by A. M. Castle
The rest of it isn’t so great. My eyes seem to have shrunk from crying, while the lids are as puffy as the vol-au-vents which are already standing in serried ranks downstairs in the kitchen for the wake. Well, reception. Or aftermath? Whatever you want to call the ghastly gathering after the funeral, where we will all chat awkwardly until the alcohol kicks in. Then the laughter will suddenly ring out too loudly and we’ll be embarrassed again.
Meanwhile, my children are in pieces and my mother-in-law has barely spoken since it happened. Because of the delay, you’d think things would be less awful. They’re absolutely not. By the time we get to the crematorium, I feel as though I’m floating about a foot above the scene, or six feet below it.
Jill’s arm is round my shoulders, mine round hers, as we progress slowly up the aisle. The children sleepwalk in front of us. It’s like a negative of my wedding photos, all that white tulle and hope swapped for black and nasty pine veneer.
Patrick is already here, as arranged. We meet at the top of the aisle, just like we did before. But this time I slide into my pew, leaving him in lonely splendour on his dais. The shiny coffin nailed down hard over his smart suit. Goodbye, my love.
I planned the service down to the last word but after it’s over I couldn’t tell you a thing that was said, done or sung. I know the pieces complemented him, and our life together, and celebrated our children, our finest achievement by far – and I know they did the trick because I could hear the sniffs behind me from the congregation. Giles and Em too, they snuffle on either side of me, tiny soft creatures again, needing all the protection I can give them. Jill is on the end of the pew, back ramrod straight, knuckles white on the shivering service sheet.
It feels right to be here, instead of in a church. We’ve only ever been fair-weather members of any congregation, only there for the jolly bits, not slogging it out every Sunday. The kids aren’t at church schools so, to put it bluntly, there’s been no need. The last time we were in one was probably Em’s christening, at Jill’s urging. She was too shattered to insist that we hold the funeral there. I’d feel bad about this awful municipal solution to Patrick’s death, but I really don’t have that much emotion to spare. I’m sure God, and Jill, have worse things to worry about.
As far as I know, Patrick had never given a thought to all this – death and the rigorous tidying away it requires. But he would have enjoyed being centre stage, all eyes on him. People often say that, and I’ve thought how discordant it sounds, yet today it’s true. The full rows of friends, neighbours, distant relatives and vague acquaintances who have turned out for him. And quite a number of attractive women sobbing. That would have tickled him. He loved to cause a stir. If he’d been here, he’d have been so busy, up and down the aisle, a handshake there, a kiss, a look, a word. And turning, now and then, to give me that wink.
I think about him as the recorded organ music starts up. It was loud and rousing during the hymns, filling out the gaps where we all blundered, after the first couple of familiar lines. I muttered along for form’s sake, while Giles and Em were hardly audible. What do you expect? They don’t do proper hymns anymore at school, even the posh places like theirs. If they sing, it’s all about dolphins, not Dear Lord and Father and forgive our foolish ways. Jill’s voice was husky, catching on cigarettes and grief.
Now, the organ sound dribbles away, mild and meandering, ushering us out of the crematorium and onwards, to the rest of our lives. We shuffle obligingly to our feet when the celebrant, whose eulogy for Patrick gave new meaning to the word bland, gestures for us to go first. Once again, it’s a wedding march, except now Patrick is being left behind forever.
On the way back down the aisle, where once I grinned from ear to ear, my veil thrown back, ring gleaming on my third finger, my prize the wonderful man on my arm, now I walk uncertainly with Giles and Em, glancing quickly at the friends and colleagues who don’t know whether to smile or not. There’s Patrick’s university friend, they shared a flat back in the day, after graduation. A group from our old firm – it all seems so long ago now. A few more recent clients – I dread the chats to come. The miscellaneous blondes – my gaze skates over them and they busy themselves with bags and tissues, darting out of my view like a shoal of silvery fish. And there’s Jen, kind and lovely Jen. Still gorgeous. Still with that idiot Tim. She gives me such a lovely smile. Ah, Stacy Johnson, my best friend, right in the middle of a row. She’s in bits. Of course she is. I try not to catch her eye. I really can’t afford to set myself off again. I need to hold it together.
