CHAPTER THREE
The church, Chrissie thought, looked more suitable for a wedding than a funeral. The Funfair Club, the disabled children’s charity that so many in Richie’s profession supported, had said that they would like to give the flowers for his funeral, and the result was that every Gothic column of the church was smothered in pyramids of cream and pink and yel ow. The secretary of the Funfair Club had said that they wanted to do Richie proud, that he’d been such a valuable member for so long, so enthusiastic, such a supporter, and it hadn’t occurred to Chrissie to ask what, exactly, doing Richie proud might entail floral y. There must have been thousands of pounds’ worth piled up against the pil ars, roses and lilies and inescapable chrysanthemums exuding good intentions, and no taste. Chrissie glanced along her pew. At least she and the girls were doing Richie proud in the taste department.
They were al in black. Narrow black, with high heels. Tamsin and Dil y had pinned their hair up under glamorous little hats, and Amy’s was down her back under a black velvet band. Chrissie had added long black gloves to her own outfit, and a smal veil. She was wearing her industrial diamonds, and diamond studs in her ears. She would have been much happier to have been wearing them among a few simple architectural vases of madonna lilies.
The church was packed. Chrissie was aware, as she came up the aisle with the girls, that faces were turning towards her, and that there was a palpable wave of warmth and sympathy towards her, which made her feel, suddenly, very vulnerable and visible, despite the veil and the heels and the diamonds. If so many people were that sorry for you, then you were judged to have lost something insupportably enormous, and that consciousness added an unexpected layer of obligation to everything she was feeling already. She went up the aisle with her head up, and the girls just behind her, and, until she was safely in the front pew, did not al ow her eyes to rest on the pale oblong of Richie’s coffin ahead of her. Its presence, its known but unseen contents, required her to keep her imagination in as profound a state of inertia as she could possibly muster.
The girls, she was proud to see, were not crying. Not even Dil y. Tamsin’s Robbie – in a suit, his soberly cherished workwear – was standing in the pew behind her in an attitude of contained tension, as if poised to catch her should she buckle under the emotion of the occasion. Amy had her head bent, and she was scowling slightly, but she was dry-eyed. Chrissie had heard her playing her flute late into the smal hours the night before, the solo pieces she used to play to Richie’s accompanying piano arrangements, Messiaen’s ‘Le Merle Noir’, Debussy, and Jacob’s ‘Pied Piper’.
Neither of the others was particularly musical, although Tamsin could sing. She sang, Richie used to tel her, like a young Nancy Sinatra.
Chrissie made herself look directly at the coffin. There was an arrangement of white jasmine on it, twisted and shaped to resemble a treble clef. It was what the girls had wanted. She drew off her gloves and laid them along the prayer-book ledge of the pew. Then she picked up her service sheet and, as she did so, the diamonds on her left hand caught the sunlight slanting in through the east window and shot out bril iant unearthly rainbow rays.
At the back of the church, on the left rather than the right-hand side, Scott stood crammed against his mother. He couldn’t believe how ful the church was, nor what a ritzy congregation it was, with its air of barely suppressed flamboyance. They had arrived far too early, and had waited nervously on the gravel ed space outside, careful y not asking one another how they felt, how they would arrange themselves if – when – they came face to face with Richie’s other family.
Margaret had been doubtful about coming. She had wanted to, longed to, Scott could see that, but she had not wanted to be in a situation, or indeed to put anyone else in a situation – where old primitive energies might rise up and turn a ritual into a riot.
‘I want,’ Margaret said, ‘to remember him as he was.’ And then, a few minutes later, she said, ‘I want to say goodbye to him.’
In the end, Scott had decided for her. It wasn’t in his nature to insist, to be forceful, but it struck him that her regrets, her remorse, might insinuate themselves quietly and destructively into both their futures if she did not go to the funeral, and so he had said, in the voice he used for clients who wanted to have their cake and eat it, ‘We’re going.’
‘We can’t,’ Margaret said. She was in an armchair in her sitting room and Dawson was heavily in her lap. ‘I can’t be there with them.’
‘You can,’ Scott said. He’d opened a bottle of wine to encourage them both. ‘You can. You should.’
‘But—’
‘We’re going,’ Scott said.
‘But—’
‘We’l get the early train, do it, and be home for dinner.’
Margaret put her hand on Dawson’s head. He flattened his little ears to the point where he looked as if he didn’t have any, and was just an overblown example of a species of giant fur toad.
‘Thank you, pet,’ Margaret said.
So here they were, Margaret in black, he in his best dark work suit, hair gel ed, sober tie, uncomfortably damp palms, in a North London church packed with showbiz people, looking at a pale-wood coffin with brass handles – and his father inside. It occurred to him that he, as his father’s only son, and his mother, as his father’s wife, had more right to be there than anyone, more natural right. This was not the first time this primordial assertiveness had occurred to him, either. It had happened a few days earlier after the announcement of Richie’s death had appeared in the local press, fol owing a gauche little visit to Margaret, in her office, by a journalist too young to know anything of significance about Richie Rossiter, and impel ed him, boldly using the landline phone at the office, to ring the house in Highgate and inform them – no arguing – that he and his mother were coming to Richie’s funeral. He was braced to speak to Chrissie, or to one of those girls who were, improbably, his half-sisters, but he got an answering machine instead, and a young, disorganized voice – not Chrissie’s – asking him to leave his name and number and a message.
‘It’s Scott Rossiter speaking,’ Scott said. ‘I’m ringing to tel you that my mother and I wil be coming to the service on Friday, and returning North immediately afterwards.’
He’d paused then, wondering how to end the message. Should he say, ‘I thought you should know’? In the end, he said nothing, merely put the phone down, feeling that he had started that smal enterprise better than he’d finished it. When he told Margaret what he’d done she said, ‘Wel , pet, better that way,’ and he’d felt slightly cheated out of congratulation. But in the train, Margaret had rewarded him. She’d looked up from disapproving of her railway cardboard cup of tea and said, ‘I couldn’t do this on my own, Scott. And I couldn’t do it if they didn’t know, either.’
