A Cotswold Casebook

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Cremation, I gather?’ said Christine, checking a card in her hand.

  The word had conjured appalling images for Thea – Carl’s flesh melting in the flames, inside a great gas oven. ‘That’s right,’ she said. She knew Carl would have preferred a burial, and initially that had been her intention, seeing herself perpetually visiting a grave in a charming little churchyard. But Jessica, their daughter, had been adamant that cremation was to be preferred. Damien, Thea’s brother, had gently explained the drawbacks of a burial. Damien was profoundly religious, but had no qualms about this means of disposal, and had offered to officiate at Carl’s funeral, which had given Thea some hours of conflict. Almost everything anybody said to her created inner conflict. The fact that it was Emily beside her at the undertaker, and not Jessica, was painful. Jess had been nineteen, quite old enough to deal with the questions and decisions. But she claimed to care nothing for the details, having won the argument over cremation.

  She heard a car arriving in their rural cul-de-sac, and went to open the door. Her shaking hands felt as if they belonged to someone else. She wasn’t going to be able to do it, she thought furiously. She was going to let Drew down, and serve him right. How could he not understand how hard this was going to be?

  Linda Padwick was devastatingly young. Mid thirties at the most. At her side was a boy, who looked about ten. Surely there was some mistake? Surely these were quite the wrong people, intending to go elsewhere, not bereaved at all.

  But they were. ‘Mrs Slocombe?’ asked the woman. ‘I’m Linda Padwick. This is Alex.’

  ‘Come in.’ Thea held the door wide, smiling inanely at the child. ‘We’re through here.’

  She led the way into the room that had been originally intended as a dining room, but which they had transformed into an office. It had its own phone, a filing cabinet and a matching set of upright chairs. There was a table, rather than a desk, and Thea carefully seated herself at a narrow end of it, to avoid facing her customers like a bank manager or head teacher. She remembered the sensation from her own experience, feeling like an applicant for a job or a troublesome student.

  Memories were being sparked repeatedly, quite beyond her control. Something in the young boy’s face reminded her of that hum of excitement that so shamefully intruded on the shock and misery and horror. To have a sudden premature death in the family made you special. It took you abruptly off the rails that you’d assumed were unalterable. People took notice of you. You were forced to learn how to do things you had never imagined. You had joined a club that was strange and exclusive and frightening.

  Seated at right angles to each other, they began the business in hand. ‘Thank you for coming to us,’ Thea said. ‘We do appreciate it.’ The presence of the boy was proving to be more inhibiting than she had expected. While having no objections in theory to his being there, his youth and vulnerability brought added reasons to be wary of what she said.

  ‘You will have been contacted by the Coroner’s Officer?’ she went on. ‘So you know it’s all right to proceed with making funeral arrangements?’

  Linda Padwick’s silence finally acquired significance. Three or four minutes had elapsed in which she had said nothing at all. She nodded slightly, her gaze on the table in front of her.

  ‘Mum?’ said Alex. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re not saying anything. You’re supposed to say something.’ He met Thea’s eyes. ‘She’s in shock, you see,’ he explained. ‘The doctor gave her some pills that would make her feel better. I think they stopped her talking.’ Anxiety flickered across his face. ‘Sorry,’ he finished.

  ‘That’s all right. There’s no hurry. We just have to find a day and time that would be good for you, and a few other details.’

  ‘Good for me,’ Linda Padwick repeated in a whisper. ‘Did you say “good”?’

  Uh-oh, thought Thea, resisting an urge to apologise. Let’s not start playing that game. ‘Yes, that’s right. I expect there’ll be a lot of people coming. We should try to fix a time that will suit most of them. Obviously, you can’t satisfy everybody’s needs, but on the whole Fridays are usually the best choice.’

  It worked very well. ‘All right, then. Have you got enough space for all their cars? Where exactly …? I can’t see the place where’ll he’ll be …’

  ‘Buried. No, you can’t see it from here. It’s about a quarter of a mile away. We can walk down there for a look, if you like. When we’ve finished up here.’

