It was a nothing sort of day, neither indecently sunny nor portentously gloomy; the sky was white, the trees drooped under yellowing, but still fairly substantial leaf cover and the birds tweeted blithely as if to signal their indifference to the occasion. Black-clad figures milled about on the lane, their faces turning expectantly our way as Nick led me down the path. He was wearing his good suit, its cut so sharp, his shirt so white, his tie so immaculately knotted, that it was just as well he had lent his black fedora to Cath, or he would have looked like a Mafioso; meanwhile I was sweating unbecomingly in my grey linen dress and an old Hobbs coat, wishing that the only un-laddered tights I’d been able to find had been less than eighty denier. Nick opened the garden gate for me with exaggerated courtesy, flinging aside my welcome home banner, which had come adrift and snagged on the garden wall so that only the legend ‘ME KAREN’ was visible.
Cath was chatting to a woman I didn’t recognize. Seeing me, she squeezed the woman’s arm apologetically and hurried over to give me a consoling hug. I succumbed briefly, but then, feeling my composure start to wobble, stepped back. Cath seemed about to say something, but before she could, Ray descended, resplendent in an Edwardian-style frock coat.
‘Bloody hell, young Karen, you scared the life out of us.’
‘Ray,’ Min chastised him, with an apologetic glance over her shoulder at the other mourners.
‘You did, though,’ she confirmed quietly, giving my arm a friendly squeeze. ‘Lying there on that drip like a poor little ghost…’ She shuddered. I mumbled something vaguely apologetic and then tried to find a way to steer the conversation back to the circumstances of Jean’s demise, but before I’d got very far at all, the funeral cortege was spotted making its way along the main road towards the hamlet. Everyone turned and conversations trailed off, as the shiny black roofs of the hearse and an accompanying limo flickered in the distance. An awkward hush fell, followed, once people realized that it would be another five minutes before it reached the hamlet, by a shuffling of feet and a renewed outbreak of sombre platitudinizing. Imogen and Douglas had by now emerged from Walford House and taking this as our signal, as surely as if they had still been the Lord and Lady of the Manor, we turned and started moving as one down the lane.
Heads swivelled and hats were doffed as we passed Prospect Cottage, but the house was blank, not so much as a flicker of its closed curtains betraying the presence within of the funeral party. It would, I supposed, be a tight-lipped little gathering anyway, in view of what Jean had told me about the strained relations between Gordon and his children. Always assuming they had come at all; I hoped for Jean’s sake that they had.
Rounding the corner, we met the cortege head-on and shrunk back into the hedgerow to let it pass. The casket was an old-fashioned mahogany monstrosity, ornately carved and adorned with a single cross of white carnations. It looked so unsuited both in its bulk and grandiosity, either to Jean’s physical frailty or her mercurial persona as to seem an insult to her memory. As others bowed their heads or crossed themselves, I looked away, fighting a rising sense of indignation, of fury really, on behalf of the old woman.
As we reached the junction with the main road and forked right into the village, it occurred to me how little the walk there from the hamlet must have changed in Jean’s lifetime. The scene must have varied more according to the season than the decade. Had she and Gordon married in the little sandstone church? I wondered. Had their children been christened here? How many times must she have walked beneath this same arch of trees, past these same cottages, gone by the school house and the pub and then through the lychgate and up the winding path through the churchyard where she was now to be buried? Had she been a churchgoer? I didn’t know, any more than I knew which star sign she’d been born under or which way (if any) she had voted, what books she’d read or whether she liked dogs or cats or neither, had had a best friend, or an unrequited love. I didn’t know and now I never would and my ignorance felt both a loss and a betrayal.
The vicar stood outside the church porch, greeting the mourners with sad benevolence.
