choir was predictable. Obviously – and inevitably – more women than men, and women whose average age was pushing seventy. The youngest female members were an acne-plagued teenage girl and a thin, tough-looking woman in her forties. The girl Carole recognized from behind the till at Allinstore, Fethering’s uniquely inefficient supermarket. The woman she did not know, which, given the way the village worked, probably meant she came from elsewhere or was a recent arrival.
The male components comprised two. There was a bustling, bearded man in his early seventies, whom Carole did actually know. He was a retired schoolteacher called Ruskin Dewitt, who had also been a member of Leonard Mallett’s Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront committee. The other male was a boy enduring the aching awkwardness of early adolescence, whose main aim in life seemed to be not to catch the eye of the Allinstore checkout girl. So deficient was the choir in male voices that the church organist, whose name Carole happened to know was Jonny Virgo, joined lustily in all the singing.
As did Heather Mallett. Which still seemed odd to Carole. She supposed that, for someone to whom singing the praises of God was important, to do so might feel like the best tribute one could bring to the celebration of a husband’s life. But it still didn’t feel quite right. Carole disliked witnessing any divergence from the conventions and rituals that she didn’t believe in.
Nor was she the only person registering disapproval. In the front pew, next to the aisle, in the seat which might have been considered the rightful place of the widow, sat the deceased’s daughter, Alice Mallett. Though Fethering gossip placed her in her early thirties, she had the look of a recalcitrant schoolgirl. The loose black dress she wore failed to disguise her dumpiness, and the black straw Zorro-style sombrero had not been a good fashion choice.
Beside her sat a tall man of matching dumpiness, dressed in conventional pin-striped suit and black tie. His attentiveness to his companion suggested that he might be the fiancé Fethering gossip had announced Alice Mallett was about to marry. Regrettably, the full resources of the Fethering grapevine had not been able to come up with a name for him.
The All Saints choir was in place by the time the coffin entered, accompanied by Jonny Virgo the organist’s expert playing of Bach’s ‘Cantata No. 208 Sheep May Safely Graze’. The chief undertaker, in his tall black hat at the front of the procession, appeared to be enjoying his master-of-ceremonies role, and the pall-bearers looked more as if they were his employees than dignitaries of the insurance world.
As they lowered the coffin on to its waiting trestles, the vicar moved into position in front of the altar and requested that the congregation remain standing for the first hymn, predictably enough, ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, is Ended’.
‘… and the fact that we are all gathered here to see Leonard off on his final journey shows how much he meant to every one of us.’
Carole found the vicar’s words arguable. She certainly wasn’t in All Saints because the deceased had meant much to her. And looking round at the other attendees, she didn’t reckon he had figured a great deal in their affections either. It was just social convention, not any genuine emotion, that had brought them all out for the funeral. (Very occasionally, Carole Seddon worried that her cynicism about the motivation of her fellow human beings was increasing, but she could quickly reassure herself by observation of their behaviour, which showed no signs of improving.)
‘Leonard,’ the vicar went on, ‘was very successful in his professional career, in the world of insurance, and I am delighted to welcome many of his former colleagues to All Saints today for this … celebration of his life. When he moved down here to Fethering, he did not just put his feet up, as many retired people seem to do. He entered thoroughly into the affairs of our community, bringing those organizational skills which had served him so well in his business life, into “doing his bit” for our village. It was Leonard who set up a committee for the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront, and he did sterling work in …’
It was clear to Carole that, as was so often the case with contemporary funerals, the celebrant knew nothing about the person whose departure his church was hosting. Maybe the two had met through Heather’s connection with the choir, but Leonard Mallett had resolutely not been a church-goer. Clearly, the two men had spent very little time together.
Apart from anything else, the vicar was relatively new to the Parish of All Saints. Of course, the dearth of church-goers in Fethering did not mean that his arrival had passed unnoticed by the wider village community. He had already been much discussed and commented on, before and after he took up the post. Lack of interest in religion in no way precluded interest in a new vicar, which in a small village reached almost Jane Austen proportions.
Carole reviewed the dossier which Fethering gossip had already compiled on him. The Reverend Bob Hinkley had not spent his entire career in the church. He had worked ‘in industry’ and ‘apparently been quite high up’, though nobody could specify what industry he had been in, or how high up he had been in it. But he was said to have had a ‘Damascene conversion’ in his early fifties and decided then to train for holy orders. The career change had caused him, everyone agreed, ‘a serious loss of income’.
To the acquisitive minds of Fethering, this was definitely a bad thing. But perhaps not such a bad thing for Bob Hinkley as it might have been for most people. Because Bob Hinkley was rumoured to have ‘a rich wife’. It was here that the contents of the Fethering gossip dossier became rather sketchy. Because nobody had actually met his rich wife.
Since this largely invented person was not sharing the vicarage with her husband, the locals, once again going for the obvious explanation, deduced that there was ‘something wrong with the marriage’. The sages of the Crown & Anchor even speculated further that his wife wanted a divorce, but Bob wouldn’t entertain the idea because it didn’t fit his image as a man of the cloth, particularly one recently arrived in a new parish. Speculation in Fethering, as ever, had only a nodding acquaintance with the truth. When the village residents got better acquainted with the new vicar, no doubt his dossier would grow bigger and, hopefully, more accurate. They would even find out that he didn’t have a wife, rich or otherwise.
‘So,’ the droning encomium continued, ‘as our brother Leonard moves on from this world to a better one, it is with the comforting knowledge that he lived a fulfilling and useful life …’
Carole’s cynicism struck again. How could Bob Hinkley possibly know that? How could anyone ever be sure what actually went on in another person’s life? From what she’d seen of Leonard Mallett, he gave the impression of being a complete bastard.
She knew the All Saints church hall quite well. There were few rentable public spaces in Fethering, so it was impossible to live in the village for long without having to attend some function at the venue. And though it was regularly maintained by the local council, the space never felt welcoming. Each repainting of the interior favoured the same cream and pale green paint and, even when bunting was hung out for wedding receptions, or lametta for Christmas parties, the hall remained resolutely institutional. Appropriate, perhaps, for the wake after a funeral of someone you hadn’t known well, or particularly liked.
It was not natural sociability that prompted Carole to go to the church hall. Her instinct would have been to head straight from All Saints back to her house, High Tor, but her curiosity proved stronger. There was something about the Mallett family set-up that intrigued her. Maybe it was just Heather’s glasses and longer hair, a suggestion that the invisible woman of Fethering was about to become more conspicuous.
If that was happening, the process was clearly continuing at her husband’s wake. By the time Carole arrived in the hall, Heather was already quaffing champagne and laughing extravagantly in the centre of a group of her church choir cronies. Perhaps it was sheer relief at the end of the ceremony, or a complex reaction to the grief