  ‘We joked about it, you know. Natural burials and all that. Everyone in my family has always been cremated.’ The new widow winced. ‘But that felt so …’

  This time Thea did not finish the sentence. There was nothing about cremation that made the experience any better or worse, in the long run. In the short run, it was probably easier. Certainly quicker, cleaner and less inescapable. She remembered flickers of resentment against Carl for being such a dedicated ecologist, ideologically committed to burial because it didn’t involve fossil fuels. It gave her enormous difficulty when it came to deciding between his wishes and their daughter’s. Eventually she took the line she thought was the more sensible. After all, a grave was a burden. Drew himself had discovered this when his wife had died; the resulting hypocrisy had shocked several people. Rather than interring Karen a few yards from his back door, he had used a much more distant cemetery. Now that he was living full-time in the Cotswolds, it hardly mattered, of course.

  She gave herself a shake. ‘All right, then. Shall we say Friday of next week? Is that too far off for you?’

  ‘What day is it today?’ It was a genuine question, and Thea felt no surprise.

  ‘Thursday. We could have it sooner, if you preferred that. Even Monday might be feasible, but most people will expect quite a bit more notice than that. We would bring him here in a day or so, and get everything ready. Have you any particular sort of coffin in mind? We can get woven willow ones, or a kind of cocoon made of felt. There are a lot of alternatives these days.’

  ‘Have you got somewhere cool, then? I don’t want him embalmed.’

  ‘We never do embalming. And yes, we’ve installed a cool room at the back of the house. You can come and see him any time you like.’

  ‘There’s been a post-mortem.’ Both women glanced at the boy, and Thea understood that his mother was growing much less confident of the wisdom of including him.

  ‘That’s no problem. It doesn’t leave any marks.’ A lie, of course. It left a grotesque line of black stitches down the length of the torso. But the scalp was replaced carefully and glued down. The face was almost always untouched.

  ‘The horse left marks,’ said the widow. ‘It kicked a hole in his chest. Broke his sternum and ruptured his lungs.’

  ‘Bloody thing,’ said Alex loudly. ‘I think it should be shot.’

  Thea cocked her head. ‘I don’t suppose he did it on purpose.’

  ‘She. It’s a mare. Dad never liked her.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ said his mother. ‘She’s gone now.’ Loss was stark on her face and Thea glimpsed a story that she might never be told. Husband and horse were both gone, and Thea understood enough of the processes involved to suspect that the two might become amalgamated in Linda’s emotions.

  ‘She was Mum’s favourite,’ the boy supplied helpfully. ‘Dad was trying to put some salve on a cut when she kicked him. She hated him, you see. And me,’ he concluded proudly. ‘Men infuriated her.’

  ‘Stop it, Alex. The lady doesn’t want to hear all that.’

  If only you knew, thought Thea. The image of a jealous horse lashing out at the well-intentioned man was filling her mind. It was so entirely different from the careless driver who had killed Carl that she relished it for that reason alone.

  ‘We’ll have a normal coffin,’ said Linda Padwick. ‘Plain, but solid. I don’t think he would have wanted anything newfangled. The felt thing sounds awful.’

  Privately, Thea rather agreed with her. S
he had only seen pictures of them so far, but they carried very little appeal. They were also hugely expensive.

  ‘I’ve got to fill all this in,’ she said, indicating a printed card on the table. ‘For the records.’ She proceeded to ask full name, age, occupation, address of the deceased. Mentally, she was checking off the remaining tasks, worried that she would forget something crucial. ‘Who do you want to officiate?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Somebody to take the service … I mean ceremony. To keep it together.’ She floundered. What were the right words? Drew had told her what to say, and it had flown out of her head. ‘We can find you any sort of officiant – humanist, for example.’

  ‘Won’t you do that? We don’t want any prayers or hymns or anything. None of that meant anything to Colin. Do we have to have somebody else? Did you say “officiant”? That’s a very odd word.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it? Well, no, you don’t have to have anybody. Drew can do it. Or a family friend. You can do absolutely what suits you.’

