by Rebecca Tope
‘What are they made of?’ asked Thea.
‘Poles. In a triangle shape. Then you weave rope, or string, dried reeds – whatever – across to make a sort of bed. They used them for old people, or somebody who couldn’t walk. You can easily find it online, if you look.’
‘Alex, this is silly,’ said Linda firmly. ‘What would people think, if we dragged your father down the street on a thing like that?’
‘What does that matter?’ Alex spoke Thea’s own thoughts.
‘Oh, it doesn’t really. But honestly, darling, I don’t think it’s realistic at all.’
‘I have to admit …’ Thea began apologetically. ‘I’m not saying it’s impossible, from our point of view. But we would have to talk to my husband.’
A sense of losing control made her waver. She was letting Drew down, letting herself down. As for poor young Alex, she felt a complete traitor in her failure to support his idea.
‘No, no, I’m sorry,’ said the widow firmly. ‘Alex, I know I said it would be nice to include Sultan somehow, but not like this. We’ll all go back to the stables afterwards and get him something special.’
‘Then you’ll send him away, like Jocasta,’ the boy accused. ‘I know you will.’
‘I promise you I won’t.’
Thea knew she had been rescued, but felt no gratitude. This was descending into a bottomless hole of personal feelings that had no place in Drew’s office. ‘Um …’ she said. ‘Maybe we should walk down to the field now. It’ll take ten minutes or so.’
‘All right,’ said Linda quickly. ‘Good idea. Do I have to sign anything?’
Thea scanned her documents worriedly. ‘No, I don’t think so. I’ll write you a card with everything we’ve decided, if you hang on a minute.’
Alex eyed her scornfully. ‘If you put it all on the computer as we go, you could just print it out right away,’ he told her.
‘I suppose I could. But we’re not sure that’s the way we want to do things. It seems a bit too official, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said with a frown. ‘It should be official, shouldn’t it?’
The undertaker who had arranged Carl’s funeral had referred repeatedly to a computer screen at her elbow. Databases of available slots at the crematorium, ministers of religion, status of the body, and other arcane material had made the process seem painfully impersonal. There was a system and Carl had been slotted into it, regardless of who he had been and what he might have wanted. Only when Emily had put up a hand and taken them onto a different path had things changed. ‘Our brother will officiate,’ she had said. ‘And we will need more than the usual twenty minutes that you’re offering.’ After that, they had gained a better quality of attention.
‘Oh, hang on,’ Thea remembered. ‘I have to give you a written statement of costs.’ She pulled out another printed form and started writing. Drew had taken her over this part of the job with great care, more confident since having a lengthy session with an accountant, three months earlier. The key, he explained, was to ensure that every outgoing was included and then to add a clear three hundred pounds on top. ‘That’s our only reliable income,’ he told her. ‘In a lean week, with only one funeral, that’s what we’ll have to live on. But if we get three or four, we’ll be rich.’
‘Hardly,’ Thea had said, but she was amenable to the general principle. One funeral a week did not seem unduly optimistic, and indeed, in the first five weeks of opening they had notched up eighteen burials.
‘That’s the publicity,’ said Drew. ‘It won’t keep on like that.’
But Drew had found additional work in the area, officiating at cremations and giving talks to affluent Women’s Institutes. One had paid him two hundred and fifty pounds for an hour’s talk, including questions.
She started to explain her workings to Linda, who waved it all away. ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘He had very good life insurance.’
There was no answer to that, so Thea pressed on. ‘There’s nothing hidden behind vague phrases like “administration costs” or “overheads”,’ she said. ‘What you see is what you get.’
‘Great,’ said Linda Padwick. ‘If that’s how you want to do it.’
It was a long list, but Thea had all the figures to hand, and the total came to barely half that of a conventional funeral. ‘We don’t charge for the plot itself,’ she explained. ‘Because it doesn’t cost us anything.’
‘What about mowing the grass? Maintaining the hedges?’
