about her pet rabbit, Matilda, and our old dog, who recognized her step even when he was old and blind. (Alan did not mention the dog’s incontinence and appallingly bad breath.) He talked about their meeting at university, the rocky road of their romance and the happy years of their marriage. He waxed lyrical about the dedication she had brought to her career as a primary teacher and the devotion her pupils gave her in return. Finally, by way of peroration, he talked of their children, Matthew and Alice, as the crowning joys of her life.
The children were sitting in the front row. I had caught a glimpse of them as they came in. They both looked like Alan, poor kids, all long nose and small chin; there was not a trace of Mary. Maybe that was no bad thing.
What else? We had two readings, one by a teacher colleague of Mary’s (something vaguely uplifting from Kahlil Gibran) and another by an old boyfriend whose face was faintly familiar (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways …’). We sang, or mouthed, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, on the tacit understanding that it had somehow been purged of its religious connotations. Then the curtains parted and the coffin slid away into the industrial processing of death.
At no point did Alan mention me. Nor did he meet my eyes. I had been erased from the story of Mary’s life. I was invisible.
There was an order of service, a little booklet with the verses of ‘Jerusalem’ and the texts of the readings. On the front was a vignetted photograph of Mary, which I looked at while the coffin slid between the curtains to the accompaniment of Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’.
The picture must have been taken a year or so earlier. She was smiling at the camera. The light caught the angles of her face – the high cheekbones, the dark eyebrows, the full lower lip; my features as well. Her hair covered most of her forehead, so I couldn’t see the scar. Something about the photo suggested that she had been one of a group – a birthday celebration, perhaps, or a reunion. She looked older than she was in my memory. Happier, too.
Everyone, Alan said just before we left, was welcome to join the family for a cup of tea and a sandwich in the village hall, which was two miles away.
We filed out. There was an unspoken etiquette about this – the family went first, for they were at the top of the hierarchy of grief. Then came the close friends, I guessed, then the colleagues from work. Finally, the people in the back rows went outside. People who hadn’t known her well. People who were merely curious. People like me, the ghosts from Mary’s past.
It was still raining. The wind had risen and the trees between the chapel and the car park were swaying and rustling. The mourners of the next cremation were already arriving and the car park was crowded. Two or three of us paused, waiting to let a car go by.
‘I wonder who they’ve got to do the sandwiches,’ said a woman at my elbow, one of the pair who had been sitting in the row in front of me. ‘I hope it’s Harrell’s.’
‘Or Thurston’s.’ Her friend lowered her voice. ‘You wouldn’t have guessed, would you?’
‘That it was …?’
‘Of course, they couldn’t be sure, so they said it was an accident. For the family’s sake. You can’t blame them, can you?’
They moved away. I hesitated near the exit road. A queue of cars inched towards the main road. A silver Renault paused a few feet away. I glanced at the driver’s window and saw Alan looking up at me. The girl was beside him in the front, the boy was in the back.
Alan didn’t lower the window. His face was perfectly blank. I raised my hand in a tentative salute. His head turned away. Perhaps I really was invisible. The queue rolled forward.
I went back to my own car, sat behind the wheel and stared at the blurred windscreen. What had I expected? A quiet reconciliation over Mary’s body? A tacit agreement that her death must bring us all together?
I became aware that I had something in my hands. I looked down at my lap. I was still holding the order of service. Quite unconsciously, I had rolled it into a cylinder and squeezed it out of shape.
I unrolled the booklet and smoothed it out on my thigh. As it happened, it was face down. There was another photograph on the back, a sort of companion piece to the one on the front.
This one was also a vignette taken from a larger image. It was in black and white and better quality than the one on the front. It showed the Mary I remembered best, her hair scraped back in a ponytail from her forehead. If you’d seen her from the front in those days, you’d have thought she was a boy.
Behind her was part of a wall and the sill of a sash window. I knew with the sharp certainty of childhood memory that she had been standing outside the dining room window, where my father often took photographs of us.
Mary was grinning. There was a lot of detail in the photograph. I could even make out the scar on her forehead, a squarish indentation, paler than the surrounding skin. She had gashed her head when she fell off the roof of the garden shed.
That hadn’t been an accident. Nor, it seemed, had her death.
I hadn’t seen Mary for thirteen years – not since our mother’s final illness and the aftermath of her death. In the ten years before that, she and I had met perhaps half a dozen times, and always in some way because of our parents. Even on that subject, if it was possible for us to disagree, we generally found a way, whether it was the best retirement flat, the best form of medical treatment or even how much milk to put in Mother’s tea.
Both of us knew that the real problem lay far deeper than this, in our shared childhood. Mary was more than four years younger than me. She said once that I’d resented her from the moment she was born, purely because she drained our parents’ attention away from me. Quite simply, she said, I was jealous.
It’s true that four years is a big age gap between children. When we were young, Mary never seemed quite real to me – more like an animated toy I had no desire to play with. A toy that was forever too young for me. Forever unwanted.
There is no doubt that I was unkind to her, on occasions cruel. I did the things that older brothers do to their sisters. I put a spider in her breakfast cereal and a frog in her bed. I hid one of her school shoes, which made her late for assembly and caused her to get a detention. And I pushed her off the shed roof. That’s what caused the little scar on her forehead. She had hit her head on a nail that protruded slightly from the post that supported the washing line.
‘I’ll get you!’ she wailed, blood dripping down her face. ‘One day when I’m bigger, I swear it! I hate you!’
It must have been a month or two after that my father took the photograph.
I had learned that Mary was dying about three weeks earlier. Neither she nor Alan told me. It was my aunt, my mother’s younger sister, who had married a sergeant in the USAAF and gone to live in Phoenix, Arizona. Mary had emailed her with the news.
My aunt knew of the rift between us, but, even so, she assumed I would have heard about something so momentous. She mentioned it when we were talking on Skype.
‘Pancreatic cancer,’ she said. ‘There are secondaries all over the place – there’s nothing they can do. It could be any time, Alan said.’