  Damien had done it for Carl, in the event. Enough people had insisted on a conventional church service for Thea to go along with it. They had sung two hymns, both of which she found herself soothed by in the event. ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ was a gem, by any measure. Words and tune had between them filled her with a few seconds of consolation. She had considered ‘Abide with Me’ for the solid associations that linked her with earlier times and thousands of other funerals. But after a lot of dithering, she had opted for ‘Now the Day is Over’ because it was full of the right sort of feeling. She had insisted on all eight verses, focusing intently on the words. She still remembered the lines: Comfort every sufferer/Watching late in pain;/Those who plan some evil/From their sin restrain. They made her imagine that Carl was still out there somewhere, helping to prevent bad behaviour, in her if nobody else.

  ‘We’ll just gather at the grave, then, and anyone who wants to can say something, and then we’ll just … bury him.’ Linda reached for her son’s hand. ‘Is that okay, darling?’

  The boy shrugged. ‘S’pose so.’

  He didn’t know anything different, Thea realised. It was unfair to ask him. And yet it was probably the right approach, making him feel involved, that nothing was being concealed from him.

  ‘Is he your only one?’ she asked Linda.

  ‘No, actually. He’s got two little sisters. They’re only four.’

  ‘Twins?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ Linda sighed, and rolled her eyes, and then, as Thea watched, remembered that these old habits might have to be jettisoned. Having twins had made her special for a while, but now she was additionally singled out in the eyes of the world. A young widow with three children. The twinness would fade into relative insignificance.

  ‘Will they be at the funeral?’

  ‘Oh, yes. They’ll never understand where their father’s gone otherwise, will they? I don’t believe in lying to children.’

  ‘No,’ said Thea, thinking of Drew’s Timmy, and how losing a parent was never going to be all right for anybody under the age of about eighteen. And even then … ‘Alex, you have some idea what’s going to happen, have you?’ She asked the question out of concern at the look on his face. She had seen fear, anger and bewilderment. All entirely to be expected, but surely her job was to try to assuage them.

  ‘He’s going to be put in the ground. Buried. In a coffin.’

  ‘That’s right. And the grave will always be there for you to visit any time you want to.’

  ‘Mmm. Except I can’t drive, can I? So how would I get to it?’

  Thea waited for the boy’s mother to state the obvious. Instead she said, ‘You won’t want to, though, will you? What would be the point?’

  ‘I might.’ Both fell silent, the air between them brittle.

  ‘You know what some people do?’ Thea suggested, much too brightly. ‘They write a little letter and put it in the coffin. Nobody else would read it, so you can say whatever you like to your dad, and it’ll stay there with him for ever. Your sisters could maybe draw pictures for him. Or you could find some photos.’ Help me here, she silently ordered the woman, with a pleading look.

  Linda Padwick gently shook her head from side to side, and her eyes rolled up towards the ceiling for a moment of sheer exasperation. ‘All this mumbo-jumbo,’ she said. ‘What earthly good does it do? I just wish we could have it all finished and done with.’

  Her remarks were at least getting lengthier, Thea noticed. And she was showing a lot more vitality than at first. Whether or not this was a good thing remained unclear. There was an implication that Thea was getting it wrong, saying too much, making assumptions. This woman was not here on a social visit. They were never going to be friends. It was a business transaction, and any straying off that path carried all kinds of risk.

  Linda’s remarks had not gone down at all well with her young son. He looked hurt and embarrassed. ‘I might do a letter,’ he said uncertainly. ‘But I don’t know what to say in it.’

  ‘Oh, Alex,’ moaned his mother. ‘There isn’t anything to say, is there? Just that you’ll always remember him, I suppose. You’re old enough now not to forget him. Not like the girls. You know what he was like, what he thought about things. We’ll all have to get used to getting on without him. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘The girls won’t forget him. I won’t let them.’

