14
Monday
This morning I have woken up ludicrously early. Pudding is a furry, purring cushion on my legs (I never used to understand why you took in a stray). Mr. Wright told me that today we are going to cover your funeral and at five-thirty I give up on the idea of sleep and go out into your garden. I ought to go through it in my mind first, make sure I can remember what’s important, but my thoughts flinch when I try to look backward with any focus. Instead I look at the leaves and buds now flourishing along the lengths of the once-presumed-dead twigs. But there has been one fatality, I’m afraid. The Constance Spry rose was killed by a fox urinating, so in her place I’ve planted a Cardinal Richelieu. No fox would dare to wee on him.
I feel a coat draped around my shoulders and then see Kasia sleepily stumbling back to bed. Your dressing gown doesn’t meet over her bump anymore. There are only three days to go now till her due date. She’s asked me to be her birthing partner, her “doula” (it sounds too posh for my rudimentary knowledge of what to do). You never told me about doulas when you asked me to be with you when you had Xavier; you just asked me to be there. Perhaps you thought I’d find it all a little off-putting. (You’d have been right.) Or with you I didn’t need a special name. I’m your sister. And Xavier’s aunt. That’s enough.
You might think Kasia is giving me a second chance after I failed you. But although that would be easy, it’s not true. Nor is she a walking, talking Prozac course. But she has forced me to look into the future. Remember Todd telling me “Life has to go on”? But as my life couldn’t rewind to a time you were still alive, I’d wanted to pause it; moving forward was selfish. But Kasia’s growing baby (a girl, she found out) is a visual reminder that life does go on, the opposite of a memento mori. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a memento vitae.
Amias was right: the morning chorus is really noisy out here. The birds have been singing fit to burst for an hour already. I try to remember the order he told me about and think it must be the larks’ turn now. As I listen to what I think is a wood-lark playing notes similar to Bach’s preludes, a little amazed and strangely comforted, I remember your funeral.
The night before, I stayed in Little Hadston in my old bedroom. I hadn’t slept in a single bed for years and I found the narrowness of it and the tightly tucked in sheets and the heavy eiderdown securely comforting. I got up at 5:30 but when I went downstairs, Mum was already in the kitchen. There were two mugs of coffee on the table. She gave me one. “I would have brought your coffee up to your room for you, but I didn’t want to wake you.” I knew before I took a sip that it would be cold. Outside it was dark with the sound of rain hammering down. Mum distractedly drew back the curtains as if you could see something outside, but it was still dark and all she could see was her own reflection.
“When someone dies, they can be any age you remember, can’t they?” she asked. As I tried to think of a reply she continued, “You probably think about the grown-up Tess, because you were still close to her. But when I woke up, I thought of her when she was three, wearing a fairy skirt I’d got her in Woolworth’s and a policeman’s helmet. Her wand was a wooden spoon. On the bus yesterday I imagined holding her when she was two days old. I felt the warmth of her. I remembered all her fingers clasped around my finger, so tiny they didn’t even meet. I remembered the shape of her head, and stroking the nape of her neck till she slept. I remembered her smell. She smelled of innocence. Other times, she’s thirteen and so pretty that I worry for her every time I see a man look at her. All of those Tesses are my daughter.”
At 10:55 a.m. we walked to the church, the wind blowing the driving cold rain against our faces and our legs, making Mum’s black skirt stick coldly to her damp tights; my black boots were splattered with mud. But I was glad it was raining and windy—“blow winds and crack your cheeks”—yes, I know, this was hardly a blasted heath but Little Hadston on a Thursday morning with cars parked two deep along the road to the church.
There were more than a hundred people standing outside the church in the slicing rain, some under umbrellas, some with just their hoods up. For a moment I thought that the church wasn’t open yet, before realizing that the church was too full for them to get inside. Among the crowd I glimpsed DS Finborough next to PC Vernon, but most people were a blur through rain and emotion.
As I looked at the crowd outside the church and thought of the others packed inside, I imagined each person carrying their own memories of you—your voice, your face, your laugh, what you did and what you said—and if all these fragments of you could be put together, then somehow we could make a complete picture of you; together we could hold all of you.
Father Peter met us at the gate to the graveyard leading up to the church, holding an umbrella to shelter us. He told us that he’d put people into the choir stalls and got extra chairs, but there wasn’t even standing room left now. He escorted us through the graveyard toward the door of the church.
As I walked with Father Peter, I saw the back view of a man on his own in the graveyard. His head was bare and his clothes soaked through. He was hunched over by the gaping hole in the ground that was waiting for your coffin. I saw that it was Dad. After all those years of our waiting for him, when he never came, he was waiting for you.
The church bell began tolling. There is no more ghastly a sound. It has no beat of life, no human rhythm, only the mechanical striking of loss. We had to go into the church now. I found it as impossible and terrifying as stepping out of a window at the top of a skyscraper. I think Mum felt the same. That single footstep would inexorably end with your body in the sodden earth. I felt an arm around me and saw Dad. His other hand was holding on to Mum. He escorted us into the church. I felt Mum’s judder through his body as she saw your coffin. Dad kept his arms around us as we walked up the seemingly endless aisle toward our places at the front. Then he sat between us holding our hands. I have never been so grateful for human touch before.
At one moment I turned, briefly, and looked at the packed church and people spilling out beyond in the rain and wondered if the murderer was there, among us all.
Mum had asked for the full monty funeral Mass and I was glad because it meant there was longer till we had to bury you. You’ve never liked sermons, but I think you’d have been touched by Father Peter’s. It had been Valentine’s Day the day before and maybe for that reason he talked about unrequited love. I think I can remember his words, or just about:
“When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn’t return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels…”
After the Mass in the church we went outside to bury you.
The unrelenting rain had turned the snow-covered white earth of the churchyard to dirty mud.
Father Peter started the burial rite: “We have entrusted our sister Tess and baby Xavier to God’s mercy, and we now commit their bodies to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust: in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.”