What to do When Someone Dies Read online

  The hearse arrived, the back door opened and the wicker coffin was exposed. Mr Collingwood always referred to it as a casket, as if that was more respectful of the dead. It wasn’t lifted by pall-bearers, but trundled into the chapel on a silly little trolley that looked as if it should be moving packing cases into a supermarket. It rattled clumsily over the cracks between the paving stones. Mr Collingwood had warned me about it in advance, saying it had been forced on them by their insurers. There had been reports of serious back injury.

  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 h
ad 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.

  ‘Yes, he was,’ I agreed.

  ‘I always looked forward to his visits. I’m going to miss him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said absurdly.

  ‘As a matter of fact, he was going to visit me the day after he died. That was how I heard – when he failed to arrive I rang his office to ask where he was. It was such a shock.’ She gave me a piercing glance. ‘I’ll be eighty-eight in two months’ time. It doesn’t seem right, does it? People dying out of their turn.’

  I couldn’t speak and she lifted a hand like a claw and placed it lightly over mine. ‘You have my sympathy, my dear,’ she said.

  For the main part, however, it was a funeral party where nobody seemed able to do the sort of things that funeral parties are for. They couldn’t offer their condolences without seeming embarrassed or creepy; they couldn’t engage in uncomplicated, emotional reminiscences about the deceased. They couldn’t do anything else either. Some picked at the food, others gulped the wine (the woman who had approached me outside the crematorium had much more than was good for her, whether in remorse or some perverse kind of revenge). And gradually they just peeled away.

  In the end, Gwen, Mary and I were left with a handful of Greg’s relatives I didn’t know; they had ordered a taxi that kept not arriving. They sat on the sofa with empty glasses, refusing top-ups and more food because it would spoil their dinner. They phoned the cab company repeatedly while we cleared and wiped and finally vacuumed around them. In the end they left, muttering something about finding a taxi in the street or catching a tube.

  Gwen and Mary stayed on and I opened some more wine and told them about the woman outside the crematorium and what she had said, and Mary said, ‘You don’t have to fight it, you know.’ I asked her what she meant by that and she said I had nothing to feel bad about. Men were bastards. My friends loved me and would support me. I would get through this. I can’t remember making much of a reply. Instead I just poured myself glass after glass of wine and drank it as if I was insatiably thirsty. They asked if I wanted them to stay and I said I wanted them not to stay, so they left and I think I drank one more glass of wine, a big one, though, filled almost to the lip, so that I had to hold it with both hands.

  When I was ten my grandfather had died. I didn’t want to go to the funeral but my mother said funerals were where we went to say goodbye to people who had died. We thought about them and we cried for them and we said goodbye to them and then we went back to our lives.

  I lay on my bed fully clothed and couldn’t decide whether the room was rotating around me or whether my bed was rotating inside the room or whether in deep, philosophical terms it made a difference. But as I lay there, drunker than at any time since my first year at university, I knew that on that day I hadn’t cried for Greg, and, above all, I hadn’t said goodbye to him.

  Chapter Nine

  In the middle of the night I suddenly sat up in bed, straining my eyes in the darkness. I didn’t know what time it was. I had turned off the digital alarm clock because, over the past weeks, I had come to dread waking in the small hours and gazing at the time clicking past. I only knew that it was dark and that something had roused me. A thought, which must have wormed its way into my dreams. A memory.

  Like most couples, I’m sure, Greg and I used to have conversations about which of our friends were unfaithful. After all, if one in three partners cheats on the other, or something like that, we figured we must be surrounded by people who were betraying each other. Now I remembered a conversation so vividly it was like being there again, and there we were in bed together, warm under the duvet and facing each other in the grainy half-light, his hand on my hip and my foot resting against his calf.

  ‘My parents?’ he was saying, and I giggled: ‘No way!’

  ‘Your parents?’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘Fergus and Jemma?’ I suggested.

  ‘Impossible. They’ve only been together for a couple of years and he’s not that kind of guy.’

  ‘What kind of guy is that? And, anyway, it doesn’t need to be him, it could be her.’

  ‘She’s too moral. And too pregnant. What about Mary and Eric?’

  ‘She would have told me,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Sure? What about if it was him?’

  ‘She would definitely have told me that too. Even if she didn’t, I’d know.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I just would. She’s a very bad liar. Her neck goes blotchy.’

  ‘What about me – would you be able to tell with me?’