  ‘Good. That’s good. We’ll be okay, sweetie.’ She reached over and put an arm round his shoulders. He tolerated the embrace like any boy of his age: not quite old enough to push it away, not quite young enough to see it as his due. Thea could not decide how damaging it would be for the boy to be so abruptly deprived of his father.

  Linda was fully engaged with the child, forgetting where she was and why. ‘At least we know he didn’t do it on purpose. Leave us, I mean. Not like some fathers we can think of – right? He didn’t mean to go. It was a horrible accident, and there’s nobody to blame for it.’

  ‘Jocasta’s to blame,’ he corrected her. ‘She did it.’

  ‘Yes, but she didn’t know what she was doing. It was all instinct. He must have touched a sore place and she just kicked out automatically. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ She raised her eyes to meet Thea’s. ‘He was squatting down, you see, right beside her leg. At least, that’s what we think. We didn’t find him for a while, but there was a camera that caught most of it. The stables have got CCTV. Well – they all have it these days. I haven’t been able to watch it yet, but my dad had a look and says it’s all there, pretty clear. He bled internally. It was too late when someone went to look for him.’

  It was a compelling story, and Thea was suitably compelled. Nothing whatever like her own Carl’s fate, then. He had died instantly, like a lightning flash, in which he could not possibly have known what was happening. This Colin Padwick had lain there in pain and fear and solitude until he died. Had the horse turned around to see what she’d done? Had she nuzzled worriedly at him, or stamped on him again in triumph? What degree of loathing had she really felt for him? Was it nothing more than an anthropomorphic theory?

  ‘How awful,’ she said weakly.

  Linda made a grimace of agreement, still holding the boy. ‘Oh, well. Is there anything else we need to do here?’

  It felt as if they’d barely started. Surely there had to be a whole lot more to be arranged. It had taken her and Emily at least an hour to go through everything with the undertaker when Carl had died. This woman had arrived barely twenty minutes ago. ‘We still haven’t established the exact time,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, probably afternoon. Say three o’clock? That should give people time enough to get here. There are some cousins in Lincolnshire, and an old friend in Suffolk. They’ve all got busy lives like us.’

  Thea looked again at her card, with most of the boxes already filled in. The Padwicks lived near Stanton, she noticed. She remembered Stanton from the Christmas before l
ast. It had struck her then as a horsy sort of place. Riding stables and all that sort of thing. Accidents must be a regular part of that way of life, surely. Falls and kicks and bites – big volatile animals with far too little brain-to-strength ratio. Thea had never greatly liked horses, and certainly never trusted them. It was only a matter of time before a great hoof came through her car windscreen, she believed. The little roads were full of the damn things.

  ‘Yes, that sounds fine,’ she said, writing the time down in the appropriate slot. ‘We’ll meet at the graveside, then, shall we? We’ll leave from here with the coffin – you can follow if you want to, of course. Make a procession of it.’

  ‘Can’t we use Sultan?’ Alex asked, his head raised in alarm. ‘You said we could bring him.’

  Thea waited, pen poised.

  ‘Oh, darling. That would be such a business. I don’t know how it would work.’

  ‘Well, ask then,’ he urged her, sounding very adult.

  Linda sighed. ‘Sultan is – was – Colin’s horse. He’s a great big hack. Quite an ugly thing, really. Alex thought he might be able to pull the coffin on a cart, but he’s never done that. It wouldn’t work at all. Sorry, lovey, but I don’t think he can come.’

  Thea tried to visualise some sort of role for the horse. She recalled images of funerals with horse-drawn hearses, black plumes and glass sides to the vehicle. As far as she knew, there had never been any such provision made by Drew for any of his customers. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘We could think about it.’

  ‘We could make a travois,’ said Alex. ‘He wouldn’t mind that.’

  Both women stared at him.

  ‘A what?’ said Linda.

  ‘It’s a thing the native Americans used. We’ve been doing it at school. They’re easy to make. We could put Dad on it, and Sultan could pull it.’

  ‘Never heard of such a thing,’ said Linda. ‘What makes you think the horse would tolerate it?’

  ‘He would,’ insisted the boy. ‘He’d hardly even notice it.’