Then, in the last pew, I do a double take. The little policewoman. Not in uniform, but I recognise those bold, beady eyes, running over my face. She’s wearing a hoody and jeans. Not even black. Is nothing sacred? What is she doing here? It was bad enough that evening, her stare. But at my husband’s funeral? I hope the children haven’t seen or recognised her. I press them closer to me. Her gaze follows me as I pass. I do a mental tut. Here? Really?
And I swish on out, the flawless skirt of my black crepe dress flowing around my legs.
Chapter 7
Then
By my second day, I’d found a skirt that was within shouting distance of my knees, and I listened like an over-eager schoolgirl, lapping up everything Jen told me. Not that I needed much help to work out how the great bank of phones worked. Yes, it looked like something Lieutenant Uhura would have sat in front of in Star Trek, but I had mastered it in minutes. At least it wasn’t the olden days, when you had to plug in little wires and make a cat’s cradle, physically joining one call to another. That might have given me pause. Now it was just the flick of a switch.
Reception was all about smiling, really. The name said it all. Receiving people, welcoming them, looking them right in the eye. And pacing yourself so you didn’t feel as though your face was going to split after the first half-hour.
Where had I got the training for this? Ushering friends into our home? Ha. Don’t make me laugh. It had all been about keeping people out. ‘The busies,’ my mother called them. Not just the police. Social workers, top of the list. Then all the other undesirables. Relatives, not that they bothered much. Mum had successfully alienated all of them. Various complex grudges that I never really got the hang of, though I suppose everything boiled down to money and sex in the end. Women friends were the same. Sometimes she’d shout about it all, depending how far down the bottle she was. I learned to block out the noise. Then there were the more obvious no-nos – ex-boyfriends, retribution on their minds. Money lenders, occasionally. And, more than once, the bailiffs. Hard to stop them, though, after they’d stoved in the door. All of the above could fit more than one category, a Venn diagram with more circles than hell.
So my instincts were to curl up, protect myself, hide from the light. But I was desperate for this to work. So I learned. And soon, I blossomed. Not in a showy way. Concealing my feelings was one of the very few transferrable skills my upbringing had given me. But I could pin on a smile brighter than the chrome of my fancy office chair when I had to. And I felt so much more at home at that desk, than I ever had anywhere else before. Including my actual home.
Partly, that was because of Patrick.
I couldn’t have told you what it was about him that clicked with every bit of my DNA. But it was as though a key had been turned, somewhere. Like a Chinese puzzle, my shrivelled heart was now open, ready to be trashed. I distrusted the feeling. Protected myself as best I could. But it was no good. I didn’t know his name, which floor he worked on, or anything else about him. Yet I was already his.
As it turned out, the more I found out, the more I loved the idea of him. Or just loved him. I asked Jen, all casual, as soon as the lift had swished closed on him that morning, but of course she was no fool. Immediately, she warned me off.
‘He’s a bit of a player, Louise. You need to be a bit careful there. I’d think again, if I were you.’
Whether it was genuine concern for me or not, I neither knew nor cared. All i
t did was make me keener. If that were even possible. Though those words of hers would come back to haunt me.
Chapter 8
Now
Louise
As I glide around town, going about my business, I’m used to feeling eyes on me, tracking me. As often as not, I look up at some man and shake him off with the force of my indifference. I’m a widow. I’m in black. Are they sick?
But sometimes it’s a woman and then I wonder. Was she one of them?
I wonder about Patrick and about how many there were, before there was one too many.
Because Jen was right, he was a player.
