by L. Smyth
I got out and, using Google Maps on my phone to guide me, began to trudge through the fields towards the village church.
Marina’s town wasn’t like the one I had grown up in. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between English country towns. On postcards and pop-culture they are often presented as unanimously quaint: a picturesque, nostalgic image of England, populated exactly half-and-half by ruddy-faced friendly farmers and betweeded gentry folk. But that’s obviously not how it is, and if you’re from the country yourself then the differences are easy to spot. The thatched cottages here weren’t flimsy and authentic in the way they were in my hometown. Here they were groomed, manicured. The walls were white and flat and clean, edged with sharp ledges of timber. Through the windows I glimpsed women in neat jackets with combed hair, standing next to large bowls of fruit, making animated gestures as they talked into their phones.
The church came into view.
I made my way up the hill, trudging over the bumps of the bank and neat stalks of hay. I began to feel anxious and doubtful. With every step I started to question my actions. I wondered whether other people from university would be at the funeral. Presumably Henry would be there.
This thought caused another strong wave of nausea. The wadge at the back of my throat reappeared. For a moment I thought about turning back, but then Marina entered my mind. I wanted to say goodbye to her. I wanted to pay my respects and feel the reality of her death. I wanted closure. I forced myself to continue until I saw the group of people outside the church.
They were expensively dressed, in clean dark overcoats that flickered like the pages of a magazine. I scanned across their faces to see if there was anyone I recognized. They all seemed to have the same complexion – polished skin, slightly snub noses – and their chins all had the same up-tilt, the same proud posture. They looked like they were waiting for someone to take their picture.
Among the crowd, I noticed a swooping a coat. It was a longer coat than the sort that the others were wearing, and the way it moved, sweeping to the right at the front of the congregation, carried the unmistakable trace of someone I knew.
Henry looked even smarter than I had expected. He stood in a stoop, talking gravely to a woman with bright red hair. His own hair was combed to the side, a black scarf was knotted around his neck, and his sharp, hollow features looked almost frighteningly stark against his pale complexion.
I watched him for a moment in the misty grey light. He crossed and uncrossed his ankles as he spoke to the red-haired woman, and his posture suggested, unusually, that he was nervous. He looked as though he were part of the group, but in a peripheral sense. I felt a sad, irrational sort of affection towards him.
Suddenly – as though intuiting my pity – Henry glanced in my direction and caught eyes with me. He looked away quickly, then immediately looked back. His eyes narrowed, his mouth pulled tightly downwards. I watched him murmur something to the red-haired woman and then, reluctantly, approach me.
As he neared my hands instinctively clenched into fists. My body shifted backwards.
‘Eva,’ His voice was sharp and aggressive. ‘Why are you here?’
‘I – was invited,’ I stuttered. ‘Elena emailed me the details.’
He shook his head briskly. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘It’s inappropriate.’
My cheeks burned.
‘What? How is it—?’
‘How is it not inappropriate?’
I didn’t know how to answer that. I stayed silent and stared at him.
‘Eva, your messages to me since the holidays have been insane. I can’t believe how insensitive you’ve been.’
I looked at him blankly.
‘Don’t you – don’t.’ He shook his head in frustration. ‘You know what I’m referring to – the conspiracy theories, the crazy insinuation that Montgomery … It’s indecent. You hardly even knew Marina.’
I said nothing.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ he continued, his voice raising a little. ‘Do you have any idea what the family are having to deal with? Do you have any idea what I am dealing with?’
I felt momentarily paralyzed with shock. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, I was so humiliated.
‘You barely knew Marina,’ he repeated, shaking his head. ‘You barely knew her. This is pathetic.’
A silence fell, and his mouth crumpled at the side.
Something about that word, pathetic, galvanized me. It was as though I could hear Marina saying it to me – you’re pathetic, you’re worthless, you shouldn’t be here – and that association made me want to defend myself. I bent my chin up towards him and looked him in the eye.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about with Montgomery,’ I said flatly. ‘If someone has been spreading rumours it has nothing to do with me. But … if I barely knew Marina, then why did you call me to help find her?’ I clenched my fingernails into my palm. ‘You called me, Henry. You directly sought my advice, and now you’re refusing to explain to me what happened. I’m sorry if my presence is making you uncomfortable, but it’s not pathetic to want to come to a funeral.’
‘Oh please—’
‘And it’s not decent of you to speak like this. It’s not fair.’ I had raised my voice.
Several people from the congregation were now looking in our direction. I could sense the judgement radiating from their faces, could hear their stunned pauses in conversation. Henry – perhaps sensing this too – ran his hand through his hair. He looked past me. There was a haunted, pained look on his face.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said quietly. ‘You don’t fucking understand.’
Now I could hear people murmuring under their breath in the distance. My eyes flicked up and I saw a stream of coats huddled in a circle. They were looking straight at us with wide, anxious eyes. One of them I recognized as Matilda Duke.