‘Oh, Andrew does that. His salary is included in the costings.’
‘Andrew’s your husband?’
‘No, our employee.’
Linda leant forward, her interest snagged. ‘But how can you know what proportion of his salary to charge me? That can’t possibly work, surely?’
‘Er …’ said Thea, who had asked the same question herself not long ago, and failed to fully understand the answer. ‘We have to make a guess as to how many funerals we’ll do in a year and then divide it.’
‘A guess. I see.’
‘It’s standard business practice.’
‘Maybe it is. Well, let’s hope it’s a good guess, then. And I hope you’ve included all the extra bits of tax and insurance – stuff like that.’
‘Are you an accountant?’ Thea suddenly asked.
‘Not exactly. But I did part of the course, before I had the kids.’
‘Well, this is it, all done now.’ She handed the sheet over, and Linda took it.
‘Too cheap,’ she said firmly. ‘People will think they’re getting a substandard service if that’s all they’re spending.’
Carl’s funeral had cost almost four thousand pounds, despite having no additional cars or a fancy coffin. She had wondered ever since just where so much money could have gone. At the time, it felt like paying for capable hands, reassurance that all the protocols had been satisfied, leaving nothing for her to worry about.
‘Well, they’re not,’ she said. ‘We like to think of ourselves as an ethical business, only charging for services actually provided.’
‘You won’t last long like that. I don’t mean it unkindly, but I think you’re missing some tricks. I wanted to spend more. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s as if I owe it to Colin to pay out a lot of money. It’s the last thing I can do for him. There he was, trying to make my horse feel better, my horse who we all knew hated him – and what does she do? Goes and kills him, ungrateful beast. How am I ever going to get around that? I’m not, of course. But I want the funeral to be the best I can make it, and for that, rightly or wrongly, I need to spend a lot of money.’
Thea looked at Alex, sitting restlessly in the chair that was too big for him. ‘We’d better go,’ she said. ‘You’ll have lots to do.’
‘None of it seems very important. But Alex wants to go into school this afternoon for some reason. We’ll have a bit of lunch and then I’ll take him.’
Thea led the way along the street of Broad Campden, trying not to feel self-conscious. The villagers had mostly accepted the arrival of an undertaker in their midst without much complaint. But the occasions where a cortège, however modest, had crawled past their homes towards the burial field had not met with universal approval. Two or three people had made a point that they were not Wootton Bassett and had no wish to become known for funerals and death, however tasteful and ecological they might be.
‘They’ll get used to it,’ said Drew. ‘The Staverton people did. And we’ll bring them some business. The pub’s likely to do well out of us.’
‘That woman’s watching us,’ said Alex, nodding towards a window. There was a face staring out of a ground-floor room, the brow furrowed. ‘Do you know her?’
‘Not at all,’ said Thea. ‘I thought that house was always empty during the week.’
‘Maybe she’s a burglar, then,’ said the boy. ‘Although she’d be daft to show her face, if she was.’
‘Stop it,’ said his mother.
The field was down the small road leading to Blockley. Very little traffic used it, most of the time. At the insistence of the council, about a fifth of the field had been roped off as a parking area, leaving four acres available for burials. ‘That’s more than enough,’ said Drew bravely. ‘But it means we’ll have to have them in proper rows, which is a shame.’ At the Staverton burial ground, there were few straight lines, the graves scattered around at odd angles. The ground rose in gentle mounds there, and Maggs had created winding pathways. By contrast, the new one was much more regimented.
‘There are nineteen graves here so far,’ she told her customers, pointing to a corner where the first row had been situated. A few young saplings had been planted as markers, but essentially it just looked like a flat, square field.
‘How many will it hold altogether?’ asked Linda.
‘Well, in theory, about four thousand, but we don’t want to put them too close together. Quite a lot, anyway.’
‘That’s incredible! You’ll never find that many people wanting a place like this.’