I sometimes wondered if she knew this from the outside in, or whether she had once been one of his, shall we say, playthings herself. I never asked her, and she never admitted as much. But the strength of my love for him made me preternaturally aware. I used to think I’d be able to spot a woman who wanted him at thirty paces, and certainly sniff one out if I was sitting next to her.
But whatever might or might not have been between them was history by the time I arrived and slid behind the marble desk. If I’d been Jen, I wouldn’t have liked it, the way he started to flirt with me. Even if they had never really been an item, it was asking her to play gooseberry in an outrageous way. And if they once had been together, well, then it was insensitive in the extreme. But what can I say? That was Patrick.
The girls I see now are Patrick’s type: self-contained and sleek. They look sophisticated, aloof. They are basically just like me, but annoyingly they are ten to twenty years younger. Of course, I have no proof. And it’s so much better, so much more dignified, to turn a blind eye.
I got very used to doing that, so keeping going is no stretch. Carving out a new role for myself as a widow is much more difficult. I no longer fit into anyone’s dinner party plan. I’m an extra even for drinks, and there’s always the possibility that I might bring down the atmosphere, be sad. Weep, even. Good gracious. Or, worse still, I won’t be sad enough, won’t live up to everyone’s image of what grief should look like, how long it should last, how deep it should go. Everyone has a view about how a woman like me does things.
As usual, I’m playing a part and it’s tiring. But I don’t really care, at this stage my life has had more costume changes than Madonna. What I do care about is my kids.
People ask me why we don’t move. ‘A change of scene, that’s what you all need, it’ll be good for Giles and Em.’ To me, that seems ridiculous. Patrick will still be with us, wherever we go. He’s an inescapable fact of our lives. The centre of everything, even if he’s no longer there. So I’d rather stay here, in the home we built together.
I’ve written letters to the school, I’ve got the kids sessions with a counsellor, I’ve put photos in their rooms of their dad looking his best, and I’ve put a big one of Patrick in the kitchen, looming over us, even though I love my clear surfaces.
It won’t bring him back, nothing can or will. But it means that the children feel that, unlike Elvis, Patrick hasn’t quite left the building.
Chapter 9
Then
There’s no accounting for taste, is there? I wouldn’t have swapped my shiny marble desk for a thousand beach bars and all the sun in the sky, but the dozy girl I was replacing decided to stay on in Malaga or Portugal or wherever. I was overjoyed when they made my job permanent.
That left me and Jen, smiling serenely through our days. We were like the figureheads on a ship in full sail. Then the wind suddenly dropped. The company was in the doldrums and there were whispers in corners about economy measures. The talk was of a cull, of people being ‘let go’ from all departments. It terrified me, that expression. I would be in free fall if I had to leave, I knew that. This place was my only solid ground. I dreaded getting the tap on the shoulder.
Jen had been with the firm for two years and didn’t want to move on either. But by now, we had an even flashier phone system, one which was a nightmare to operate. Jen, who’d taught me so much at the beginning, struggled with the nuances of the new rig. Well, we both did. At first, anyway. It didn’t help that the instruction booklet was nowhere to be found. In those days, you couldn’t just download another from the internet. So it was me trying to give her pointers. It was a reversal of our normal roles and it felt odd for her. Jen had once held all the cards, played them with the effortless élan of a major-league poker champ. Now she kept fumbling.
I was lucky – I’d just happened to pop to the loo when a crucial call had been booked in for the managing director. Funding. From the States. Jen accidentally cut him off in his prime, the source of revenue went south and no one was amused. I told her we’d just talk our way out of it, blame the machine, mechanical error. But the more we blathered, the stormier the faces grew. The chop. I looked on, gutted, but the chaps upstairs had the excuse they’d needed. Just her, though, not me.
I owed Jen so much. From my perfect beige nails to my immaculate blouse (now real silk) to my accent, which had been gradually morphing into hers. The desk wouldn’t be the same without her. I hated crying, couldn’t ever afford to start in case I never stopped, but my eyes were stinging the day she left. I felt so sorry for her, exiled from the firm. She had been its serene public face. Now she was gone. For a while, I felt as though everyone who came through that door was searching for her, disappointed that there was only me. I tried to beam more brightly to compensate.