When I looked back at Henry I was startled by his expression. I had expected him to be calmer: yet instead all of his features looked incredibly sharp, incredibly angry. He moved towards me quickly
‘Eva you don’t—’
I grabbed his arm, whether as a reflexive defence mechanism or as a comforting gesture, I couldn’t tell. But Henry did not react either way. He did not flinch and he did not retaliate. His eyes fell to my fingers. Then they moved to my face.
‘What are you doing?’ he said tonelessly.
‘Tell me.’ I said. ‘Tell me what happened to her.’
He was staring at me.
‘Tell me why you got in contact with me at least,’ I said.
There was a long silence.
When Henry started speaking, the words came out quickly, as though he had no control over them.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I basically thought you might know something. I saw Marina a few evenings before … before she went back to Northam. She had taken a lot of drugs on New Year’s Eve. She told me some weird lies, and then she went missing. I thought you might know something about where she’d gone or whether there was truth in what she said. But as it was you didn’t know anything. You knew less than nothing.’
‘And you went back to Northam – on that morning? The morning she died?’
I heard someone calling to Henry then, and when I turned I saw the woman with red hair approaching. Instinctively my hands fell away from his arm.
‘I just thought you might know something,’ Henry muttered.
‘Henry,’ said the woman . Her skin was freckled and tanned. As she spoke her teeth jutted out over a thick bottom lip.
‘Marcus was asking after you,’ she said tartly. ‘Is everything all right?’
A tense silence gave her an answer. I felt the adrenaline of the confrontation wash away. The shame of the conversation dawned on me.
‘I’ll come now,’ Henry said.
The woman looped her arm through his and they turned to leave. I stayed where I was, and studied Henry’s long, slow walk. The sun was burning red in the wo
man’s hair.
My throat was dry with the effort of not crying.
I found a secluded spot at the edge of the church and stood there, watching the procession trail inside. I waited until the last person had gone in and took a deep breath.
Then I felt a broad, flat hand on my shoulder. It stayed there and squeezed.
‘Are you all right over here?’ A smooth voice. A man’s voice.
I turned my head slowly to look at my shoulder. There were slight, golden hairs along the knuckles. The fingernails were immaculately polished, a pentagon of fine squares. I followed the line of his lean wrist – leather watch, gold cufflinks – to the cuff of his shirt. Then finally I looked at his face.
He must have been about fifty, with long eyelashes, a broad brow, and hollow circles under his eyes. As I peered at him closer I noticed that they were green, with little pieces of gold in them.
‘I assume you’re a friend of Marina’s?’ he asked.
I nodded, unsure of what to say exactly. But his face was reassuring: gentle, kind, fatherly. I felt relaxed all of a sudden: whatever answer I gave, it would be OK.
‘Not from school,’ he said questioningly. ‘Perhaps from university?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We … were on the same course.’
‘Ah,’ he nodded and smiled. As he did so his mouth curved upwards, tilting into a sort of trapezium. The odd shape of it looked unnervingly familiar. He lifted his other hand. I saw that it held an unlit cigarette.
‘Well thank you for coming,’ he said, lighting it and taking a drag. ‘I’m Marcus, Marina’s father.’
So he was. I studied his face then, thinking of all the anecdotes Marina had told me about him. I thought of the time that he had accidentally bought a pair of red and yellow tartan trousers, having thought (because of his colour blindness) that they were navy and green. I thought of the time he had attempted an all-you-can-eat buffet on the afternoon before an important meeting with the Italian ambassador, and then vomited over his shoes. I thought of his other business blunders; his religious phases; his favourite phrases and witty epithets. My mind rolled back to the essays I’d read of his online; the barbed comments he’d made against other academics – against Montgomery. An inappropriate smile flickered across my mouth. I did my best to suppress it.
‘Eva,’ I replied.
We continued talking for a few minutes. He asked me about my journey down from Northam, in what specific contexts I had known Marina, what my experience of university had been like. Speaking to him was easier than I could have imagined – easier than I found appropriate, even, considering the circumstances of our meeting. He led the conversation with an easy confidence, a certain brashness, and in such a way that I didn’t feel as though I should tiptoe around the subject of Marina or her death. He told me that they were setting up a foundation in her name.
‘When the first event comes up we’ll be looking for volunteers,’ he said brightly. ‘If that’s something you’d be interested in.’
‘Definitely.’
As Marcus spoke I watched his mannerisms. The way that he tilted his head slightly to the right when listening, the way that he flicked his ash with a careless index, the way that his eyes curled at the sides as he smiled. That casual elegance – it all carried the ghost of Marina. I thought, impulsively, of asking him about what had happened to her on the night before her death.
Just as I opened my mouth Marcus began speaking again:
‘Well, we’d better get inside, I think they’re starting to sit down,’ he said, glancing at his watch. He took a final drag of the cigarette and then flicked it on the ground. ‘Please don’t tell my wife about this, by the way.’
‘No, of course not. I understand – it’s a difficult time.’
‘She hates me smoking,’ he said.
I noted a small but detectable sting of resentment in his voice, and hearing it caused me to reflect again on the weirdness of the conversation. Here was a mourning father at the funeral of his daughter, only weeks, I assumed, after she had been found dead. After she had committed suicide. How was he so composed? How was he even able to speak, let alone with such effortless joviality? Where was the rest of the family?
