‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll be fine. It’s high time you gave it a go. I’m not sure of the details, but there’s a woman coming about her husband. He sounds a bit young, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Now, I’m really late for Mrs Frangipani at the hospice.’
‘She’s not called that, you idiot. I thought you were always mega-careful with their names.’
‘It’s Frantileni. I know perfectly well, but I always think frangipani’s such a nice word. Now, it’s your last chance to ask me anything. You’ve got the diary, coffin catalogue, stuff about the paperwork and legal requirements.’
‘How young was he?’
‘Um … don’t know. Too young.’ He shook his head. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he repeated. ‘Just be yourself. Don’t overdo the sympathy. Give her time to think of any special details. It was a sudden death, so she won’t have been prepared for it.’
The first quivers of apprehension assailed her then. ‘Um, Drew—’ she began, but he was already almost out of the door.
The woman was due at ten, which was imminent. She was called Linda Padwick. Her husband’s body was in the mortuary at Gloucester. ‘Some ghastly accident with a horse,’ said Drew, who had contacted the Coroner’s Officer already.
Horses were a daily feature of Cotswold life, with racing stables, riding schools, stud farms and livery all preoccupying a fair portion of the population. Accidents involving them were common enough to go unremarked, or at least fail to make front-page news. But people seldom actually died at the hooves of a horse. She remembered a bizarre story told by Den Cooper, husband of Drew’s partner Maggs, where a young woman was killed when a horse headbutted her. It had led to Den’s biggest murder enquiry, eventually, shaking him for a number of reasons. Thea tried to concentrate on this aspect of Mr Padwick’s death, rather than lingering on the consequences for his wife.
But it was impossible. As she waited for Linda Padwick to arrive, Thea was thrown back nearly five years to the moment when she herself had been forced to visit an undertaker and arrange the funeral of her own young husband.
The person who dealt with her had been a woman. A woman who was almost shockingly friendly. Thea’s clouded, horrified mind had nonetheless retained almost every detail of that hour, ever since. She recalled a foolish final notion that the whole thing was a prolonged dream, where the most terrible events were happening. And then here was this woman coming onstage from a land of good cheer and normality. ‘Good morning. My name is Christine Woolley. Please sit down.’
Thea, and her sister Emily (who had won the muted contest as to which sibling should go with her) sat side by side across a desk, in the bland room.
‘Cremation, I gather?’ said Christine, checking a card in her hand.
The word had conjured appalling images for Thea – Carl’s flesh melting in the flames, inside a great gas oven. ‘That’s right,’ she said. She knew Carl would have preferred a burial, and initially that had been her intention, seeing herself perpetually visiting a grave in a charming little churchyard. But Jessica, their daughter, had been adamant that cremation was to be preferred. Damien, Thea’s brother, had gently explained the drawbacks of a burial. Damien was profoundly religious, but had no qualms about this means of disposal, and had offered to officiate at Carl’s funeral, which had given Thea some hours of conflict. Almost everything anybody said to her created inner conflict. The fact that it was Emily beside her at the undertaker, and not Jessica, was painful. Jess had been nineteen, quite old enough to deal with the questions and decisions. But she claimed to care nothing for the details, having won the argument over cremation.
She heard a car arriving in their rural cul-de-sac, and went to open the door. Her shaking hands felt as if they belonged to someone else. She wasn’t going to be able to do it, she thought furiously. She was going to let Drew down, and serve him right. How could he not understand how hard this was going to be?
Linda Padwick was devastatingly young. Mid thirties at the most. At her side was a boy, who looked about ten. Surely there was some mistake? Surely these were quite the wrong people, intending to go elsewhere, not bereaved at all.
But they were. ‘Mrs Slocombe?’ asked the woman. ‘I’m Linda Padwick. This is Alex.’
‘Come in.’ Thea held the door wide, smiling inanely at the child. ‘We’re through here.’
She led the way into the room that had been originally intended as a dining room, but which they had transformed into an office. It had its own phone, a filing cabinet and a matching set of upright chairs. There was a table, rather than a desk, and Thea carefully seated herself at a narrow end of it, to avoid facing her customers like a bank manager or head teacher. She remembered the sensation from her own experience, feeling like an applicant for a job or a troublesome student.
