S. Watson: Second Life

But I hadn’t, had I? I’d run away to Berlin. I’d taken her son. I’d left her to die.

‘What happened?’ I say again.

Hugh is patient. ‘Darling, we don’t know. But they’re doing everything in their power to find out.’

At first I’d thought it would be better for Connor to stay away from Kate’s funeral. He was too young, he wouldn’t cope. Hugh disagreed. He reminded me that our father hadn’t let me and Kate go to our mother’s and I’d resented him for the rest of his life.

I had to concede he was right, but it was the counsellor who decided the matter. ‘He can’t be protected,’ she said. ‘He has to deal with his grief.’ She hesitated. We were sitting in her office, the two of us. She had her hands folded on the desk in front of her. I was looking at the marks on her hands, tiny abrasions. I wondered if she was a gardener. I pictured her, kneeling beside flower beds with pruning shears, deadheading roses. A life she can return to, when this is over. Unlike us.

‘Julia?’

I looked up. I’d missed something.

‘Does he want to go?’

When we got home we asked him. He thought about it for a while, then said he’d like to, yes.

We bought him a suit, a black tie, a new shirt. He looks much older, wearing them, and walks between me and Hugh as we go into the crematorium. ‘Are you all right?’ I say, once we’ve sat down.

He nods, but says nothing. The place feels drenched with pain, but most people are silent. In shock. Kate’s death was violent, senseless, incomprehensible. People have retreated within themselves, for protection.

Yet I’m not crying, neither is Connor, and neither is his father. Only Hugh has looked at the coffin. I put my arm around our son. ‘It’s all right,’ I say.

People continue to file in behind us and take their seats. There is shuffling, voices are hushed. I close my eyes. I’m thinking of Kate, of our childhood. Things were simple, then, though that is not to say they were easy. After our mother died our father began drinking heavily. His friends – mostly artists, painters, people from the theatre – started spending more and more time with us, and we watched our house become the venue for a kind of rolling party that sputtered and faltered but never quite stopped. Every few days new people would arrive just as others left; they would be carrying more bottles and more cigarettes, there would be more music, sometimes drugs. Now I can see that this was all part of our father’s grief, but back then it had felt like a celebration of freedom, a binge that lasted a decade. Kate and I felt like unwelcome reminders of his past, and though he kept the drugs away from us and told us he loved us, he was neither inclined nor able to be a parent and so it’d fallen to me to look after us both. I would prepare our meals, I’d put a squirt of paste on Kate’s toothbrush and leave it out at bedtime, I’d read to her when she woke up crying and made sure she did her homework and was ready for school every day. I held her and told her that Daddy loved us and everything would be all right. I discovered I adored my sister, and despite the years between us we became as close as twins, the connection between us almost psychic.

Yet she’s there, in that box, and I’m here, in front of it, unable even to cry. It’s beyond belief and, somewhere, I know I let her down.

There’s a tap on my shoulder. I turn round. It’s a stranger, a woman. ‘I just wanted to say hello,’ she says. She introduces herself as Anna. It takes me a moment to place her; Kate’s flatmate, we’d asked her to do a reading. ‘I wanted to tell you how sorry I am.’

She’s crying, but there’s a kind of stoicism there. A resilience. ‘Thank you,’ I say, and a moment later she opens the bag on her lap. She hands me a sheet of paper. ‘The poem I picked… d’you think it’s okay?’

I scan the poem, even though I’ve already read it in the order of service. ‘To the angry,’ it begins, ‘I was cheated, but to the happy I am at peace.’ I’d thought it an odd choice, when surely anger is the only response possible, but I say nothing. I hand the sheet back. ‘It’s great. Thank you.’

‘It’s one I thought Kate might like.’ I tell her I’m sure she’s right. Her hands are shaking and, even though the reading isn’t long, I wonder how she’s going to get through it.

She does, in the end. Though upset, she draws on some inner reserve of strength and her words are clear and strong. Connor watches her, and I see him wipe a tear away with the back of his hand. Hugh’s crying, too, and I tell myself I’m being strong for them both, I have to keep myself together, I can’t let them see me fall apart. Yet I can’t help wondering whether I’m kidding myself and the truth is I can’t feel any pain at all.

Afterwards I go over to Anna. ‘It was perfect,’ I say. We’re standing outside the chapel. Connor looks visibly relieved that it’s over.

She smiles. I think of Kate’s phone calls over the last few weeks and wonder what Anna thinks of me, what my sister had told her.

‘Thank you,’ she says.

‘This is my husband, Hugh. And this is my very dear friend, Adrienne.’

Anna turns to my son. ‘And you must be Connor?’ she says. He nods. He holds out his hand for her to shake it, and for a moment I’m struck again by how grown up he seems.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he says. He seems totally lost, unsure how he’s supposed to behave. The carefree boy of just a few weeks ago, the child who would race into the house, pursued by three or four friends, to pick up his football or his bike, seems suddenly to have gone. The boy who would spend hours with his sketch pad and some pencils has disappeared. I tell myself it’s temporary, my little boy will be back, but I wonder if that’s true.

We carry on talking, for a while, but then Hugh must sense Connor’s distress and suggests they make their way over to the cars. Adrienne says she’ll go with them, and Hugh turns to Anna. ‘Thank you for everything,’ he says, and he shakes her hand again before putting his arm around Connor’s shoulders. ‘Come on, darling,’ he says, and the three of them turn away.

‘He seems a nice lad,’ says Anna, once they’re out of earshot. The wind has whipped up; there’ll be rain soon. She smooths her hair away from her mouth.

‘He is,’ I say.

‘How’s he coping?’

‘I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet.’ We turn and walk towards the flowers that have been arranged in the courtyard outside the chapel.

‘It must be hard for him.’

I wonder how much she knows about Connor. She and my sister were old friends; Kate told me they’d known each other at school, though only vaguely, through other people. A few years ago they’d reconnected through Facebook and quickly realized they’d both moved to Paris. They met for drinks and a few months later Anna’s flatmate moved out of her apartment and Kate moved in. I’d been pleased; my sister hadn’t always found it easy to keep friends. They must have talked a great deal, yet Kate could be secretive, and I imagine the painful subject of Connor was something she might not find easy to raise.

‘He’s okay,’ I say. ‘I think.’

We’ve reached the south-west wall of the crematorium, the wreaths, the white chrysanthemums and pink roses, the sprays of white lilies pinned with handwritten cards. I bend down to read them, still not quite understanding why it’s Kate’s name I see everywhere. Just then the sun breaks through the clouds and for the briefest of moments we’re lit by its brilliance.

‘I bet he’s quite a handful,’ says Anna, and I stand up. Connor’s a good lad, no trouble at all. We decided to tell him the truth about his background as soon as he was old enough to understand it.