Thea gave her a startled look. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
The woman reached for her son’s hand. ‘Alex, I don’t think he’d like this, would he? It’s … I don’t know. Just not right.’
The boy said nothing. Thea hurried to defend her livelihood. ‘It’s still very new. When there are lots of trees and rocks and paths, it’ll be really nice. It’s totally quiet and peaceful. We’ll be putting some seats in, as well. And maybe a building over there, if we can get permission.’
‘What kind of building? A chapel, you mean?’
‘Oh no. More like a pavilion, with a list of all the graves, and somewhere to sit if it’s raining.’
‘But you might not get permission?’
‘It’ll take a while,’ Thea admitted. ‘But I think we’ll get it eventually.’
‘I don’t like it. I’m sorry. I know it’s terrible of me. But it’s just so … bleak. Colin liked people, and noise and things. He’d want to be more in the middle of everything.’
Thea felt close to screaming. Obviously she had done something wrong. What had the stupid woman expected?
‘Well …’ she said helplessly.
‘Listen. I’ll pay you for the wasted time. I am really sorry. You must think me such a fool. But I can change my mind, can’t I? And you have helped me a lot. When I came to you this morning, I was just a mess. I hardly knew what I was doing. You got me thinking and talking more than I’ve done for days. You’ve woken me up.’ She laughed grimly. ‘And now you probably wish you hadn’t.’
There were many things that Thea wanted to say, ranging from a furious tirade about wasted time to a much more mellow acknowledgement that she too had woken up to a few things during the course of their conversation. She managed a stiff smile and a shrug. ‘Of course you can change your mind,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s irrevocable.’
‘A cremation would be,’ said Linda. ‘At least I’m sure about that. I’m not having him cremated.’
‘Can we use Sultan, then, after all?’ asked Alex.
‘Maybe,’ said his mother. She looked down at him, bringing her face squarely to his. ‘Maybe you know better than I do what we ought to do.’
‘No, I don’t. But I think he’d like a horse to be there. So he can forgive Jocasta for what she did. Sort of. I mean …’ he tailed off. ‘It wasn’t really her fault,’ he added.
‘Nor yours,’ said Thea boldly. ‘It was just an awful accident.’
‘Sometimes accidents feel like crimes, though, don’t they?’ Linda blinked away the sudden tears. ‘As if somebody somewhere did a wicked thing.’
‘Believe me, it’s quite different,’ Thea insisted, as much for her own reassurance as Linda’s.
‘It isn’t, though. He’s just as dead either way.’
They walked back, saying very little. Mother and son got into their car and drove off, with Thea watching them. She felt drained of energy, unhappy and obscurely ashamed.
‘I’m not doing that again,’ she told Drew when he came home. ‘Sorry, but that’s definite.’
‘But why?’ He was still trying to get to grips with the loss of a funeral that would have been good publicity for the business.
‘Lots of reasons. I don’t know whether I can explain, but it was more than I could manage. You never thought, did you, that it might bring Carl back? He was almost there in the room with us. At least – that wouldn’t have been so bad. But it was as if I was arranging his funeral all over again.’
‘Oh.’
‘And it would be like that every time. Like Groundhog Day, over and over, time after time.’
‘I don’t think it would,’ he argued mildly.
‘And when she said the field was bleak, that was like a punch in the mouth. I saw it through her eyes, for a few minutes. I don’t know if I can shake that image. I’d be scared that every family would suddenly change their minds, like she did.’
He went pale. ‘Thea … what are you saying? We’re in this together, aren’t we? I can’t run the business without you.’
‘You could. Andrew could do a lot more. But no, I’m not abandoning you. At least, I might be a bit. I want to get a job. Oh – and I think you ought to charge people more for the funerals. And get back to the council about that building we want.’
‘A job?’ he repeated. ‘What sort of job? Are you telling me you’re going to be out all day, every day? What about the children? Answering the phone? How would that ever work?’
