ONE
The trouble is, thought Carole Seddon peevishly, that no one knows any of the old hymns any more. Though devoutly anti-religious, she did have standards when it came to certain matters of British tradition. And she was strongly of the view that children should be brought up to know the basic repertory of hymn tunes that she’d had to learn at their age.
Carole was not a frequent visitor to All Saints Church in the village of Fethering. Lack of faith precluded regular Sunday attendance and, as a divorced woman in her fifties, she was not invited to many weddings or christenings. So, it was just funerals, really. And it was a funeral that had brought her to All Saints that Thursday morning in late February.
She had not known the deceased, Leonard Mallett, well, nor liked him very much. Of his professional career, in the world of insurance, she knew nothing. But they had both been on the same committee, which he had chaired, for the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront. Though the group only met a couple of times a year, Carole had found out through the local grapevine that most of the other members would be attending the funeral. So, after the disproportionate amount of soul-searching that she brought to every social situation, she’d decided she ought to join them. Though Leonard himself was obviously beyond being offended, and Carole hardly knew his wife Heather, she still felt the danger that her absence might be interpreted as some kind of snub (unaware of the more likely truth that it simply wouldn’t be noticed).
So, she was there in the church. Though there are many beautiful old churches in West Sussex, some dating back to Saxon times, All Saints Fethering was not one of them. It had been built by the Victorians in dour dark red brick and seemed somehow too high and cavernous ever to feel welcoming. As with every such institution in the country, the age of its dwindling congregation mounted with each passing year, and there didn’t seem to be many young people leaping in to replace those called to a Higher Place.
Leonard Mallett’s funeral, however, had very nearly filled the church. Despite arriving characteristically early, Carole had been ushered into one of the side pews. This vantage point, though not in the favoured central block, gave her a good view of the altar and choir stalls, and of the trestles on which the deceased’s coffin would shortly rest.
At the door, she had been handed an order of service. A quick glance through its contents revealed no surprises. The hymns were totally predictable. As were the readings, even down to the inevitability of Joyce Grenfell’s ‘If I should die before the rest of you’ and Henry Scott Holland’s one about having ‘slipped away to the next room’. (Carole had nothing against either of them as poems; she just wished people might occasionally choose something else. But funerals were rare and stressful events for most people, so perhaps it was too much to hope for originality.)
On the order of service’s cover there was a colour photograph of Leonard Mallett. Characteristically unsmiling, he wore the frustrated expression of a man who wasn’t at that moment getting his own way. It was not a face that inspired affection.
But something about the man had inspired the healthy turnout for his funeral. There were a few Fethering regulars, some members of the Seafront committee, to whom Carole gave minimal nodding acknowledgement, but most of the congregation were unfamiliar to her. Presumably people from Leonard’s former London life, senior managers from the world of insurance, who had ventured down to the South Coast to pay their dutiful respects in the forbidding draughtiness of All Saints Fethering.
Somehow, to Carole, the church’s bleak austerity felt appropriate for the funeral of someone she had hardly known.
In Fethering, of course, the fact that you hardly knew someone didn’t mean that you were totally ignorant of their circumstances. Gossip could be relied on to generate an extensive dossier, based on some fact and much conjecture, about every resident of that South Coast village. And, although Carole had received none of the information from the man himself, she knew that Heather was Leonard Mallett’s second wife, though it was a first marriage for her. They’d had no children together, but he had a daughter with his first wife, who had subsequently died (though nobody knew exactly when). The girl was called Alice. She was rumoured to be an actress who didn’t get much work, but who lived quite comfortably in London on an allowance from her father.
Fethering gossip had it that Alice was engaged to be married. It also said that she didn’t get on with her stepmother. Though there was evidence about the forthcoming wedding, because it was due to take place at All Saints, the bit about tensions between the two women was pure speculation. But then Fethering gossip always tended to go for the rather simplistic fairy-tale interpretation of family relationships. It wouldn’t entertain the idea of a stepmother and stepdaughter who got on well together.
Leonard Mallett was said to have been some fifteen years older than his second wife. He had moved to the village, into a large house called Sorrento on the exclusive Shorelands Estate, towards the end of a long and lucrative career bossing people about in insurance. After a few years of daily commuting to London, he had devoted his retirement to bossing people about in Fethering. It was on his initiative that the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront committee had been set up, and the fact that he had persuaded Carole Seddon, not by nature a joiner of anything, to become a member, was a measure of his bossing skills.
She had not enjoyed his hectoring manner at meetings, but could not fault the fact that he had set up the committee. On her morning walks with her Labrador, Gulliver, she had become increasingly aware of the pollution affecting Fethering Beach. Every day’s tides deposited more tar-soiled plastic items on the shoreline. And tourists seemed deliberately to avoid the litter bins on the prom, preferring to scatter their burger boxes, polystyrene chip trays and ice-cream wrappers directly on to the ground. As she grew older, and perhaps since she had been blessed with two granddaughters, Carole had become increasingly worried about the legacy of pollution being bequeathed to future generations.
Fethering gossip’s dossier on Heather Mallett was less detailed than the one it had compiled on her husband. This was in part because she was rarely seen around the village. Though Leonard was a constant and loud presence at all Fethering events, and particularly in its only pub, the Crown & Anchor, his wife kept herself to herself. She was rarely to be seen shopping on the Parade. Presumably, she favoured the large anonymous supermarkets, like Sainsbury’s in Rustington, over the local outlets. The only guaranteed sightings of her in the village were at church on Sundays, and at Friday rehearsals for the All Saints choir, of which she was a diligent member.
Heather Mallett was a pallid creature, who favoured anonymous colours: beige, light pinks and taupe. Though probably about the same age as Carole, she had the resigned air of a woman who did not expect post-menopausal life to yield any excitements. Unlike Carole, whose hair had been cut in the same helmet shape since schooldays when it was dark brown until now when it was grey, Heather’s hair, that pale blonde which edges almost imperceptibly into white, was cut very short. Like Carole, she usually wore undistinguished rimless glasses.
That was the first thing about her at the funeral that looked odd. In place of the familiar, almost transparent pair, Heather Mallett was wearing glasses with thick, oxblood-coloured frames. They looked almost fashionable, and certainly emphasized the rather fine brown eyes which nobody had ever noticed before. She had let her hair grow longer too. And the black trouser suit she wore was almost ‘sharp’, making a definite change from her normal dowdy appearance.
The other odd thing that morning in All Saints was that Heather Mallett did not follow the coffin into the church, in the customary manner of a newly bereaved widow. Nor did she subsequently take her place in the front pew, attended by sympathetic family members. Instead, she had entered earlier, with the rest of the choir, all of whom wore their usual clothes rather than cassocks. Following someone’s directive – possibly the widow’s – they had not