  ‘Yes – so watch it.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘I just would.’

  ‘Trusting fool.’

  We smiled at each other, sure of our happiness.

  I got out of bed, pushed my feet into slippers, went downstairs and into the kitchen, turning on the overhead light and blinking in the sudden dazzle. I saw from the wall clock that it was nearly three o’clock. It was windy outside and when I pressed my face to the window, trying to make out the shape of the roofs and chimneys, I imagined all those people out there, lying safely in bed with each other, warm and submerged in their dreams. I could still hear Greg’s voice and see his smile, and the contrast between the intense comfort of that memory and this cold, empty darkness was like a blow to the stomach, making my eyes water. No one tells you how physical unhappiness can be, how it hurts in your sinuses and throat, glands, muscles and bones.

  I made myself a mug of hot chocolate and drank it slowly. Greg’s face faded. I knew he wasn’t here, wasn’t anywhere. His ashes were in a small square box with a rubber band around it. But I heard his teasing voice. Trusting fool, he called me.

  ‘Fergus.’

  ‘Ellie?’ His eyes widened with surprise. He was still in his dressing-gown, unshaven and puffy with sleep. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  He stood back, pulling his dressing-gown more tightly around him, and I walked past him into the kitchen, where the four of us had sat so many times, eating takeaways, playing cards, drinking almost until it got light. The supper things were still on the table: two stacked plates, an empty serving bowl, a half-drunk bottle of red wine. Fergus started to collect them up, dropping the forks on the tiled floor with a clatter.

  ‘I know it’s a bit early.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Coffee? Tea? Breakfast? Devilled kidneys? That last one was a joke. Jemma will be in bed for ages. She’s on maternity leave now.’ As he said this, I saw anxiety cross his face: Jemma was on maternity leave and I was childless, barren, shamed and alone.

  ‘Coffee, please. Maybe some toast.’

  ‘Marmalade, honey, jam?’

  ‘Whatever. Honey.’

  ‘If we’ve got any. No. No honey. Or jam, actually.’

  ‘Marmalade’s fine.’

  ‘The funeral seemed to go off all right,’ he said cautiously, as he filled the kettle and slid a slice of bread into the toaster.

  ‘The funeral was crap.’

  He smiled ruefully at me.

  ‘No one knew what to say to me.’

  ‘It’s over, at least.’

  ‘Not really.’

  He looked at me, eyebrows raised. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I’ve decided to believe him.’

  The kettle started to boil, sending puffs of steam into the air. Very methodically, he measured spoonfuls of coffee into the pot, then poured in the water. Only when he had handed me the hot mug did he look me in the eye. ‘Come again?’ he said.

  ‘Greg didn’t have an affair.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Fergus, putting his mug carefully on to the table with a click, then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Right.’

&
nbsp; ‘On the one hand there’s how it appears, him dying with this other woman.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And on the other is my trust.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m keeping faith. I’m not abandoning him.’

  I waited for Fergus to say that he was dead, but he didn’t. He said, ‘I see,’ and picked up his mug again, staring at me over the rim. ‘Well, that’s good, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Good, I mean, if it lets you come to terms with what’s happened.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Because what has happened?’

  Fergus frowned and ran his fingers through his hair, so it stood on end, giving him the look of a sad clown. He dipped his finger into his coffee and licked it. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking, Ellie?’ he said eventually.

  ‘When you were doing work for him, in the office, did you see any sign that he was… you know – involved?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. That doesn’t mean -’

  I interrupted what I knew he was going to say. ‘Look, Fergus, Greg died with another woman. But he wasn’t having an affair with her. He wasn’t. OK? So, what were they doing together? That’s the question, isn’t it? For a start there are other possibilities.’ Fergus looked at me and didn’t speak. ‘Just off the top of my head she might have been a hitchhiker.’

  Fergus thought for a moment. ‘Not wanting to be a devil’s advocate, but this woman -’

  ‘Milena Livingstone.’

  ‘She was some sort of businesswoman, no?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Do they tend to hitchhike? In London?’

  ‘Or just some business contact.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘That he was giving a lift to.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘So you believe him?’

  ‘Ellie, he’s not here to believe. Your husband – my best friend, the man we both loved and miss like hell – is dead. That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? It’s as if by somehow persuading yourself that he wasn’t fucking another woman, he won’t be dead after all. You’ll go mad if you keep on like this.’