Gail nudged me. “Her father can’t leave Simla. Apparently he’s too ill.”
She nudged me again. “That’s the mother.” She pointed with her chin toward a large black hat in the front row. The large black hat was flanked by two young men, also wearing hats. Some guys knew how to dress in the presence of a rabbi. Alastair was bare-headed.
“Who’re the guys?”
“I don’t know.” Gail was obviously annoyed. I recognized the gleam of curiosity in her bright eyes. If the two guys were important enough to be in the front row, they were important enough to be known by Gail. “We’ll find out later,” she promised. I was only beginning to understand that the Gail I was getting to know needed, almost viscerally, to satisfy her curiosity. It was as much a part of her as her brilliant eyes.
I was glad to be whispering with Gail. It took my mind away from the grotesque thought of Mo, dead and nailed in a wooden box. The last time I saw her she was dancing in the mud at the Glastonbury Festival, flinging the rain out of her hair, slender arms reaching for... well, everyone, everything.
She was the first of our group to die, and it was as if the grim reaper reached across her coffin and touched us all with his chilly finger. “You may be young,” he hissed, “but you are not exempt.”
Alastair, on the other side of Gail, stared stonily ahead. I wondered how he was taking it. Gail intercepted my glance and breathed, “He’s expecting her to leap out from behind the flowers and yell, ‘Ha-ha, can’t you take a joke?’ Like this was one of her Performance Art events. He doesn’t believe it. He’s still in shock.” She had an enigmatic expression on her face and I wondered, not for the first time, what Alastair had told her about the past.
There was nothing personal about the service: Not one of her friends had been asked to speak; there was no music or poetry. It was as if the grown-up world, as well as death, had claimed her and extinguished every individual spark. And there were so few of us. Where were all the friends who could have given her back some identity?
“Where is everyone?”
“In the last three years Mo fought with loads of people,” Gail said. “You know Mo. She wasn’t backward about confrontation.”
“With you?”
“Oh no. She tried, but I wouldn’t let it happen.”
That didn’t surprise me at all. Since I left England there had been two reluctant letters from Alastair. The correspondence and the friendship would have wilted from sheer neglect if Gail hadn’t taken it over. Words might be his thing, but using them for communication and storytelling was definitely hers, and I’d come to rely on her for news of friends back home. At first I thought of these e-mails as a substitute for Alastair, but lately I’d looked forward to and welcomed them as a connection with Gail. I was at the crematorium only because she told me where to go and when.
“Where’s Jay?” I murmured.
“Somerset,” said Gail. “They had a really nasty bust-up. I wrote to you...”
“But all the same...”
“Still angry.”
“Christine?”
“Angry, too. Something about money.”
That sounded like Mo, the rich girl always overspending, always borrowing from poorer friends and then not quite understanding when they became desperate to be repaid.
“Drew?”
“Couldn’t stand her.”
“I thought he fancied the pants off her.”
“Oh, Liza.” Gail sighed. “You don’t know much, do you? They had a little scene a couple of years ago and she went round telling everyone he couldn’t get it up.”
“All the same...”
“Still angry. And he married Sha-sha and she’s angry too. I wrote to you.”
But this was what Moselle was all about. No one was ever indifferent to her. She was infuriating. You loved her or you hated her, and sometimes you did both at the same time. But you cared.
Now it seemed as if her mojo was still operating, because just as the mumbled ceremony was droning to a close, Moselle’s mother’s large black hat flew into the aisle and a scuffle broke out between the two guys in the front row. The service ended with fists and fury.
“Thank God,” Gail said, standing on tiptoe and craning her neck to see. “Something Mo-like at last.”
The first to leave was a guy nursing a bloody nose. He strode to the door, raging and humiliated, not looking at anyone.
Gail shoved me. “Go on. Find out who he is.”
“Me?”
“Don’t be such a wimp, Liza. You’re a writer now — go do some research.”
Reluctant to admit I was more at home in libraries than real life, I ran, and when I caught up with him, the man with the bloody nose was already unlocking his car — a brand-new Volvo. I did the first thing to come into my jet-lagged head: I thrust a handful of tissues at him and said stupidly, “Are you all right?” I have always despised people who say that when things are so clearly not all right, and the man with the bloody nose distinctly felt the same way. He glared at me and grimaced — showing his bloody teeth. He did, however, grab the tissues.
“Am I all right!” he snarled. “That arsehole hit me. At her funeral. What a brilliant time to meet her boyfriend! Oh yeah, I’m all right.”
He might’ve been quite fit if it weren’t for the blood and the fury. He fumbled the Volvo open.
I said, “Wait. You can’t drive like that. Some of us are going for a drink or a curry. Come with us.”
“I never want to see any of you arty freaks again. You and your stupid stunts are what killed her.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“North Camden Art Exhibition. Does that ring a bell?”
“I was in Toronto till last night.” Far away the sound of an ambulance rose and fell like a sigh.
The guy with the bloody nose said, “Moselle was not a tart. She did not take drugs.”
“What are you talking about? Of course not.” I wanted him to calm down but he wasn’t listening.
“She was my wife,” he shouted. He wadded up the reddened tissues and hurled them across the carpark. I was too stunned to say anything. The guy climbed into his car and started the motor.
“Wait!” I cried. “I didn’t know Mo was married. Who are you?” But he didn’t hear me. He just drove off, his tires screaming. He was Mo’s husband? And he’d just met her boyfriend? I stood for a second with my jaw hanging.
The others were waiting in the Garden of Remembrance, looking perplexed. The woman in the large black hat turned out not to be Mo’s mother after all. “But I am married to her father, dear,” she told Alastair. She was redheaded and stick-thin and she was hanging on his arm as if being the deceased’s stepmother entitled her to support. “Actually, I’m the third Mrs. Joffe, but I’ve never felt like a Mrs., so do call me Bekki.” The invitation seemed to be extended solely to Alastair.
Gail gave me an evil grin but didn’t intervene. The second man from the front row, the boyfriend, was nursing a bruised hand and a swelling eyebrow; otherwise he was quite fit, too. And that was no surprise: Mo always picked lookers. It was a characteristic we shared. Sometimes we even picked the same lookers, except she was better at catching them than I was — which was one of the reasons why I exiled myself in Canada.
The third Mrs. Joffe was saying, “You can imagine what a shock this has been, having to cope with all the arrangements on my own. Her father never leaves his precious air conditioning at this time of year. Weak lungs, you know.”