face each other. Behind them there is movement, the silent movie of the undertakers manoeuvring into position, the bare branches of the beech trees shifting in the wind and tissues falling like snow, soundlessly from sleeves onto soft grass, but the boy and the aunt are frozen.
‘Well, go on then, Mikey.’
But having not said hello, now he can’t find hello. Hello has gone and left nothing in its place. He takes a very deep breath as if to find hello, but his new for-the-funeral jacket is very tight and the new for-the-funeral tie is pressing on his throat and they won’t let hello back up again from wherever it’s hiding.
‘Hello, Michael!’ says Diana.
So, she had the word all the time.
Inside, there is space and light and whiteness and windows, and at the same time it is all mixed up with blackness and rumbling music and the coffin on a stand with the lid nailed shut. No one would hear you, even if you screamed. It strikes him as odd that although a lot of people die in Lockdown, you never see them buried. He can put that right if he becomes a person who makes computer games and he is wondering about that when suddenly, without warning, the coffin disappears. It is extraordinary, like magic, black magic, because there is a lot of black. His mum is right, all the people come in the front door and leave out the side except the dead person, who slides through the curtains and that’s that.
Chapter Six
Lunch is in a bankrupt country house where they’d made a business out of dying, plastering fire exit signs on the wood panelling and selling egg-and-cress sandwiches to mourners. It is every bit as ghastly as Diana has predicted; she is so relieved Edmund has not been forced to mingle with the half remembered remnants of her suburban past, it is bad enough for her. The old women cluster around the child as if mere proximity to youth can provide an antidote to the funeral, and of course it is all about Valerie, poor Valerie, hugs and kisses and condolences for Valerie; most of them barely remember that there was another daughter called Diana, or if they do, it’s for all the wrong reasons.
It strikes Valerie that probably both she and Diana are out of place here, for different reasons. If anything, Diana looks more lost, giving orders to the girls in black uniforms serving the tea rather than listening to the old folk with tears behind glasses and memories clasped in handbags. Valerie does try, she says things like, have you caught up with my sister Diana, she’s over there; oh yes, Diana, they say, I’ll see if I can catch her later. When it is all over, waiting for her sister in the empty hall, sprigs of green cress on the parquet floor and coffee spilled in saucers, Valerie realises it isn’t just her family that Diana turned her back on all those years ago, it was her younger self. As Mikey slips his hand in hers, she knows it isn’t such an easy thing to do, to step away from your childhood.
The automatic child locks on Diana’s 4x4 snap shut. Behind her, Mikey is asleep on the back seat. Valerie is also exhausted, she closes her eyes and allows the bland music on the radio and the hypnotic beat of the windscreen wipers to iron out her crumpled grief.
‘Wake up, they’re playing our song.’ Diana is singing along to something. Valerie doesn’t recognise it, but she doesn’t say so. When the song is finished, Diana apologises that Edmund is not going to be at Wynhope when they get there. He has to be in London, apparently.
That is a strange decision, not to go to your mother-in-law’s funeral, even if you didn’t invite her to your wedding, but blearily Valerie concludes it probably wasn’t the right sort of funeral, not his sort of people.
‘He worshipped his mother, but she died of cancer when he was ten and then his father was so depressed afterwards that he shot himself when Edmund was a teenager.’
The Google search Valerie did on her phone the night before brought up images of a country house, a good-looking tanned man with an oversized cheque for charity in his hands and a smile for the camera on his face and several old newspaper articles about a death at Wynhope House which she didn’t bother to read.
Diana explains. ‘He doesn’t really do funerals any longer, and who can blame him?’
Do not judge and you will not be judged, that’s what Solomon would be saying; he’s fond of that verse even though he’s the most unjustly judged of all.
Diana is moving the conversation on: who was at the funeral, faces half remembered, names forgotten. ‘How much had you seen of her?’ Indicating left, Diana pulls off the slip road and keeps her eyes fixed in front of her. ‘Mum, I mean.’
Arrows on road signs propel them through complicated junctions, traffic lights slow them, stop them, send them on their way, time runs away behind them leaving only tyre tracks on damp roads.
‘Not enough. It’s difficult to explain. Paul, he was a very controlling man, he cut me off, from her, and from you, I suppose.’ Crying does not seem acceptable in the Range Rover. ‘To be honest, I don’t think she forgave herself for not spotting what was wrong and coming after me. I wanted to tell her I didn’t blame her, but now of course . . .’
The right turn is badly judged, the oncoming car honks and Diana swears. ‘I don’t remember her coming after me either. Or did I miss her running down the road, pleading with me to come home?’
‘I think she tried, but Dad wouldn’t let her.’
‘Did she ever talk about me?’
The roads are smaller now, the twists and turns wake Mikey up, and Valerie whispers over her shoulder that they are nearly there. She hopes he’s not going to throw up.
‘Well?’
The silence stretches before them the length of the dark lane which is overhung with trees still black from winter and tall hedges rusted brown with last year’s leaves leaning in on them.
‘Thought not,’ says Diana.
She was never as quick off the mark as her sister, couldn’t just come up with the right words at the right time. Once, when she was very young, Diana told her she had to pay her for every word she ever used because Diana was the one who owned a dictionary. This isn’t an easy day for thinking or speaking, but it is too late now because Diana is saying here we are and ahead of them elaborate wrought-iron gates are swinging open to Wynhope House.
Swivelling round, Mikey watches the gates close behind him. He remembers he needs to ask about the coffin and the curtains, but probably not now.
‘Where’s the house, Mum?’ All he can see is grass, trees, sheep, birds, sky and an endless narrow road between painted railings.
‘Here!’ says Diana. ‘We’ve arrived.’
In front of the child, the house is enormous. One, two, three long windows; a dark green front door with a porch on pillars; one, two, three long windows on the other side; upstairs, almost the same; and then another layer of smaller windows on top of that with their own little roofs. Pointing at the top floor, his mum winks and whispers to him that those are the rooms where they lock up the servants; in a louder voice she tells his aunt that the place is amazing, beautiful, she’s never seen anything like it.
There aren’t any words Mikey can really think of to describe it, so he doesn’t say anything. To him, the whole house looks like when you cut things out of paper and unfold it, both sides of the snowflake the same. Except. Except over on one side is a tower, just like a tower in a book with pointy bits and church windows and stone faces. It doesn’t
