really anything to do with all these other people.
And now here she was at Putney crematorium. Petunia’s will had been surprisingly specific: no church burial, just a cremation at Putney, ashes to be interred with Albert’s. Mary could remember her mother saying that Putney was the nicest of the London crematoria, but she hadn’t thought it had any practical bearing. Now she knew it hadn’t been a chance remark. Petunia must have been there a few times before. Mary would have preferred a church, where good things happened to people as well as bad, where weddings and christenings had soaked into the walls over the years to counteract the effects of all the funerals. There was none of that with a crematorium, which was only there for one reason. But her mother had been right, this was a calming place: a low red-brick building with a half-circular driveway and a well-tended garden beyond; much nicer than the place in Wimbledon where they had burned her father’s body. You didn’t notice the crematorium’s chimney. The driveway was designed to let the corteges come and go efficiently.
The late May afternoon was bright and clear, and it was warm, which was jarring; her father’s funeral two decades before had also been a nice day. You wanted rain and cold and gloom to match your mood, but Mary could feel herself growing flushed and sweaty as they stood outside under the portico, waiting to go in. Her mother would have wanted to be in the garden on a day like today.
It was interesting to notice the change in turn-out from her father’s funeral. That time, half the population of Pepys Road had come. But most of those people had sold their houses and moved, and everyone had lost touch, so there were far fewer people here this time, twenty or so, over half in some way or another family. Petunia – another surprise – had wanted the service to be read from the Book of Common Prayer. They had recruited the parish vicar for Pepys Road, who was – yet another surprise – a young woman, much younger than Mary, who when they met had just got back from a run around the Common and was still wearing jogging clothes. Mary knew about woman priests in theory but had never met one. The Reverend was bright and nice and immediately agreed to read the service, tapping the time and place and Petunia’s ‘details’, as she called them, into her smartphone, before looking up and smiling.
‘I know it looks funny, but I can back it up to my computer, so I’m less likely to lose it,’ she said. ‘I used to get through three paper diaries a year.’ Mary could see that she liked being more modern than people thought she would be. This meeting with the trim, practical, kind-faced priest made Mary feel sad. It gave her a sudden sense that it was now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually a stranger to the place you lived in. The woman priest with jogging clothes and a BlackBerry gave Mary a glimpse of what life must have been like for her mother as she grew older.
But the priest read the service beautifully. Her speaking voice had been light and slightly breathy, perhaps from exercise, but her ceremony voice was richer and deeper.
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.
I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God.
Petunia hadn’t believed a word of that, to Mary’s certain knowledge, but the language felt right, as a way of talking about the very last things. After all, it really was the end of the world, for Petunia anyway. Her father, a roaring, furious, militant atheist, would have been livid at the idea of the Prayer Book being read; so this was a final, a very final, very much overdue, form of insurrection on the part of her mother. For once she had done what she wanted instead of long-sufferingly keeping quiet. Mary smiled and sniffed and felt Alan squeeze her arm, right there beside her, all flesh, all fifteen stone of him in his best black M &S suit, and felt reassured. On her other side, Ben was doing a heroic job of not being bored and fidgeting as much as he wanted to. Graham and Alice both looked pale and composed and she felt a moment’s pride in them and herself for raising them. Mary said to herself: I haven’t done so badly.
The vicar read some more in her strong voice, and said a prayer for Petunia Charlotte Howe. Then she pressed a button, the curtains parted, and the coffin with Mary’s mother’s corpse in it trundled through a hole in the wall to, presumably, the fires beyond. Mary had expected more melodrama, a glimpse of licking flames perhaps – wasn’t that what happened in films? – but instead there was just that mix of the ceremonial and the municipal. She was glad of that; it could easily have been too much. Outside, people drifted about, some of them coming up to Mary and Alan and Graham and Alice and Ben and others chatting to each other in small groups. Alan, who had been brilliant, had booked a room over a pub for food afterwards, so they could all go for a drink to let off steam after the ceremony. This was a chance to tell people about that. ‘Give them a drink and a sandwich,’ he said. ‘People expect it. Part of the ritual. Then they can piss off home.’
Home – that word had a different charge for Mary, now. Where was home? Maldon, of course. There was now nowhere else in her life, no bolt-hole, nowhere she could run away and hide, no mother to run to. This, the small- talky after-ceremony, was harder than the service itself had been. One of the men from the crematorium appeared in the entrance and disappeared back in again. Mary got the impression that lingering here was something of an inconvenience for the staff – maybe they had another cremation booked. In fact, thinking about it, they were bound to. But she could not find in herself any appetite for hurrying up, shooing people away, or any other form of being helpful. Not today.
‘I’m so sorry’ is what people mainly said, or sometimes ‘I am sorry for your loss.’ The Indian newsagent, whom Mary was surprised and pleased to see, said that; so did the man down the street whose name she didn’t know, who’d been smiley and friendly; so did the two of Albert’s old colleagues who came. Greatly to Mary’s surprise, so did the Polish builder who had come to the house to give a quote for the renovations. It must be a Polish thing, she thought. Maybe they liked funerals. She would have to make up her mind what to do about the house, and she was strongly minded to take the Pole’s quote, renovate, and then sell; the house would be worth, what, two million pounds? It was ridiculous, but it was also what it was. She caught herself having these thoughts and felt ashamed. ‘With her mother not cold in the ground’ – but in fact her mother had already gone into the flames.
Graham, looking very smart in a suit, was standing close by as if he was keeping an eye on her. He was also looking, as he often did, faintly knowing and ironic. Her son looked as if he thought he could tell what you were thinking. Well, what I’m thinking is, My mum’s dead, and I’m rich.
63
It took two weeks for Mary to decide what to do with 42 Pepys Road. After the funeral, she had a small collapse. Nothing dramatic, just that she felt tired all the time, and found it impossible to make even the smallest decisions. Every choice that she could delegate to Alan, she did. When she couldn’t, she boiled with indecision. One symptom was that she found she was unable to decide what to cook. She’d been looking forward to getting back to cooking, and because she had lived on ready meals while her mother was dying, being back in her own kitchen making proper food felt like a good thing to do. There was also the fact that Ben, though he obviously would not say so, because that would involve communicating in something other than a grunt, liked her cooking and greatly preferred it to his father’s non-cooking.
Perhaps for that very reason, she couldn’t muster the mental or physical energy to cook properly. The need to decide what to make for supper would leave her standing in front of the fridge for ten minutes, not feeling depressed or frustrated or angry or resentful about having to make the meal, not consciously feeling anything, just unable to choose between pasta and a ready-meal shepherd’s pie. She could see her cookbooks on the shelf, Nigella and Nigel and Delia and Jamie, the unopened books standing there as if reproachfully, their arms folded. At Sainsbury’s in Maldon she would stand in front of the frozen food cabinet, unable to discriminate between the Bird’s Eye fish fingers, twenty-four for ?4.98, and the Sainsbury’s own-brand fish fingers, same-size box, in all probability made by the same people, for ?4.49. But what if they weren’t the same? But what if they were? She took to calling Alan at work and asking him what he wanted, so she didn’t have to make up her mind. It was the same with watching TV, with deciding which radio station to have on in the background, with choosing what clothes to wear. Everything just seemed like a huge effort. Actual grief would hit her too, completely unpredictably, catching her as she heard ‘Love Me Do’ on an oldies station or as she was standing in a queue at the bank and saw a woman of about her mother’s age, hunched over to fish something out of her handbag in exactly the way her mother had used to do – grief would come and lift her off her feet, like a wave; but the fatigue and demoralisation she felt were
