‘On the website, through some shops,’ I tell Octavia. ‘The usual.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That’s good – well done.’
I sink lower down into my scarf and look out at the dramatic, wind-flattened black trees, the yellow lichen, the startling green of the sea, crashing against the grey rocks, as the car bowls through the empty, muddy lanes, deeper into the countryside. I chew my lip, thinking.
I wonder if anyone has opened her studio since she died? I wonder, for the thousandth time, how Granny could have stopped painting all those years ago when I know how much the landscape around her meant to her, how it inspired her. But though no one ever says it, it’s obvious something died inside her with Cecily, and it never came alive again.
Archie slows down, and all of a sudden we’ve arrived at the church, perched high on the edge of the moor. I squint, and see the hearse pulled up outside the door. They are unloading the coffin. There, twisting an order of service over in her hands, is Louisa, and next to her, ramrod straight, stands my mother. The pallbearers are sliding the long coffin out – Granny was tall – and it hits me again, that’s her inside the wooden box, that’s her. Archie turns the engine off. ‘We’re here,’ he says. ‘Just in time. Let’s go.’
Chapter Four
Granny always knew what she wanted and so the funeral service is short and sweet. We slip into our seats and the coffin is carried in, my mother, Archie and Louisa walking behind it. I stare at Mum, but her head is bowed. We sit and listen to the minister in the small chapel with big glass windows, no adornment, no incense, everything plain. Outside, the wind whistles across the moors. There are two hymns, ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’ and ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’. The collection is for the RNLI. Louisa reads from Exodus. Archie reads an extract from A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. At Granny’s request there is no eulogy. That’s the only thing that is weird. No one gets up and speaks over Granny’s body, there in its oak coffin in the aisle of the church, and it feels strange not to talk about her, not to say who she was, how wonderful she was. But that was her instruction and, like all the others, it must be followed to the letter.
As we are all bashfully singing the second hymn, accompanied by a worn-out, clanging old piano, I look past my mother, to see if Arvind is OK. There’s no space for his wheelchair in the pews, so he sits in the aisle next to the coffin of his wife. It is rather ghoulish, but Arvind doesn’t seem to mind. He is the same as always; shrunken to the size of a child, his nut-brown head almost bald but for a few wispy black hairs. His eyes are sunk far into his head, and his mouth is pursed, like an asterisk.
He stares at me, as if I am a stranger. I smile at him, but there is no reaction. This is Arvind’s way, I’m used to it. It was only when I was old enough to know that a ‘That coat is lovely on you!’ means ‘That coat is garish and vile’ or a ‘Wow, I love your hair!’ means ‘Good God, who told you you could carry off a fringe?’, that I began to realise how lucky I was to have Arvind as my grandfather. He simply cannot dissemble.
Ignoring the hymn, he holds up the flimsy order of service and waves it at me. ‘Is it recycled?’ he says, in his incredibly penetrating, sing-song voice, which still has a strong Punjab accent sixty-odd years since he came to the UK. ‘Is their carbon footprint reduced? This is very important, Natasha.’
Separating us is my mother, in her sixties but still ravishing, in a long black tailored coat with an electric blue lining, her thick dark hair cascading down her back, her green eyes huge in her heart-shaped face. Now she looks down at Arvind.
‘Be quiet!’ she hisses.
‘We must all recycle everything, every little thing,’ Arvind tells me, leaning forward so he can catch my eye and speaking completely normally, as if it were just the two of us taking tea together. ‘China can carry on emitting more CO2 than the rest of the world put together, but it will be MY FAULT if the world ends, because I did not recycle my copy of PLAY. BOY.’ He finishes loudly, his voice rising.
‘Dad, shut up,’ Mum grips the top of his arm in rage. ‘You have to be quiet.’
‘Father,’ Archie says, rather pompously, behind us. ‘Please. Be respectful.’
‘Respectful?’ Arvind shrugs his shoulders, and waves his arms around in a grand gesture. ‘They don’t mind.’
I turn around, partly to see if he’s right and catch my breath as I see for the first time how many people are here. I hadn’t really noticed as we hurriedly took our seats, and more have arrived since then. They’re standing at the back, three deep in places, crammed into the small space. They are here for Granny. I blink back tears. Who are they? A lot of them are rather advanced in years. I guess some are friends from around here, some are people down from London, old friends from the golden days. I don’t recognise many of them. They are all watching this scene at the front of the chapel with interest.
Around me, my relatives are unamused. Archie is furious. Octavia looks as though a nasty smell is troubling her. Louisa is flustered, staring beseechingly at Arvind; her lovely brother Jeremy and his wife Mary Beth, who have flown in from California for the funeral, are studiously still singing. The Bowler Hat is officiously, soundlessly, opening and shutting his mouth, like a minister for Wales who doesn’t know the Welsh national anthem. Arvind catches my eye, winks, and goes back to the hymn. I stare at the sheet, unable to concentrate on the words, not sure whether to laugh or cry.
As the service ends and we process out to the churchyard for the burial, following Granny’s coffin, I realise I am leading my mother who has Archie by the arm while Jay pushes Arvind next to us. Louisa, the architect of this, has respectfully dropped behind, and it is just the four of us, my cousin and our parents, who have their arms around each other. I don’t know what we should be doing, other than following the minister. I grip Mum’s arm, feeling strange, and wishing someone else was here with us. I especially wish Sameena were here, but she’s in Mumbai visiting her sister who is not well, and she’s not flying back till next week.
Well, really, it’s Oli. I wish Oli were here, holding my hand. But of course he’s not, because I asked him not to come.
The graveyard looms, our small family totters towards it, disjointed and odd, and behind us comes Louisa, the de facto leader of her branch of the family, clutching her brother Jeremy’s hand.
‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’
My mother sobs, loudly, a great shuddering cry. Archie hugs her closer. Jay is watching the hole in the ground, intently, as if it is moving. Arvind is gazing into space, he doesn’t look as if he’s here at all.
They lower Granny’s coffin into the ground, and I look around again to see the congregation now assembled behind us, scattered in and around the lichen-covered gravestones on the edge of the moor. Suddenly I think of Cecily. Where’s her grave? I look around. Wouldn’t she have been buried here, too?
Granny was from here. But we, my mother and uncle, my grandfather and my cousin, we are from many other places as well. With a sudden flash of pain in my heart I long to be back in London, walking through the cobbled streets round Spitalfields and Bethnal Green, feeling the centuries of history in the city under my feet.
But now I’m away from it, now I see the emptiness of my life there, in a way I haven’t before. It is empty. A job I can’t do, a marriage I might lose, a life I don’t recognise. They are throwing more earth into the grave now, it patters softly on the wood, like rain. I feel my throat closing up.
When the crowd starts to disperse, gathering outside the church, getting into cars that are clogging up the tiny lane, we are all left around the grave. No one speaks. I look at their faces: Mum’s is a mask,