What she forgot, because it had no purchase on her yet, and she hoped never would, was the drink. Clover put on a party with waiters, back at the house, and it was just as noisy and successful as the party that Lucy had been to a year ago there, when Freddie was alive. Granny Iffy became, as she herself said, ‘Granny Squiffy’, Clover was ‘half-cut’ (according to Evert) before they started, and Evert himself got so sloshed he kissed one of the waiters. ‘It was what he wanted,’ said Clover, angling her glass for a refilclass="underline" ‘he wanted to go out with a bang’; and to Lucy, standing at first by the door to the kitchen, the pop of champagne corks was the defining noise. Well, perhaps wakes were like this – it took a little getting used to, like the funeral itself, and she wasn’t going to show surprise. The solemn feeling that had silenced and upset her in the crematorium was not really to do with Freddie, whom she’d hardly known, and whose smile at her had always been a general one, of tolerance for all the confusing children of his friends’ children. The sight of the coffin, and the thought of him inside it, just a few feet away – this must have been what her mother wanted to protect her from, and what her father thought she was old enough now to see. She felt somehow both grateful and indignant.
She arrived at Clover’s with her mother and Una, and didn’t join up with her father and Pat again till later on, when the room was full, and ten or twelve people, in spite of the damp, grey weather, had gone into the garden. ‘There’s your father outside with Clover,’ said her mother: ‘run and talk to them.’ Lucy went through the French windows at the tactful pace which mixed eagerness to see one parent with reluctance to leave the other. A waiter had just come up to their little group.
‘Now I’ve asked them for things you can eat!’ said Clover, as her father shook his head at a tray of something wrapped in bacon. ‘I mentioned it specifically.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘you’ve got enough to think about.’
‘You’ve made something vegetarian, haven’t you,’ she said to the waiter, ‘specifically?’
‘I’ll certainly ask, madam,’ said the waiter.
‘They’ve taken over the kitchen,’ said Clover, ‘it’s out of my hands.’ She looked down and smiled dimly at Lucy. Her father, in an old striped suit, pulled her to him and kissed her, and Pat stooped too, eyes narrowed in concern.
‘Are you all right now, Lucy?’ he said.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Lucy, though his tenderness threatened to upset her again.
‘And have you got a drink?’ said Clover.
The waiter came back a minute later with a special plate of food for Lucy and condescending flourishes, smiled on by the adults: ‘There you are, young lady, you’ll enjoy that,’ patting her on the head as he went away. The vegetarians were going to have to wait rather longer.
Lucy had a sense of people being very nice to Clover, considering what they said about her normally, behind her back. She was suddenly a closer friend than she’d been before. This was partly because they were all being nice about Freddie – remarkable tributes were paid to him, now he was gone, and more than once Lucy heard someone say, ‘Well, he was a great man!’ and look away as if overcome with strong feeling.
‘Actually, you know, Clover, love,’ a tall drunk woman said, shaking her head in helpless frankness, ‘he was a bloody good writer!’
‘Well, he was, wasn’t he,’ said Clover mildly. ‘He understood people so well’ – this drew a thoughtful murmur from the others.
‘I was wondering if we were going to have another instalment of the famous diary,’ said a man with a slightly anxious laugh.
Clover reflected. ‘I mean there’s masses there. He wrote every day of his life, almost to the last. I said something about it to Ivan Goyle, you know – I thought he might make another selection. Or even two.’
‘Oh, wonderful . . .’ said the drunk woman.
‘The absolute truth is the last one caused such a fuss I’m not sure I can take it.’
‘Well not yet anyway perhaps, love.’
‘Look, do you want to go inside?’ said Clover.
‘No, it’s fine, Clo,’ said her father. He looked round. ‘It’s hardly raining at all.’
Lucy took her cue from this, and turned her back to the drizzle as she chewed her sausage roll.
‘It is quite nice to be out, isn’t it,’ said Clover, a fine mist glistening on the stitch of her shawl.
‘Oh, it’s nothing much,’ said Pat, looking up reassuringly at the blurred grey sky above the rooftops. Clover stood, smiling dimly, miles away. And a minute later, as the rain turned unignorable, ‘You know, it is rather wet’ – and with a sudden collective coming to their senses everyone in the garden walked, almost ran, back into the house.
A little later Lucy went and stood near Grandpa George, who was in a corner of the crowded room with a tall white-haired man – she knew he hated people barging in when he was talking. After a minute, though, the older man nodded pleasantly at her and said, ‘And this must be your granddaughter, George?’
He looked down to check. ‘Yes . . . yes, it is’ – with a momentary smile at her, as if confirming he hadn’t lost his car keys.
‘And where is her beautiful mother?’
‘Oh, she’s about somewhere . . .’
‘It’ll be nice to see her again. They’re still in . . . Belsize Park?’
‘The last I heard, yes,’ said George, with quick facetiousness, since, as Lucy knew, the question meant was she still living with Una?
‘I thought I saw her friend earlier.’
‘I expect,’ said George.
‘I couldn’t remember her name.’
‘Oh, it’s Una.’
‘Una, that’s right. A nice name.’
‘Yes. Quite easy to remember.’
‘If you can remember anything . . .’ said the man, rather self-admiringly. ‘She does something, doesn’t she.’
Sir George smiled more pleasantly. ‘She sells completely useless items that she calls Essentials. Rather a clever idea – I believe she’s doing very well.’
Lucy slipped away.
She half remembered the house, with its hundreds, its thousands of books, but it was interesting in a new way to see where Freddie had lived and worked – until two weeks ago. Una said the move to Blenheim Crescent had been paid for by the film he wrote about the Cambridge Spies (Communists and homosexuals, whom Lucy imagined peering through binoculars from one college into the next). There were pictures of Freddie all over the house; in the large gloomy study, which she went into, hesitantly, after the lavatory, there was a photo of him getting married to someone who wasn’t Clover, long ago obviously, when he had dark hair and was a foot taller. Other photographs hung in the hall, and if you read the small twiddly writing you could find him in a school photo, which hung in the lavatory itself. Then there was the portrait her father had painted last year, which loomed over the drinks tray in the drawing room, and was smiled at today with respect and regret. Freddie had already been ill when it was done, very gaunt, she remembered her father talking about it, the problems of being truthful but kind. She took in this difficulty, it seemed to her an excellent picture, though not one she would want to have herself. Then she thought of Freddie, gaunter still, in the coffin, perhaps still in that striped jacket and red bow tie – she must remember he would just be ashes now, awful but a relief. (But then, what happened to the ashes? Where were they?)
She went through the hall, checked up on the visitors’ book, open on the table for the mourners to write their names: her own now two pages back, before her father’s, whose big S swung up and circled Pat’s B on the line above – Patrick Browning. She heard voices and went past the open door of the dining room . . . her father, but with Ivan, sitting with their backs to the door. ‘It’s been worked on recently, but it probably dates from 1967 or 8,’ Ivan was saying, ‘when your dad was in the news again. It may have been meant for the Memos, but I’m pretty sure he never read it there. A bit near the knuckle, perhaps.’