Memories were being sparked repeatedly, quite beyond her control. Something in the young boy’s face reminded her of that hum of excitement that so shamefully intruded on the shock and misery and horror. To have a sudden premature death in the family made you special. It took you abruptly off the rails that you’d assumed were unalterable. People took notice of you. You were forced to learn how to do things you had never imagined. You had joined a club that was strange and exclusive and frightening.
Seated at right angles to each other, they began the business in hand. ‘Thank you for coming to us,’ Thea said. ‘We do appreciate it.’ The presence of the boy was proving to be more inhibiting than she had expected. While having no objections in theory to his being there, his youth and vulnerability brought added reasons to be wary of what she said.
‘You will have been contacted by the Coroner’s Officer?’ she went on. ‘So you know it’s all right to proceed with making funeral arrangements?’
Linda Padwick’s silence finally acquired significance. Three or four minutes had elapsed in which she had said nothing at all. She nodded slightly, her gaze on the table in front of her.
‘Mum?’ said Alex. ‘Are you okay?’
‘What?’
‘You’re not saying anything. You’re supposed to say something.’ He met Thea’s eyes. ‘She’s in shock, you see,’ he explained. ‘The doctor gave her some pills that would make her feel better. I think they stopped her talking.’ Anxiety flickered across his face. ‘Sorry,’ he finished.
‘That’s all right. There’s no hurry. We just have to find a day and time that would be good for you, and a few other details.’
‘Good for me,’ Linda Padwick repeated in a whisper. ‘Did you say “good”?’
Uh-oh, thought Thea, resisting an urge to apologise. Let’s not start playing that game. ‘Yes, that’s right. I expect there’ll be a lot of people coming. We should try to fix a time that will suit most of them. Obviously, you can’t satisfy everybody’s needs, but on the whole Fridays are usually the best choice.’
It worked very well. ‘All right, then. Have you got enough space for all their cars? Where exactly …? I can’t see the place where’ll he’ll be …’
‘Buried. No, you can’t see it from here. It’s about a quarter of a mile away. We can walk down there for a look, if you like. When we’ve finished up here.’
‘We joked about it, you know. Natural burials and all that. Everyone in my family has always been cremated.’ The new widow winced. ‘But that felt so …’
This time Thea did not finish the sentence. There was nothing about cremation that made the experience any better or worse, in the long run. In the short run, it was probably easier. Certainly quicker, cleaner and less inescapable. She remembered flickers of resentment against Carl for being such a dedicated ecologist, ideologically committed to burial because it didn’t involve fossil fuels. It gave her enormous difficulty when it came to deciding between his wishes and their daughter’s. Eventually she took the line she thought was the more sensible. After all, a grave was a burden. Drew himself had discovered this when his wife had died; the resulting hypocrisy had shocked several people. Rather than interring Karen a few yards from his back door, he had used a much more distant cemetery. Now that he was living full-time in the Cotswolds, it hardly mattered, of course.
She gave herself a shake. ‘All right, then. Shall we say Friday of next week? Is that too far off for you?’
‘What day is it today?’ It was a genuine question, and Thea felt no surprise.
‘Thursday. We could have it sooner, if you preferred that. Even Monday might be feasible, but most people will expect quite a bit more notice than that. We would bring him here in a day or so, and get everything ready. Have you any particular sort of coffin in mind? We can get woven willow ones, or a kind of cocoon made of felt. There are a lot of alternatives these days.’
‘Have you got somewhere cool, then? I don’t want him embalmed.’
‘We never do embalming. And yes, we’ve installed a cool room at the back of the house. You can come and see him any time you like.’
‘There’s been a post-mortem.’ Both women glanced at the boy, and Thea understood that his mother was growing much less confident of the wisdom of including him.
‘That’s no problem. It doesn’t leave any marks.’ A lie, of course. It left a grotesque line of black stitches down the length of the torso. But the scalp was replaced carefully and glued down. The face was almost always untouched.
‘The horse left marks,’ said the widow. ‘It kicked a hole in his chest. Broke his sternum and ruptured his lungs.’
‘Bloody thing,’ said Alex loudly. ‘I think it should be shot.’
Thea cocked her head. ‘I don’t suppose he did it on purpose.’
‘She. It’s a mare. Dad never liked her.’
‘Never mind that,’ said his mother. ‘She’s gone now.’ Loss was stark on her face and Thea glimpsed a story that she might never be told. Husband and horse were both gone, and Thea understood enough of the processes involved to suspect that the two might become amalgamated in Linda’s emotions.