‘Hello, welcome to St Aloysius. Good morning and welcome…’
Next to him, a female funeral attendant in a top hat was handing out orders of service. Nick took one and we went inside, pausing for a moment for our eyes to adjust to the dim interior. It was a small plain church with whitewashed walls. A single aisle led between rows of dark wood pews to a simple altar beneath a triptych of stained-glass windows. As mere acquaintances of the deceased, I had expected to squeeze in inconspicuously at the back, and was surprised to find the church barely a third full, and to be ushered forward, along with the other residents of the hamlet, to fill up the gaps in the foremost pews. Catching Cath’s eye I gave her a puzzled look and she shrugged back, a little insouciantly it seemed to me, but before I had a chance to comment to Nick on the poor turnout, the organ’s mournful tootling had come to an abrupt halt and the meagre congregation had risen to its feet.
There was a brief expectant silence, some shuffling and coughing at the back of the church and then a gusty off-key organ note heralded the start of the funeral march. It was almost too pathetic to bear, the half-empty church, the generic lugubrious music, the sombre faces of the hired pall-bearers, who though advancing now with downcast eyes, would be laughing and joking in their civvies in an hour or two. Surely Jean’s life had been worth more than this?
As the coffin was lowered onto the aluminium bier, and the chief mourners drew level with our pew, I took a surreptitious sidelong glance at them. There was a plumpish woman of about my age, wearing a navy mac and a bouffant hair-do, whom I took to be the estranged daughter, and a suntanned man in a flash double-breasted suit, looking every inch Dubai. But between them, where I would have expected to see Gordon, tall and prideful, keeping his upper lip characteristically stiff, there was only a smallish elderly figure – a female relative, I assumed, although the daughter’s bulk prevented me from seeing her clearly. I nudged Nick, jerked my head towards them and furrowed my brow, enquiringly, but he didn’t seem to catch my drift.
I was staring up at the stained-glass window, thinking back to the strange premonition I had had about Jean when we first met and wondering if something other than my own self-absorption had prevented me from acting on it, when the vicar stepped forward, pink sausage fingers clasped piously in front of his cassock and began to intone with the sing-song, counter-intuitive cadences beloved of the clergy, ‘We are gathered here today to say farewell to Gordon Victor Anthony Naylor and to commit him into the hands of God.’
The service had long finished and the mourners were mingling in the churchyard before the scale of my misapprehension had even begun to sink in. I sat on a bench and stared nonplussed at the order of service – an A5 pamphlet, the cover bearing a silver crucifix, beneath which was printed:
A SERVICE OF THANKSGIVING
FOR THE LIFE OF
GORDON VICTOR ANTHONY NAYLOR
1925–2018
On the inside page was an oval sepia photograph of a handsome but rather arrogant-looking young airman, with a supercilious half-smile playing about his lips, the legend beneath, ‘Gordon “Spider” Naylor semper fidelis.’
I didn’t have the courage to admit to Nick that I’d thought it was Jean who was dead. Clearly I had been told, and if I’d been too far gone at the time to digest the information, I was not inclined to cite my illness in mitigation. This was supposed to be the new me, the strong me, the sane me. Besides, it would have felt unseemly, for Jean was standing, large as life, just feet away from me, her dress smart, her posture erect, her hair neatly coiffed beneath a half-veiled pill-box hat. Given the scale of the transformation she appeared to have undergone since the last time I’d seen her, distressed and vulnerable on the lane, I felt I could be forgiven for not having recognized her.
‘… And this is my son Peter,’ she was saying to Douglas Gaines. ‘Come over special from Dubai.’
Nick was worried the wake would tire me out, but I was determined to go. I wanted to express my – condolences would be the wrong word – sympathies, I suppose, euphemistic enough to cover it. I also wanted to lay the ghost of Prospect Cottage once and for all to rest. I needed to satisfy myself that it was not the ghoulish mausoleum of my imaginings, but, as Nick had always insisted, a dreary little house blighted by nothing more sinister than a coal-effect gas fire and some flock wallpaper.
