37

We would have been the last members of the family to see her, though she, of course, had not seen us.

The hospital telephoned early the next morning to say she had died during the night. Mr Radley seemed to take the news worst of all: for the rest of that day he sat in the armchair, staring out of the sitting-room window and biting his lip, absorbed in his own thoughts. When I brought him a sandwich at lunchtime he looked at me as if I was a total stranger, before saying, ‘Thanks, Birdie, leave it on the table,’ where it stayed untouched until I cleared it away in the evening. This surprised me. I’d never put him down as a man of deep feeling where other people – real people – were concerned. He could work himself up into a lather of sentimentality over long-dead strangers – names on the Vimy memorial, for example – but he tended to step over beggars in the street.

Lexi, meanwhile, was in organisational overdrive: hospital, registrar, undertaker, solicitor, crematorium, all were being treated to her curious blend of tyranny and charm.

The funeral would only be a couple of days away. There was no need to delay: there were no distant friends or relatives to be rounded up, and the crematorium was very accommodating. Apparently death has its favoured seasons, and business was slack in August.

‘Well, people are off on their holidays,’ was my mother’s interpretation of this statistical quirk.

My granny took a great interest in the details of Auntie Mim’s death. ‘I’ll be next,’ she said, ‘thank God.’ Ever since I had known her she had been predicting her imminent demise with complacency. She was only seventy-eight, but her blindness had limited her activities cruelly and she was as bored with life as any ninety-year-old. ‘Did she leave anything?’

I said I didn’t think so. Legacies were another of Granny’s long-standing obsessions. She used the necessity for scraping together an inheritance for my mother as an excuse for a miserliness which was becoming ever more ambitious and eccentric. Lately she had taken to saving and washing out the flimsy plastic bags in which the butcher wrapped raw meat. She had rigged up a piece of string in the kitchen on which to dry them, and they would hang there like damp little ghosts. When dry they were consigned to a drawer until the day dawned that a purpose could be divined for them. Even when her eyesight had failed she insisted on darning laddered tights. My mother had to supply her with a threaded needle, and she would sit at the kitchen table, a grapefruit forced into the toe of the holey stocking, creating a very tangly piece of mending indeed, cursing and yelping as she jabbed herself, but inwardly delighted to be saving forty pence.

By some unfathomable method she had calculated the cost of her share of the food mother served her each week to be £2.67. There was no quarrelling with such a precise figure. Every Sunday, just as mother was dishing up the roast she would stump into the kitchen and decant just this amount, coin by coin, from her purse to the table, while mother would sigh and tutt and pound the potatoes to a mush.

I was wrong about Auntie Mim. She had left her jewellery – none of it especially valuable – to Frances, £1,000 to Clarissa and the rest, which would be about £90,000, to Lexi.

‘Did you know she had any savings?’ I asked Frances on the way to the crematorium. Rad was driving us: Nicky and Frances were in the back. The adults – Mr and Mrs Radley, Uncle Bill and Auntie Daphne were in the Renault. Clarissa and her mother, Cecile, and, separately, Lawrence, were coming by taxi. There were no limousines.

‘She sold her cottage before she came to live with us, so I suppose I knew she must have something. I never really thought about it. She always looked so poor.’

‘It’s the looking rich that costs the money,’ Nicky pointed out. The atmosphere in the car was cheerful: it was ridiculous to mourn the death of a ninety-three-year-old, Rad said. We should be happy she lived so long. This was the best sort of funeral, Nicky agreed, as if he was a connoisseur: one where you could give someone a good send-off without feeling too upset. Frances leaned between the front seats and switched the radio on. We were all under twenty-one. By the time our turn came someone would have discovered a cure.

Inside the chapel the eleven of us managed to fill the first two rows by spreading out a little. Lexi was in any case taking up as much space as two normal people on account of her outfit – a black jacket with huge shoulder pads, a peplum, a tight black skirt and a wide-brimmed hat smothered with quivering ostrich feathers. Frances herself had had to be restrained from wearing the bequeathed pearls. She made Nicky sit next to Cecile who was wearing a fox fur. ‘I don’t want to brush up against that dead thing,’ she said loudly.