‘She was Mum’s favourite,’ the boy supplied helpfully. ‘Dad was trying to put some salve on a cut when she kicked him. She hated him, you see. And me,’ he concluded proudly. ‘Men infuriated her.’
‘Stop it, Alex. The lady doesn’t want to hear all that.’
If only you knew, thought Thea. The image of a jealous horse lashing out at the well-intentioned man was filling her mind. It was so entirely different from the careless driver who had killed Carl that she relished it for that reason alone.
‘We’ll have a normal coffin,’ said Linda Padwick. ‘Plain, but solid. I don’t think he would have wanted anything newfangled. The felt thing sounds awful.’
Privately, Thea rather agreed with her. She had only seen pictures of them so far, but they carried very little appeal. They were also hugely expensive.
‘I’ve got to fill all this in,’ she said, indicating a printed card on the table. ‘For the records.’ She proceeded to ask full name, age, occupation, address of the deceased. Mentally, she was checking off the remaining tasks, worried that she would forget something crucial. ‘Who do you want to officiate?’ she asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘Somebody to take the service … I mean ceremony. To keep it together.’ She floundered. What were the right words? Drew had told her what to say, and it had flown out of her head. ‘We can find you any sort of officiant – humanist, for example.’
‘Won’t you do that? We don’t want any prayers or hymns or anything. None of that meant anything to Colin. Do we have to have somebody else? Did you say “officiant”? That’s a very odd word.’
‘It is, isn’t it? Well, no, you don’t have to have anybody. Drew can do it. Or a family friend. You can do absolutely what suits you.’
Damien had done it for Carl, in the event. Enough people had insisted on a conventional church service for Thea to go along with it. They had sung two hymns, both of which she found herself soothed by in the event. ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ was a gem, by any measure. Words and tune had between them filled her with a few seconds of consolation. She had considered ‘Abide with Me’ for the solid associations that linked her with earlier times and thousands of other funerals. But after a lot of dithering, she had opted for ‘Now the Day is Over’ because it was full of the right sort of feeling. She had insisted on all eight verses, focusing intently on the words. She still remembered the lines: Comfort every sufferer/Watching late in pain;/Those who plan some evil/From their sin restrain. They made her imagine that Carl was still out there somewhere, helping to prevent bad behaviour, in her if nobody else.
‘We’ll just gather at the grave, then, and anyone who wants to can say something, and then we’ll just … bury him.’ Linda reached for her son’s hand. ‘Is that okay, darling?’
The boy shrugged. ‘S’pose so.’
He didn’t know anything different, Thea realised. It was unfair to ask him. And yet it was probably the right approach, making him feel involved, that nothing was being concealed from him.
‘Is he your only one?’ she asked Linda.
‘No, actually. He’s got two little sisters. They’re only four.’
‘Twins?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Linda sighed, and rolled her eyes, and then, as Thea watched, remembered that these old habits might have to be jettisoned. Having twins had made her special for a while, but now she was additionally singled out in the eyes of the world. A young widow with three children. The twinness would fade into relative insignificance.
‘Will they be at the funeral?’
‘Oh, yes. They’ll never understand where their father’s gone otherwise, will they? I don’t believe in lying to children.’
‘No,’ said Thea, thinking of Drew’s Timmy, and how losing a parent was never going to be all right for anybody under the age of about eighteen. And even then … ‘Alex, you have some idea what’s going to happen, have you?’ She asked the question out of concern at the look on his face. She had seen fear, anger and bewilderment. All entirely to be expected, but surely her job was to try to assuage them.
‘He’s going to be put in the ground. Buried. In a coffin.’
‘That’s right. And the grave will always be there for you to visit any time you want to.’
‘Mmm. Except I can’t drive, can I? So how would I get to it?’
Thea waited for the boy’s mother to state the obvious. Instead she said, ‘You won’t want to, though, will you? What would be the point?’
‘I might.’ Both fell silent, the air between them brittle.
‘You know what some people do?’ Thea suggested, much too brightly. ‘They write a little letter and put it in the coffin. Nobody else would read it, so you can say whatever you like to your dad, and it’ll stay there with him for ever. Your sisters could maybe draw pictures for him. Or you could find some photos.’ Help me here, she silently ordered the woman, with a pleading look.
