Altered Life
Page 7
CHAPTER SIX
ON THE WEDNESDAY of the following week, I drove out to the church in Knutsford where Rory Brand’s funeral was to be held. I parked at a distance from the other mourners, feeling uneasy about turning up without a formal invitation.
The last funeral I’d been to was almost three years ago. When my father had been cremated there’d been a gathering of nearly a hundred people, each one of whom had something good they wanted to tell me about him. It hadn’t helped. I still remembered the bleak emptiness that had settled in my stomach that morning and took the best part of a year to ease away. Despite a couple of opportunities I hadn’t been to a funeral since, so this was a big test of commitment for me.
It was a barren, windy day and brown leaves swirled like lost souls up and down the pathways that criss-crossed the burial plots. When Laura Marshall rang to tell me the arrangements, she sounded confident and back in control, as though Brand’s death had been a minor derailment and not a major catastrophe. I wondered what it would take to get behind her calm, superior façade, to touch an emotion and make it bleed. But now I was here I found myself rather looking forward to seeing her again.
The church was a small gothic relic that was larger than it appeared from outside, its wooden support beams arching upwards into a roof that had been newly renovated, according to an exhibition panel inside the entrance. I sat at the back on a hard pew, next to people I assumed were friends rather than relatives. They shuffled along the bench, making space for me with those blank but sympathetic faces people reserve for public sorrow.
On the front row itself, I noticed a tall, elegant woman with red hair sitting next to a group of elderly people I took to be the inner circle of Rory’s family. Aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers. I’d been told his parents were dead. I guessed that the woman with red hair would be his wife, Tara. Several people around me cried quietly into handkerchiefs. Their sniffles were caught by the still air of the church and echoed on and on, becoming a mournful underlying soundtrack to the funeral.
A windswept lady vicar stood before us and smiled reassuringly. Her voice contained the calming banality expected in these circumstances, a rise and fall that soothed and put Brand’s death in the context of its equal and opposite, life.
‘Rory Brand was a man for all seasons,’ she said. ‘Talking to his friends and family, it’s obvious that there were many sides to this man: businessman, husband, playmate, friend. Everyone knew Rory for his energy, his willingness to take risks, and his ability to say, and do, the unsayable and the undoable.’
I looked around at the congregation. None of them seemed surprised by this description of the man they knew. Rory must have worked his charm on all of them at some time.
The vicar carried on in this vein for ten minutes, then introduced a young man, Brand’s nephew, who gave a short reading from a book of poetry. His voice cracked more from nervousness, I thought, than emotion.
Afterwards we sang a couple of hymns, then the pall-bearers stood and gently guided the trolley carrying the coffin back out of the church, like hospital porters performing one last duty with a stretchered patient. We stood and watched as it rattled out of the nave towards the huge wooden door, which was suddenly opened as the coffin approached, admitting a blast of cold air into the church.
At the end of the ceremony Tara, Rory’s widow, stood and turned into the aisle, walking towards me. She kept herself upright and her face almost completely still as she walked past. Though her eyelids were swollen and her cheeks raw, there were no tears in her eyes. Perhaps she’d gone past that stage. Perhaps she was focused on revenge, or the next business meeting. But her manner suggested that she knew we were all watching her. The rest of the congregation stood and began to shuffle out in rows. I also stood and waited for my turn. Laura Marshall was in the line, and she lifted her blonde head slightly towards me as she filed past, offering nothing with her eyes. Unlike Tara, she’d been crying. Her emotions had finally surfaced, but only at a time and place where they were sanctioned.
And I thought Tara Brand had managed the event quite well, given the shock she must have had. She’d held herself together, not giving way to loud tears or throwing wild tantrums. She was measured, calm, almost stately. She’d put on a first class performance.
After all, it’s not every day you attend the funeral of your second husband and turn to meet your first—me—staring at you open-mouthed with a look of disbelief on his face.