‘Don’t panic.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘I don’t mean right away. Most likely it’ll be next year sometime. Just don’t ever ask me to arrange another funeral, okay. Everything else is up for discussion.’
He pushed her hand away. ‘And don’t you think that every time I do it, that Karen isn’t there in the room with me as well? The Karen I betrayed by burying her somewhere else – not where she wanted and expected to be? I have to work through that guilt every single time.’
Guilt – the old enemy. Even when there was nobody to blame, just as Linda Padwick had said, it felt as if somebody somewhere had done a wicked deed.
She hoped young Alex had been granted his wish, and that Sultan would find a role to play at his master’s funeral. You really couldn’t blame a horse, whatever dreadful thing it had done.
When Harry Richmond Sold His Cottage
It came as quite a nasty surprise to Harry to discover the great gulf between deciding to move house and actually accomplishing it. A multitude of people had to be confronted, their numbers burgeoning as time went on. His house – he preferred to think of it as a cottage – was unarguably desirable. As he understood things, almost everyone wanted a Cotswold cottage built from local stone in 1903. Garden. Views. Easy access to Cirencester and the motorway. But the phrase in need of modernisation was apparently a deterrent to buyers, despite everything in the building being perfectly functional.
So his shock was profound when after a whole month only two sets of people had shown even a glimmer of interest in buying it. The estate agent was an impatient young man festooned with gadgetry, who chewed his lower lip and repeatedly warned about the slackness of the market just now. The endlessly vaunted shortage of housing bore no relation to the desirability or otherwise of a three-bedroomed cottage in an area largely populated with the affluent and the retired. A young family could not afford it, and the rest might find it too isolated. ‘It’s a minority taste,’ said the young man rudely.
He was plainly puzzled as to Harry’s reason for wanting the sale in the first place. But Harry of course could not tell him. He could hardly even bear to rehearse to himself the details of the incident that was driving him out of the home he had loved. He turned his thoughts away from the blood that now tainted it. All he knew was the guilt that followed him night and day, from which the only possible escape was to go and live somewhere else.
But what if he couldn’t sell it? A month had already been far too lo
ng to wait. If there had been any choice, he would have gone to stay with a friend or relation. He would have rented a room in a small hotel, or taken a caravan to the Peak District. Instead he was forced to stay there, the guilt eating away at him. Surely, he demanded of himself many times, a normal person would have got over it by now. Instead it intensified day by day. Every item on the radio seemed to remind him. He would be caught unawares by a casual word and be wrenched back into his unhappy thoughts. It deprived him of sleep and gnawed at his self-respect.
One of the potential buyers was a young wife sent by her busy City financier husband to choose them a handy hideaway for weekends. She had three children under five, left in London with the nanny. Harry found himself feeling sorry for her when she came alone for a second viewing. ‘I’m sure to get it wrong,’ she said worriedly.
Harry’s habitually sympathetic manner quickly had the story pouring out – how they had so much money since Scott’s latest bonus that the only sensible thing to do with it was to buy another property. Somewhere safe and civilised for the children. ‘He says we should get a dog as well,’ she sighed. ‘He thinks an Irish setter would be nice. I have no idea what I would do with an Irish setter.’
Harry entertained a vision of a large dog digging up his garden and shuddered. ‘It would be a pity to keep such a big animal in London,’ he said. ‘I think they like to run free, miles every day.’ Privately he thought his cottage deserved better than occasional visits from an urban family who would have little idea how to make it feel loved, with or without an Irish setter.
‘I know,’ she said wretchedly. ‘But Scott thinks because I don’t go out to work I have all day to exercise a dog and teach a two-year-old his alphabet and keep in touch with all his relatives. And just for good measure, I’m to refurbish a country cottage in the latest style.’ She looked again at the narrow utilitarian staircase and the dado running around the dining room and sighed.
‘Three children, did you say? You might want a bigger garden, in that case.’