Linda Padwick gently shook her head from side to side, and her eyes rolled up towards the ceiling for a moment of sheer exasperation. ‘All this mumbo-jumbo,’ she said. ‘What earthly good does it do? I just wish we could have it all finished and done with.’
Her remarks were at least getting lengthier, Thea noticed. And she was showing a lot more vitality than at first. Whether or not this was a good thing remained unclear. There was an implication that Thea was getting it wrong, saying too much, making assumptions. This woman was not here on a social visit. They were never going to be friends. It was a business transaction, and any straying off that path carried all kinds of risk.
Linda’s remarks had not gone down at all well with her young son. He looked hurt and embarrassed. ‘I might do a letter,’ he said uncertainly. ‘But I don’t know what to say in it.’
‘Oh, Alex,’ moaned his mother. ‘There isn’t anything to say, is there? Just that you’ll always remember him, I suppose. You’re old enough now not to forget him. Not like the girls. You know what he was like, what he thought about things. We’ll all have to get used to getting on without him. That’s all there is to it.’
‘The girls won’t forget him. I won’t let them.’
‘Good. That’s good. We’ll be okay, sweetie.’ She reached over and put an arm round his shoulders. He tolerated the embrace like any boy of his age: not quite old enough to push it away, not quite young enough to see it as his due. Thea could not decide how damaging it would be for the boy to be so abruptly deprived of his father.
Linda was fully engaged with the child, forgetting where she was and why. ‘At least we know he didn’t do it on purpose. Leave us, I mean. Not like some fathers we can think of – right? He didn’t mean to go. It was a horrible accident, and there’s nobody to blame for it.’
‘Jocasta’s to blame,’ he corrected her. ‘She did it.’
‘Yes, but she didn’t know what she was doing. It was all instinct. He must have touched a sore place and she just kicked out automatically. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ She raised her eyes to meet Thea’s. ‘He was squatting down, you see, right beside her leg. At least, that’s what we think. We didn’t find him for a while, but there was a camera that caught most of it. The stables have got CCTV. Well – they all have it these days. I haven’t been able to watch it yet, but my dad had a look and says it’s all there, pretty clear. He bled internally. It was too late when someone went to look for him.’
It was a compelling story, and Thea was suitably compelled. Nothing whatever like her own Carl’s fate, then. He had died instantly, like a lightning flash, in which he could not possibly have known what was happening. This Colin Padwick had lain there in pain and fear and solitude until he died. Had the horse turned around to see what she’d done? Had she nuzzled worriedly at him, or stamped on him again in triumph? What degree of loathing had she really felt for him? Was it nothing more than an anthropomorphic theory?
‘How awful,’ she said weakly.
Linda made a grimace of agreement, still holding the boy. ‘Oh, well. Is there anything else we need to do here?’
It felt as if they’d barely started. Surely there had to be a whole lot more to be arranged. It had taken her and Emily at least an hour to go through everything with the undertaker when Carl had died. This woman had arrived barely twenty minutes ago. ‘We still haven’t established the exact time,’ she said.
‘Oh, probably afternoon. Say three o’clock? That should give people time enough to get here. There are some cousins in Lincolnshire, and an old friend in Suffolk. They’ve all got busy lives like us.’
Thea looked again at her card, with most of the boxes already filled in. The Padwicks lived near Stanton, she noticed. She remembered Stanton from the Christmas before last. It had struck her then as a horsy sort of place. Riding stables and all that sort of thing. Accidents must be a regular part of that way of life, surely. Falls and kicks and bites – big volatile animals with far too little brain-to-strength ratio. Thea had never greatly liked horses, and certainly never trusted them. It was only a matter of time before a great hoof came through her car windscreen, she believed. The little roads were full of the damn things.
‘Yes, that sounds fine,’ she said, writing the time down in the appropriate slot. ‘We’ll meet at the graveside, then, shall we? We’ll leave from here with the coffin – you can follow if you want to, of course. Make a procession of it.’
‘Can’t we use Sultan?’ Alex asked, his head raised in alarm. ‘You said we could bring him.’
Thea waited, pen poised.
‘Oh, darling. That would be such a business. I don’t know how it would work.’
‘Well, ask then,’ he urged her, sounding very adult.
Linda sighed. ‘Sultan is – was – Colin’s horse. He’s a great big hack. Quite an ugly thing, really. Alex thought he might be able to pull the coffin on a cart, but he’s never done that. It wouldn’t work at all. Sorry, lovey, but I don’t think he can come.’