The service was over in a quarter of an hour. Lexi had instructed the chaplain not to go on too long. ‘She was ninety-three, so for heaven’s sake let’s keep it brief and jolly.’ There was no music – there weren’t enough of us to carry a hymn, and the Radleys weren’t keen singers. The chaplain rattled through the order of service at a jaunty pace. It’s not easy to say ‘We come into the world bringing nothing, and we take nothing with us when we go,’ in an optimistic voice, but he managed it. He gave the eulogy, using the biographical details furnished by Lexi, with such conviction that by the end of it I was almost ready to believe that he would miss Auntie Mim as much as those of us who had actually met her.

Outside the chapel our few floral tributes had been placed on the grass for our inspection. The lady funeral director had told us we could take them home with us if we liked. ‘If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have ordered a wreath,’ Cecile complained. ‘I’d have got something that would have done as a table decoration.’

Clarissa was admiring Lexi’s outfit. ‘I like the peplum. Very skittish.’

‘Oh do you?’ Lexi smoothed it down over her hips. ‘I don’t know if it’s me. I’ll probably take it back – unless someone dies in the next day or two, of course.’ And she gave a throaty laugh. It was the only time I ever heard her attempt a joke.

There were drinks and snacks back at the house. Cecile, on account of her seniority perhaps, was allowed a glass of sherry. Everyone else was on orange juice. Lexi had bought some boxes of ready-made cocktail snacks which were tipped on to plates and handed round.

I noticed that the miniature photograph of Auntie Mim’s One Great Love was now on top of the bureau with the other family pictures. I decided to test Lexi out. ‘Who’s this?’ I asked, as she passed me holding aloft a plate of cheese straws.

‘Marigold Bray,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘She was Auntie Mim’s girlfriend. Lovely, isn’t she?’ And she whisked off again. Cecile, a more enthusiastic purveyor of tittle-tattle, had been listening to this exchange and swiftly moved into the space vacated by Lexi.

‘She was a lesbian, you know, when she was younger,’ said Cecile, as if it was a hobby one grew out of. ‘She had a sort of relationship with another teacher at the school where she worked. She was only in her twenties then. Did you know she used to teach? Yes, cookery. Impossible to believe, really, considering.’

‘So what happened then?’

‘Her parents found out and had her put in an institution. She was in there for six months and when she came out she was completely cured. Mind you, she never married. And do you know, it was from that time on that she ate nothing but potatoes and sprouts. Isn’t that curious?’

‘She was not “cured”, she was completely crushed.’ Lexi had re-entered the room and overheard the last part of our conversation. ‘I shudder to think what they did to her in that place. She never worked again for the rest of her life.’ The room had fallen silent during this exchange. Everyone was listening.

‘What did she live on for the next seventy years?’ I asked.

‘She went back to live with her parents and they kept her until they got too old, and then she looked after them. Her older sister – Mum’s mum – had already married and moved to Belgium, and Mim was condemned to be a maiden aunt from the age of about twenty-five. They never had any visitors, and never went anywhere, so she had no chance of meeting anyone.’

‘Why did she only eat sprouts and potatoes?’ asked Frances, who had caught up by now. ‘Is that all they fed her in the loony bin?’

Lexi tutted. ‘I don’t really know. Before she was put away she’d been a teacher, and a really beautiful cook, apparently. I think it was her way of showing her parents that they’d damaged her.’

‘Why didn’t she and Marigold tell them to sod off?’ said Frances.

‘Children respected their parents in those barbaric times,’ said Mr Radley.

‘She didn’t have it in her to rebel,’ said Lexi. ‘And her teaching career was over – it was much harder for women to be independent.’

‘I wish I’d known all this while she was alive,’ said Frances with indignation. ‘I’d have made more effort to take her out and show her a good time.’

‘You mean down at the tattoo parlour, or trying on the make-up in Miss Selfridge?’ said Rad.

Frances ignored him. ‘Why didn’t she get out and do something when her parents had died?’

‘She was about fifty by that time.’

‘That’s only the same age as you, and you’re not too old to go out and have fun.’

‘She’d probably lost the knack by then. Self-denial can become a habit like anything else.’

‘My wife is an expert on self-denial, as you all know,’ said Mr Radley.

‘Now I think about it,’ Lexi went on, talking over him, ‘she once told me that after her mother had died she did try to trace Marigold, and eventually found that she’d gone to live in Kenya. That would have been thirty years after they’d lost contact, and Auntie still hadn’t got over her.’

‘Well, I’ve always said that love lasts longer if it’s frustrated,’ said Clarissa.

I glanced automatically at Rad, and was treated to one of his sardonic looks. Beyond him, unnoticed by anyone else, Lawrence was staring straight at Lexi.