A middle-aged woman, who must have been a relative of Greg’s, asked if we should follow it in.
‘They’re going to get it in position,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure if the group before us has finished.’ It was as if we’d booked a tennis court. Greg’s relative, if that was who she was, stayed next to me. I felt no need to try any small-talk.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
I still hadn’t worked out what to say when people said how sorry they were. ‘Thank you’ didn’t seem quite right. Sometimes I’d mumbled something meaningless. This time I just nodded.
‘It must be so terrible for you,’ she said.
‘Well, of course,’ I said. ‘It was such a shock.’
Still she didn’t go away. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘the circumstances were so awkward. It must be so… well, you know… for you.’
And then I thought, Oh, right, I understand. Suddenly I felt bloody-minded. ‘What do you mean?’
But she was tougher than I was. She wouldn’t be diverted. ‘I mean the circumstances,’ she said. ‘The person he died with. It must be so upsetting.’
I felt as if I had an open wound and this woman had put her finger into it and was probing to see whether I would cry out or scream. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. I didn’t want to give her anything.
‘I’m just sad I’ve lost my husband,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing else to say.’ I walked away from her and looked at the gardens. There were shrubs and little hedges of an institutional kind, the sort you might see in the car park of a business centre. The building itself had a mid-twentieth-century solidity about it but was noncommittal at the same time, a bit like a church, a bit like a school. But behind, and towering above it, was a chimney. They couldn’t hide that. There was smoke coming out of it. It couldn’t be Greg. Not yet.
Now I was sure. I had known already, but perhaps I’d forced it out of my mind, especially for the funeral. Everyone, absolutely everyone, knew that Greg had died with another woman and that this meant they had been having an affair. And what did they think about me?
My next memory of the funeral places me inside, right at the front, next to Greg’s parents. I could feel the crowd of mourners behind me, staring at the back of my head. They were sorry for me, but what else did they feel? A little bit of embarrassment, contempt? Poor old Ellie. She hasn’t only been made a widow: she’s been humiliated, abandoned, her marriage exposed as a sham. Would they be speculating about us? Was it Greg’s roving eye? Was it Ellie’s failings as a wife?
Greg’s brother Ian and his sister Kate had both rung me with suggestions for the service. I had resented this at first. I felt possessive, territorial. Then, suddenly, I’d thought of the funeral as a nightmare version of Desert Island Discs, choosing music and poetry to show what a sensitive and interesting person Greg had been and how well I’d understood him. The idea of choosing poems with an eye on what it would make people think of my good taste repelled me so I rang Ian and Kate back and said I’d leave it to them.
Ian came to the front and read some Victorian poem that was meant to be consoling but I stopped paying attention halfway through. Then Greg’s other brother, Simon, read something from the Bible that sounded familiar from school assemblies. I couldn’t follow that either. The individual words made sense, but I forgot the meaning of the sentences as they unfolded. Then Kate said she was going to play a song that had meant a lot to Greg. There was a pause that went on too long and then a rattling in some speakers on the wall as someone pressed play and then what was clearly the wrong song came on, perhaps a song from the funeral afterwards or the one before. It was a power ballad I remembered having heard in a movie, one with Kevin Costner. It was completely alien to Greg, who had liked scratchy songs played on steel guitars by wizened Americans who had served time in prison, or looked as if they had. I glanced across and saw panic on Kate’s face. She was visibly wondering whether she could run out and switch off this awful song, find the right CD and put it on, then deciding she couldn’t.
It was the only bit of the funeral that really meant anything to me. For just one moment, I had a vivid sense of what it would have been like if Greg had been there, and how he would have looked at me, and how we would have struggled not to laugh, and how we would have cackled about it afterwards, and how it would have become a standing joke. It was the closest I got to crying all day, but even then I didn’t cry.
When we were spilling out afterwards, we collided with another group about to come in and I realized that in another hour they would be colliding with yet another. We were on a conveyor-belt of grief.
Everybody was invited back to my place where we had the worst party of all time. It wasn’t that the food was bad, far from it. At first I had planned to hit a supermarket and buy everything ready-made but then I’d decided to do it myself. I’d spent the evening and night before making tart-lets with goat’s cheese and red onion and cherry tomatoes and mozzarella and salami. There were toppings on little pieces of dried toast. I’d stuffed red peppers and baked cheese straws. I’d bought a kilo of olives with anchovies and chillies. I’d bought a case of red wine and another of white. I’d baked two cakes. There was coffee, tea, a selection of infusions, and yet it was still the worst party of all time.
It combined the ingredients of different kinds of bad party. For a start, quite a lot of people didn’t turn up. Some friends weren’t even at the funeral. Others didn’t come to the house. They might have felt embarrassed by the circumstances, by the humiliation. It gave the party a forlorn, rejected atmosphere.
Once people started arriving, I was reminded of those awful teenage parties where the boys cluster in a corner, giggling among themselves, staring at the girls but not daring to approach them. Something tribal had happened. Maybe my perspective had been poisoned, but I felt that it was as if Greg had left me for Milena and there were those who were taking his side against me.
Gwen and Mary were there and, of course, they were entirely in my camp. They fetched drinks and food and hovered around me, murmuring words of support. I half expected us to put our handbags on the floor and dance round them.
My parents were there, old and crumpled, and my sister Maria, looking furious – as if Greg had done her a personal wrong by dying in the way he had. Then there was Fergus, whose eyes were swollen with grief; I envied him that. He had wanted to read something at the funeral but at the last moment pulled out. He said he didn’t think he’d manage it. I got the impression from Jemma, his hugely pregnant wife, that he had been sobbing on and off since it had happened.
There were people like Joe and Tania, who drifted between the camps, making heroic and doomed efforts to bring them together. There were groups of Greg’s and my friends, but everything seemed forced and awkward.
In a strange way, the people I took most comfort from were not friends, certainly not family, but those I had never met before. There was an old primary-school friend whose name I recognized as the James with whom Greg had run three-legged races; there was a large man with a face like a bloodhound’s who had taught Greg piano when he was a teenager. There were several clients, who came up to tell me how much they had depended on Greg, trusted him, liked him, and would miss him now that he was gone. It was such a relief to be with people who didn’t know the back-story to his death, and were there simply to say goodbye.
‘He was a very dear young man,’ said Mrs Sutton, in a piercing voice. She wore a black silk dress and seamed stockings, and had a creased face and silver hair in an immaculate bun. She looked very old and very rich, with an aquiline nose and straight-backed bearing that seemed to belong to a different era.