Thea tried to visualise some sort of role for the horse. She recalled images of funerals with horse-drawn hearses, black plumes and glass sides to the vehicle. As far as she knew, there had never been any such provision made by Drew for any of his customers. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘We could think about it.’
‘We could make a travois,’ said Alex. ‘He wouldn’t mind that.’
Both women stared at him.
‘A what?’ said Linda.
‘It’s a thing the native Americans used. We’ve been doing it at school. They’re easy to make. We could put Dad on it, and Sultan could pull it.’
‘Never heard of such a thing,’ said Linda. ‘What makes you think the horse would tolerate it?’
‘He would,’ insisted the boy. ‘He’d hardly even notice it.’
‘What are they made of?’ asked Thea.
‘Poles. In a triangle shape. Then you weave rope, or string, dried reeds – whatever – across to make a sort of bed. They used them for old people, or somebody who couldn’t walk. You can easily find it online, if you look.’
‘Alex, this is silly,’ said Linda firmly. ‘What would people think, if we dragged your father down the street on a thing like that?’
‘What does that matter?’ Alex spoke Thea’s own thoughts.
‘Oh, it doesn’t really. But honestly, darling, I don’t think it’s realistic at all.’
‘I have to admit …’ Thea began apologetically. ‘I’m not saying it’s impossible, from our point of view. But we would have to talk to my husband.’
A sense of losing control made her waver. She was letting Drew down, letting herself down. As for poor young Alex, she felt a complete traitor in her failure to support his idea.
‘No, no, I’m sorry,’ said the widow firmly. ‘Alex, I know I said it would be nice to include Sultan somehow, but not like this. We’ll all go back to the stables afterwards and get him something special.’
‘Then you’ll send him away, like Jocasta,’ the boy accused. ‘I know you will.’
‘I promise you I won’t.’
Thea knew she had been rescued, but felt no gratitude. This was descending into a bottomless hole of personal feelings that had no place in Drew’s office. ‘Um …’ she said. ‘Maybe we should walk down to the field now. It’ll take ten minutes or so.’
‘All right,’ said Linda quickly. ‘Good idea. Do I have to sign anything?’
Thea scanned her documents worriedly. ‘No, I don’t think so. I’ll write you a card with everything we’ve decided, if you hang on a minute.’
Alex eyed her scornfully. ‘If you put it all on the computer as we go, you could just print it out right away,’ he told her.
‘I suppose I could. But we’re not sure that’s the way we want to do things. It seems a bit too official, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said with a frown. ‘It should be official, shouldn’t it?’
The undertaker who had arranged Carl’s funeral had referred repeatedly to a computer screen at her elbow. Databases of available slots at the crematorium, ministers of religion, status of the body, and other arcane material had made the process seem painfully impersonal. There was a system and Carl had been slotted into it, regardless of who he had been and what he might have wanted. Only when Emily had put up a hand and taken them onto a different path had things changed. ‘Our brother will officiate,’ she had said. ‘And we will need more than the usual twenty minutes that you’re offering.’ After that, they had gained a better quality of attention.
‘Oh, hang on,’ Thea remembered. ‘I have to give you a written statement of costs.’ She pulled out another printed form and started writing. Drew had taken her over this part of the job with great care, more confident since having a lengthy session with an accountant, three months earlier. The key, he explained, was to ensure that every outgoing was included and then to add a clear three hundred pounds on top. ‘That’s our only reliable income,’ he told her. ‘In a lean week, with only one funeral, that’s what we’ll have to live on. But if we get three or four, we’ll be rich.’
‘Hardly,’ Thea had said, but she was amenable to the general principle. One funeral a week did not seem unduly optimistic, and indeed, in the first five weeks of opening they had notched up eighteen burials.
‘That’s the publicity,’ said Drew. ‘It won’t keep on like that.’
But Drew had found additional work in the area, officiating at cremations and giving talks to affluent Women’s Institutes. One had paid him two hundred and fifty pounds for an hour’s talk, including questions.
She started to explain her workings to Linda, who waved it all away. ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘He had very good life insurance.’
There was no answer to that, so Thea pressed on. ‘There’s nothing hidden behind vague phrases like “administration costs” or “overheads”,’ she said. ‘What you see is what you get.’
‘Great,’ said Linda Padwick. ‘If that’s how you want to do it.’