In fact, for the home of two reclusive pensioners tricked out for a wake, it had a surprisingly jaunty air about it. The curtains were now half-open, one window stood ajar and some ugly yellow chrysanthemums on the ledge had attracted the attention of a late, lazy wasp. The small front parlour was crammed with furniture – two wing-backed armchairs stood either side of the fireplace, a glass-fronted china cabinet took up one alcove and a TV the other, whilst the only free wall was dominated by a bulky sideboard, covered in crocheted doilies and laden with enough sandwiches and sausage rolls to feed an army. Recalling Gordon’s abstemiousness on the night of our party, I was surprised to see a cluster of tumblers and an array of hard liquor on offer as well.
I watched Nick work the room – clasping shoulders, shaking hands, pitching his comments perfectly between sombreness and cheer while I hovered awkwardly by the refreshments. I was still trying to take in the scale of my misapprehension about the funeral.
‘Excuse me, love, you couldn’t top me up, could you?’
It was the plump woman from the church, still wearing her navy coat and looking as much a fish out of water as me. I obliged and she tilted her sherry glass towards me with a wary smile.
‘Cheers,’ she said, taking a sip. ‘I’m Pat, by the way. The daughter, for my sins…’
‘Karen,’ I said, offering her my hand, ‘I live just up the lane. I’m sorry for your loss.’
She gave me a slightly pained smile and I recalled my conversation with Jean at our housewarming: ‘she and Gordon don’t see eye to eye’. Something of an understatement, judging by the unease this poor woman clearly felt in what had been her childhood home.
‘Your mum seems to be coping well,’ I ventured. We both looked across to where Jean was sitting in a high-backed chair, chatting animatedly to the vicar, a glass of whiskey in one hand and a sausage roll in the other.
Pat gave me a look as if to say, ‘Well wouldn’t you?’ But I didn’t dare let on how much I knew – as objectionable an old tyrant as Gordon had been, I was conscious I was still at his wake.
‘I suppose… she… her… circumstances will change now…’ I added, delicately. ‘It’s a lot of house to deal with on her own.’
The knots in which English people will tie themselves, to avoid saying the obvious: your mother is old and frail. What are you going to do about it?
But Pat didn’t turn a hair.
‘She’ll not want to budge from here,’ she said. ‘Believe you me, I’ve tried.’
‘So what will… happen then?’
But Jean had tired of making small talk with the vicar and was making her way over to us. Perhaps she had risen to the occasion, perhaps she just brushed up well, but she seemed much more the woman I had first encountered – erect and beady, than the one Nick and I had found wandering unhinged and vulnerable that night on the lane.
‘I see you’ve met our Pat,’ she said, giving me what seemed a smile of recognition. ‘Pat, this is… no, don’t tell me…’ She clasped my hand to silence me and I held my breath.
‘… Karen. She and her husband bought the Marsdens’ old place two doors along. You remember the Marsdens, Pat?’
I could have punched the air. Not only did Jean remember who I was, she was a person again, cogent and engaged.
‘Yes, Mother, I remember the Marsdens,’ said Pat tolerantly, then turning to me in an undertone. ‘What did you pay for it, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Oh gosh, I’m afraid I don’t… my husband dealt with all that… why are you…? Is your mother thinking of selling…?’
‘No, I am not!’ Jean interjected in an indignant tone. There was nothing much wrong with her hearing either, it seemed.
‘Well now, Mum, let’s see how you go,’ Pat said. ‘I’ve a lot on my plate. I’ll be over when I can but I’ll not be able to drop everything if you fall and hurt yourself again.’
‘You cheeky wotnot!’ Jean said, mock indignation scarcely concealing her obvious delight that Pat would once again be back in her life, in however limited a capacity.
‘There are all sorts of modifications you can make, anyway,’ I said brightly. ‘Walk-in showers and stair-lifts and so forth.’
‘Oh, I don’t think that’ll be necessary,’ Jean said a little huffily and I felt myself blushing. ‘I shan’t be rushing into anything and besides…’
She looked over at the chimneybreast, where a framed wedding photo of her and Gordon took pride of place and for a horrible moment I thought she was about to wax lyrical about the home they had shared together.
‘My top priority will be getting rid of that horrible wallpaper.’