Chapter 10
Now
Louise
Just when I think we’re beginning to make progress, something comes along to upset all our apple carts, throw a pall over our lives again.
We managed to stagger our way through Christmas. It was hideous. We spent it with Jill, mourning her son but doing her best to celebrate what she still had – her grandchildren. They’d become all the more important to her. To us.
We’d had our differences, in the past. In fact, I’d blamed some of Patrick’s wandering ways on his mother turning a blind eye way back. There wasn’t a woman alive, it seemed, who didn’t let Patrick off the hook. And fair’s fair, it was his father who’d done the dirty, upping and leaving Jill for a younger version, begetting another bunch of kids. It didn’t take a genius to work out this displacement was the reason Patrick constantly sought reassurance, acceptance, attention.
But now Patrick was gone, taking all his faults away with him. We were left with the man smiling from the photos, who was perfect, of course. I much preferred to pretend this was the man I’d lived with and known, and as far as Jill was concerned, it was gospel. Meanwhile, Giles and Em took comfort from seeing him around.
I was glad once the last cracker was pulled and the dried-up Christmas pudding could be decently ditched. Only Patrick had ever liked it. This year, Giles had solemnly swallowed down a symbolic mouthful and the rest had mouldered until I could bear the sight no longer.
Chucking all that wrapping paper into the recycling was more liberating. It seemed to promise some sort of renewal, the end of yet another test, like the funeral. But I hadn’t realised, then, that every single day would go on being an ordeal of a sort.
This time it’s Em, coming home from school with that ominous cried-out look. What’s happened? I instantly want to know, but I resist asking straight out.
‘Nice day?’ Sometimes the oblique question nets the answer. Not this time.
‘Fine.’ She storms off to her room. I turn pointedly to Giles. He slings his bag on the counter, shrugs his shoulders. I realise, suddenly, that he’s grown again. One day soon he’ll be his father’s height. Every day he looks more like him. I have to be careful, on the landing in the dark. More than once, he’s nearly given me a heart attack, coming out of his bathroom all of a sudden, dumping his towel on the floor just like his dad used to.
‘Well, something happened,’ I say.
‘What’s for tea?’
‘Supper. Pasta bake.’ This is in honour of Em’s new status as a vegan. I’m hoping she won’t notice the cheese; that the whol
e phase will, in fact, be over as quickly as possible. Giles’s wince at the prospect doesn’t help my temper. ‘Do you know what happened? Going to tell me?’
He cracks under pressure. ‘School project. Family tree. Someone teased her.’
‘What about?’ I immediately square up to fight. How dare they? And our tree, thanks to my marrying into Patrick’s lot, is perfectly respectable.
‘Oh, some cow. Said there were so few people on Em’s, it was more like a stick.’
I close my mouth. Whoever it was, she had a point. With my parents MIA, her dad now dead, little contact with his half-siblings, and me an only child, our family tree is indeed a slender branch rather than a mighty oak. But Em doesn’t need it rubbing in.
I march up to her room. I don’t wait to be asked in. Don’t want to be standing there until the Day of Judgement, do I? She is bunched up on her bed, sad as dirty laundry. I ignore her token resistance, give her the biggest hug I have and tell her straight. She has a family to be proud of, a mum who will always love her, a doting gran and a big brother who really isn’t that bad.
And a dad whose memory she should always treasure. And never once let go of.
Chapter 11
Now
Becca
Becca sat in her car, slowly and carefully peeling the wrapper off a Twix. Not really her favourite, but her dad had loved them. She wasn’t quite sure why she still bought them. No, that was a lie. It was something that brought him closer. She remembered him opening the packet, handing one stick to her, eating the other himself. They’d chomp together in harmony, while her mum was out.