It was a long list, but Thea had all the figures to hand, and the total came to barely half that of a conventional funeral. ‘We don’t charge for the plot itself,’ she explained. ‘Because it doesn’t cost us anything.’
‘What about mowing the grass? Maintaining the hedges?’
‘Oh, Andrew does that. His salary is included in the costings.’
‘Andrew’s your husband?’
‘No, our employee.’
Linda leant forward, her interest snagged. ‘But how can you know what proportion of his salary to charge me? That can’t possibly work, surely?’
‘Er …’ said Thea, who had asked the same question herself not long ago, and failed to fully understand the answer. ‘We have to make a guess as to how many funerals we’ll do in a year and then divide it.’
‘A guess. I see.’
‘It’s standard business practice.’
‘Maybe it is. Well, let’s hope it’s a good guess, then. And I hope you’ve included all the extra bits of tax and insurance – stuff like that.’
‘Are you an accountant?’ Thea suddenly asked.
‘Not exactly. But I did part of the course, before I had the kids.’
‘Well, this is it, all done now.’ She handed the sheet over, and Linda took it.
‘Too cheap,’ she said firmly. ‘People will think they’re getting a substandard service if that’s all they’re spending.’
Carl’s funeral had cost almost four thousand pounds, despite having no additional cars or a fancy coffin. She had wondered ever since just where so much money could have gone. At the time, it felt like paying for capable hands, reassurance that all the protocols had been satisfied, leaving nothing for her to worry about.
‘Well, they’re not,’ she said. ‘We like to think of ourselves as an ethical business, only charging for services actually provided.’
‘You won’t last long like that. I don’t mean it unkindly, but I think you’re missing some tricks. I wanted to spend more. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s as if I owe it to Colin to pay out a lot of money. It’s the last thing I can do for him. There he was, trying to make my horse feel better, my horse who we all knew hated him – and what does she do? Goes and kills him, ungrateful beast. How am I ever going to get around that? I’m not, of course. But I want the funeral to be the best I can make it, and for that, rightly or wrongly, I need to spend a lot of money.’
Thea looked at Alex, sitting restlessly in the chair that was too big for him. ‘We’d better go,’ she said. ‘You’ll have lots to do.’
‘None of it seems very important. But Alex wants to go into school this afternoon for some reason. We’ll have a bit of lunch and then I’ll take him.’
Thea led the way along the street of Broad Campden, trying not to feel self-conscious. The villagers had mostly accepted the arrival of an undertaker in their midst without much complaint. But the occasions where a cortège, however modest, had crawled past their homes towards the burial field had not met with universal approval. Two or three people had made a point that they were not Wootton Bassett and had no wish to become known for funerals and death, however tasteful and ecological they might be.
‘They’ll get used to it,’ said Drew. ‘The Staverton people did. And we’ll bring them some business. The pub’s likely to do well out of us.’
‘That woman’s watching us,’ said Alex, nodding towards a window. There was a face staring out of a ground-floor room, the brow furrowed. ‘Do you know her?’
‘Not at all,’ said Thea. ‘I thought that house was always empty during the week.’
‘Maybe she’s a burglar, then,’ said the boy. ‘Although she’d be daft to show her face, if she was.’
‘Stop it,’ said his mother.
The field was down the small road leading to Blockley. Very little traffic used it, most of the time. At the insistence of the council, about a fifth of the field had been roped off as a parking area, leaving four acres available for burials. ‘That’s more than enough,’ said Drew bravely. ‘But it means we’ll have to have them in proper rows, which is a shame.’ At the Staverton burial ground, there were few straight lines, the graves scattered around at odd angles. The ground rose in gentle mounds there, and Maggs had created winding pathways. By contrast, the new one was much more regimented.
‘There are nineteen graves here so far,’ she told her customers, pointing to a corner where the first row had been situated. A few young saplings had been planted as markers, but essentially it just looked like a flat, square field.
‘How many will it hold altogether?’ asked Linda.
‘Well, in theory, about four thousand, but we don’t want to put them too close together. Quite a lot, anyway.’
‘That’s incredible! You’ll never find that many people wanting a place like this.’
Thea gave her a startled look. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
The woman reached for her son’s hand. ‘Alex, I don’t think he’d like this, would he? It’s … I don’t know. Just not right.’
