Until the funeral itself I find it impossible to absorb that Birdie is dead. I have cried, of course, often, and I have willed myself to understand, but there is a degree of detachment about my grief. I feel as though I’m somewhere deep inside my own body, awaiting excavation: nothing that this body does is real any more. It’s too early to miss her, to realise at any but the most superficial level that I’ll never see her again however much I want and need to, that I will grow old and die myself, and still won’t have seen her, that everything else will carry on except Birdie.
I am not strong enough to break the news to father. He hears it first from mother, who has surprised me by crying great rending sobs herself and arranging for special prayers to be said at church. My father comes home to comfort me and be comforted. We sit on the bench together in the garden, surrounded by the scent of dying roses and the whirring of bees, and talk. He seems absolutely stricken by the mention of Half Moon Street. Mother hasn’t passed on this detail in her account.
‘You used to meet Val there, didn’t you?’ I say. We don’t look at each other as we talk, but straight ahead across the lawn.
‘Yes,’ he says quietly. ‘I wanted you to see the place because I knew you’d like it, not because it meant anything to me. It was wrong of me to take you there.’
Mother brings us tea but otherwise allows us our privacy. ‘I must write to Valerie tonight,’ father says, thinking aloud. Composing such a letter of condolence will almost break him, I know, but even this penance is preferable in his view to a personal visit.
When it is time for him to leave, mother comes out to say goodbye. ‘Thank you for the money,’ she says, referring to some transaction of the week before.
He waves away her gratitude. ‘If you need any more …’ They walk up the garden, slightly ahead of me. ‘The roses must have been good this year.’ He has missed the best of them.
‘Yes. I’ve been ignoring the hose ban,’ says mother. ‘Unfortunately the lawn keeps growing.’ She draws a parting in the long grass with the toe of one shoe.
‘Would you like me to cut it while I’m here?’ asks father, pleased to be useful, and even more pleased with himself for recognising the cue.
‘Would you?’ says mother. ‘That would be wonderful.’ And within seconds father is struggling out of his jacket and making for the shed, and mother is putting an extra chop in the casserole. I don’t know whether it is grief or guilt or a need for comfort that effects this reconciliation, or what unwritten contract is drawn up in the privacy of their room, but father doesn’t go home that night, and only returns to his grim little bedsit the following day to collect his belongings and take a last thankful look through that nailed-up window on to the eviscerated garbage bags and broken down bikes in the alley below.