Perhaps it was a coping mechanism, I thought, as we walked into the church. He hadn’t yet had time to process the trauma. After the funeral he would fall apart.
I went through the doors and looked around the church interiors. It was taller, grander and more opulent than it looked from outside. There was a grand arch in front of the altar, and etched into the stone ceiling were a series of Latin quotes. A tapestry of religious scenes hung like a rectangular kaleidoscope along the wall. A huge stained-glass window at the end of the hall caused an explosion of colour when the sun passed through it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Henry again. He walked up to a brunette woman, took both of her hands in his, and kissed her cheeks. Then he did the same with a brown-haired girl and several other smartly dressed people. He bent forward to take his seat beside them.
I stared at him. Was that Marina’s family?
Just as I thought this, the brunette woman’s head swivelled towards me and she stared right into my eyes. Her eyes flashed – a glean of steel. They tracked from me to Marcus. Then back again. I recognized her: it was Elena.
I felt my breath catch in my chest. I felt the same panic, the same anxiety, the same worthlessness that I had when I had first arrived at Henry’s house on that day in October. I was out of place here.
She turned back to Henry, and made a very discreet pursing gesture with her lips. I slunk to the left into a seat near the back of the church. Somewhere I hoped no one would see me. Meanwhile Marcus strode ahead, nodded at Henry, and then sat down beside him. Once he was settled, Henry turned around again. His eyes studied me carefully. His mouth was pulled down in a tight, humourless frown.
How much did he know? What had he said to Elena?
As soon as the service was over, I thought, I would go home. I couldn’t stay here. I needed to leave, to extract myself from her life entirely. If I didn’t get out of there soon, someone would discover what I’d done.
The organ played. The congregation stood up. There was a low, rumbling sound from the back of the hall and then the sound of footsteps clacking on the concrete. The coffin came into view.
I turned my head to look at it as it passed the pew. I tried to take in the image, rest it in my mind, accept that she was in there. But I couldn’t concentrate properly. I couldn’t see the coffin even though I was looking directly at it. Even now, thinking back to that moment, I can only remember fragmented images: the wrists of the funeral bearers; the shape of their hats; the shadow of the white flower that lay still, calm and motionless, outstretched on the lid.
I felt entirely numb. My head swayed lazily, creating a weird sensation at the top of my nose. My hands gripped the wooden seat underneath me. The woman next to me turned, frowning and – upon catching my eye – then tried to disguise her distaste, offering a bland smile.
That smile caused me to remember something Marina had once said to me. We had been sat in my room one evening, watching a film, when a funeral scene came on screen. She’d rolled her eyes.
‘The thing about funerals that I can’t stand,’ she’d said, ‘is not the death element. It’s not the sadness of saying goodbye to someone. It’s how fake the whole thing is. Everyone’s trying so hard to look depressed. It’s so stiff and boring.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘When I die I just want to have a cardboard coffin, with the words ‘OH WELL’ painted on it in bright colours. Then I want someone to throw it into a fire, and dance around it. After that they can forget about me.’
That was the only time she ever spoke to me about death in a personal sense, as far as I remember. She’d made some general comments about it, in one of her virulent philosophical tirades – how she didn’t believe in an afterlife, how she thought religion was nonsense. Once she’d even hinted at the ‘interconnectedness�
�� of things, some vague hippie riff which sounded like it was possibly plagiarized from Spinoza. But she never said to me how it affected her, or how the idea of death made her feel. However flippant that comment had been, it offered at least some kind of insight into her frustration with the way that people behaved towards death; how they attempted to sanitize it.
As the coffin reached the front of the church, I wondered if that conversation had been a way of her trying to tell me something else. I turned it over in my head, trying to place exactly when it had happened. I tried to remember the exact words she had used.
The priest stood up. He walked quietly to the front of the steps, smiled unctuously, and began to recite a prayer.
‘We are here today,’ he spoke in low, resonant tones, ‘to celebrate. To celebrate the life of a girl who was known to, and loved by, all of us. Now she has been received into God’s arms …’
I shifted uncomfortably. It was so severe, so formal and austere the whole thing – so contradictory to everything Marina had been, everything she had stood for. The pointlessness of her suicide overwhelmed me. Marina’s atheist rants counted for nothing now. Marina’s personality and vibrancy meant nothing. She was nothing but a limp, lifeless body, and her life ‘story’ was nothing but that – a story. A story other people could tell, listen to and tinker with. A story people could use to push their own agendas, tell their own stories. Where was she to contradict them now? It was such a waste. She had made such a waste of it.
The priest now spoke some words in Latin which I didn’t understand. I felt a hot, numbing sensation at the back of my mouth. I tried hard not to cry.
Once the funeral was over I crept out of the church, careful not to make eye contact with anyone else, and especially careful to avoid Henry. I went back to my hiding place outside. Rain began to fall with increasing speed and density. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and jabbed at the screen. I googled taxi numbers.