The boy said nothing. Thea hurried to defend her livelihood. ‘It’s still very new. When there are lots of trees and rocks and paths, it’ll be really nice. It’s totally quiet and peaceful. We’ll be putting some seats in, as well. And maybe a building over there, if we can get permission.’
‘What kind of building? A chapel, you mean?’
‘Oh no. More like a pavilion, with a list of all the graves, and somewhere to sit if it’s raining.’
‘But you might not get permission?’
‘It’ll take a while,’ Thea admitted. ‘But I think we’ll get it eventually.’
‘I don’t like it. I’m sorry. I know it’s terrible of me. But it’s just so … bleak. Colin liked people, and noise and things. He’d want to be more in the middle of everything.’
Thea felt close to screaming. Obviously she had done something wrong. What had the stupid woman expected?
‘Well …’ she said helplessly.
‘Listen. I’ll pay you for the wasted time. I am really sorry. You must think me such a fool. But I can change my mind, can’t I? And you have helped me a lot. When I came to you this morning, I was just a mess. I hardly knew what I was doing. You got me thinking and talking more than I’ve done for days. You’ve woken me up.’ She laughed grimly. ‘And now you probably wish you hadn’t.’
There were many things that Thea wanted to say, ranging from a furious tirade about wasted time to a much more mellow acknowledgement that she too had woken up to a few things during the course of their conversation. She managed a stiff smile and a shrug. ‘Of course you can change your mind,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s irrevocable.’
‘A cremation would be,’ said Linda. ‘At least I’m sure about that. I’m not having him cremated.’
‘Can we use Sultan, then, after all?’ asked Alex.
‘Maybe,’ said his mother. She looked down at him, bringing her face squarely to his. ‘Maybe you know better than I do what we ought to do.’
‘No, I don’t. But I think he’d like a horse to be there. So he can forgive Jocasta for what she did. Sort of. I mean …’ he tailed off. ‘It wasn’t really her fault,’ he added.
‘Nor yours,’ said Thea boldly. ‘It was just an awful accident.’
‘Sometimes accidents feel like crimes, though, don’t they?’ Linda blinked away the sudden tears. ‘As if somebody somewhere did a wicked thing.’
‘Believe me, it’s quite different,’ Thea insisted, as much for her own reassurance as Linda’s.
‘It isn’t, though. He’s just as dead either way.’
They walked back, saying very little. Mother and son got into their car and drove off, with Thea watching them. She felt drained of energy, unhappy and obscurely ashamed.
‘I’m not doing that again,’ she told Drew when he came home. ‘Sorry, but that’s definite.’
‘But why?’ He was still trying to get to grips with the loss of a funeral that would have been good publicity for the business.
‘Lots of reasons. I don’t know whether I can explain, but it was more than I could manage. You never thought, did you, that it might bring Carl back? He was almost there in the room with us. At least – that wouldn’t have been so bad. But it was as if I was arranging his funeral all over again.’
‘Oh.’
‘And it would be like that every time. Like Groundhog Day, over and over, time after time.’
‘I don’t think it would,’ he argued mildly.
‘And when she said the field was bleak, that was like a punch in the mouth. I saw it through her eyes, for a few minutes. I don’t know if I can shake that image. I’d be scared that every family would suddenly change their minds, like she did.’
He went pale. ‘Thea … what are you saying? We’re in this together, aren’t we? I can’t run the business without you.’
‘You could. Andrew could do a lot more. But no, I’m not abandoning you. At least, I might be a bit. I want to get a job. Oh – and I think you ought to charge people more for the funerals. And get back to the council about that building we want.’
‘A job?’ he repeated. ‘What sort of job? Are you telling me you’re going to be out all day, every day? What about the children? Answering the phone? How would that ever work?’
‘Don’t panic.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘I don’t mean right away. Most likely it’ll be next year sometime. Just don’t ever ask me to arrange another funeral, okay. Everything else is up for discussion.’
He pushed her hand away. ‘And don’t you think that every time I do it, that Karen isn’t there in the room with me as well? The Karen I betrayed by burying her somewhere else – not where she wanted and expected to be? I have to work through that guilt every single time.’
Guilt – the old enemy. Even when there was nobody to blame, just as Linda Padwick had said, it felt as if somebody somewhere had done a wicked deed.
She hoped young Alex had been granted his wish, and that Sultan would find a role to play at his master’s funeral. You really couldn’t blame a horse, whatever dreadful thing it had done.