Christopher waited until Angela was in the bath before going out into the garden. He listened to the sounds of her washing herself, then pushed the terracotta pot aside. He took a chisel from the shed and levered up the flagstone. Using all his strength he lifted it, then dragged it and leaned it against the fence. He recovered the shoe box from the earth, dragged the flagstone back and dropped it into its place.
He took the shoe box into the shed and put it into the old brown shopping bag that his grandma had used daily for thirty years. He hadn’t been able to throw it away. There were indentations of her fingers on the leather handles. He hung the bag on the back of the shed door, closed it, then put the terracotta pot back in place.
He looked up at the bedroom: the curtains were shut. Angela was drying her hair. He could hear the whine of the hairdrier she’d brought with her and laid out on top of the chest of drawers, together with her jars and bottles and brushes and cosmetics. It had delighted him to see her mark her territory in his bedroom.
When Angela had dried her black hair and dressed herself, she went into the living room and stroked the spines of his books. When they had lived together seventeen years ago she had been surprised by the number of books he had brought home. Hardly a day went by when he didn’t produce a book from the pocket of the voluminous donkey jacket he wore to work. He spent most of his short lunch breaks in second-hand bookshops. She’d once laughed at him and called him, Jude the Electrician.
She looked along the top row: Beckett, Barnes and Bennett, stood next to Haggard, Heroditus and Hardy. She began to rearrange the books and put them into strict alphabetical order. When he came in and saw her he was moved almost to tears.
♦
There was a funeral about to take place at the Waterloo Road Cemetery. Christopher and Angela sat in her car and watched as a beetle-black hearse with a wreath-covered coffin inside drew up outside the arched door of the chapel. Behind, looming over the tiled roof, was the tall red-brick crematorium chimney from which grey smoke drifted. A muddle of gravestones surrounded them on all sides. In the distance a small mechanical earth digger dipped in and out of a rectangular hole, making a grave by removing dark brown earth and piling it into a heap at the side.
They had brought flowers with them: stargazer lilies. Their perfume was intoxicating in the confinement of the Volvo. A procession of cars drove slowly up the inclination of the drive. Angela felt Catherine’s warmth beside her but she couldn’t see or hear her.
“Catherine’s here, Chris,” she said. “Can you feel her?”
“No,” he said. “But I wish I could.”
Christopher watched as the man operating the digger climbed out of the cab and walked off among the gravestones in the far distance. He said to Angela, “Stay inside the car, Angie.”
He picked up his grandma’s bag from the back seat and got out of the car. He walked over the brow of a gentle hill and wandered amongst the ancient gravestones, looking for a resting place in consecrated ground for the little one he’d found in the ditch. He found a large enough niche under a crumbling statue of an angel holding a prayer book. He gathered bits of old masonry and piled them around the gaps until the bag and its contents were hidden.
He didn’t know what to say, apart from “Rest in peace, chick.” He stood for a few moments, memorising the location, though he doubted if he would ever return. A new life was beginning for him. There was only Catherine to say goodbye to now.
As he drew nearer to the car he could see that Angela was watching him anxiously. He hadn’t told her about the baby in the ditch. He wouldn’t now. It was a secret he would take with him to his own grave.
They waited until the mourners and the coffin had gone inside the chapel and the door had been closed. Then Christopher led Angela around the back of the building to a door which said ‘No Admittance’. They stood on either side of the door. They heard a man’s echoing voice, then music and tentative singing. “Are you cold, Angie?” said Christopher to her. He could see that she was trembling. He pulled her towards him, the orange pollen from the lilies he was carrying stained the front of her navy coat.
“Have you thought of what to say?” she asked him.
“Nothing good enough,” he said. “Have you?”
“No,” she said.
When they heard the car doors slamming at the front of the building and saw the mourners drive off, Christopher knocked on the door. It was opened by a young man with his hair in a pony tail. He was wearing a brown overall over his sweatshirt and jeans. He looked astonished to see them there.
“You want the other door,” he said.
“No,” said Christopher, pushing past him and pulling Angela with him, “this is the right place. Please, just give us one minute.”
It was hot inside the white painted room. At the far end, set into the wall was a glassed-in roaring bonfire; the incinerator.
Christopher and Angela walked up to it and laid the flowers at its base. Christopher said, “You’re our Catherine, and we’ll never forget you.” Angela closed her eyes and tried hard to summon up a picture of Catherine’s lovely face. She had it for a moment, but then it started to elude her and by the time they were leaving the incinerator room together it had gone.