Joanna Trollope: The Other Family

Amy took a deep breath and glanced along the pew. Dad would have adored seeing them like that, sleek and styled and polished. She picked up her service sheet, almost ready to smile. There was – and it was a triumphant little realization – no comparison. None at al .

The gravel ed space in front of the church was ful , afterwards, of people standing about in the chil y sunshine, talking with the kind of animation born of social awkwardness. Scott wanted to steer Margaret through the throng, quite rapidly, and out into South Grove, towards Highgate Hil and down to the safe anonymity of the tube station. He’d already planned to buy her a gin and tonic at King’s Cross, and another on the train, and then take her out to dinner when they got home and send her back to Tynemouth in a taxi. But she was standing there staring, holding her bag over her arm like the Queen, her gloved hands folded in front of her. He put a hand under her elbow.

‘Come on, Mam, h’way—’

‘Don’t you h’way me,’ Margaret said. She twitched her elbow out of his grasp. ‘I can’t go til he’s gone.’

Scott fol owed the direction of her gaze. The undertakers, treading softly in their black orthopaedic shoes, were sliding Richie’s coffin into the gleaming black body of the hearse. The starry white flowers on top of the coffin, oddly ethereal and girlish, were ruffled by the wind, and those four women were standing in a row in front of them, watching.

‘There’s nothing to see—’

‘That’s not the point,’ Margaret said. She began to move forwards, through the crowd.

‘Mam—’ Scott said, in pursuit. ‘Mam. It’s going – he’s – it’s going to the crematorium—’

‘I know,’ Margaret said. She was dangerously close to those four black backs. ‘I know. But I can’t go until he’s gone.’

Scott was uncomfortably aware that people were staring at them, that some people, anyway, were remarking on how like Richie he looked. He took Margaret’s arm again, more firmly.

‘Mam—’

‘It isn’t right,’ she said. ‘It isn’t respectful. I came to say goodbye.’

‘Margaret,’ someone said.

They both turned. A heavily set man in a dark suit and a lavish black-satin tie was standing very close to them. He bent forward.

‘Margaret,’ he said, ‘Jim Rutherford.’ He kissed her cheek.

‘My God,’ Margaret said, ‘Jim Rutherford—’

He put large, flexible hands on her shoulders.

‘I wondered if you’d come. I thought about ringing you.’

‘Of course I came.’

‘Now I see you,’ Jim Rutherford said, ‘I remember that I shouldn’t have wondered any such thing.’ He glanced at Scott. ‘This your boy?’

Scott nodded. The undertakers had arranged the coffin and the flowers and were closing the doors of the hearse.

‘You won’t remember me,’ Jim Rutherford said. ‘Last time I saw you, you were only a nipper. Your dad and I ran you out down Tynemouth harbour wal . It was blowing fit to have your head off. You in the music business too?’

Scott shook his head.

‘I’m a lawyer—’

Jim Rutherford smiled.

‘As sensible as your mother, then.’ He looked down at Margaret again. ‘You bearing up then? You doing al right?’

‘Yes,’ Margaret said, ‘and why wouldn’t I?’

Jim Rutherford bent, and kissed her cheek again, and said, ‘Glad to see you, Margaret, very glad to see you,’ and as he straightened up the hearse slid away with Richie’s coffin in it and a sudden respectful silence fel upon the crowd like a blanket. Then Jim Rutherford stepped back, and Scott tightened his grip on his mother and the line of four black backs in front of them broke up, and swung round, and Chrissie and Margaret found themselves face to face, six feet apart, in an unexpected, unrehearsed moment of supreme drama.

Nobody said anything. The six of them confronted one another in a ring of startled spectators. A few interminable seconds passed and then Chrissie, like someone caught in the slow inexorable motion of an automatic revolving door, turned smoothly away and began to walk with purpose towards the road. Released from the intense potency of the moment, her daughters turned too, less smoothly, and went after her, hurrying to catch up, to touch her, to reconnect.

Margaret simply stood there, her arm in Scott’s grasp. People were looking at them now, looking and glancing, covert little snatches of reaction floating about like conversation heard down a stairwel . Scott cleared his throat. Margaret was not the only one in need of a gin and tonic.

‘Mam—’

She was stil gazing at the spot where Chrissie had stood only seconds before.

‘Wel ,’ Margaret said. ‘Wel . You never get what you expect. Do you?’

Chrissie had bought smoked salmon, and early strawberries flown in from Spain, and put two bottles of champagne in the fridge before they left for the church. She knew she wouldn’t be able to eat or drink at the reception after she and the girls went to the crematorium, and she knew that if they didn’t have something basic to focus on, like food and drink, when they got home, they were in for an evening as bad as – or perhaps in some ways almost worse than – the one on which Richie had died. The service had been bearable – just – but the crematorium had hardly been bearable at al , and Dil y had given a little scream when the coffin had, by virtue of some heartless modern mechanism, simply and silently sunk down on its plinth into a depth where no one’s imagination could bear to fol ow it. As with the drive back from the hospital the night Richie died, Chrissie wasn’t sure how she had got herself and the girls out of the crematorium and into the gleaming hired Lexus and back to confront al those hugs and smiles and champagne-flavoured offers of support, not to mention journalists and photographers asking her how she felt, wanting to take pictures of the girls in tears, asking them al to pose together, draped over one another in a stagy symphony of grief and loss.

Friends had suggested that they come back with them, that the late afternoon and evening would be better, easier, if the intensity of the four of them was diluted by other people, people who might, Chrissie’s friend Sue hinted, be able to remind them that Richie, of al people, believed life was for living and would be urging them to get on with it.

‘Tomorrow, maybe,’ Chrissie said. There was something about Sue’s smiling energetic desire to drive them forward out of the darkness and towards something more social y amenable that almost offended her. ‘It’s only been ten days. We’l get there, but we’l have to do it at our own pace.

And I don’t think, tonight, I could quite face—’

‘OK, sweets,’ Sue said. She’d put her arms round Chrissie, the way people perpetual y did in television soap operas. ‘You do what you need to do. But I’m there when you need me. I’l cal in the morning.’

‘Why didn’t you let her come?’ Dil y said later. She’d been strangely cheered by the sight of an ex-boyfriend, hovering at the edge of the reception, a boyfriend whom Richie had deemed a talented guitarist and who had abandoned Dil y for a scruffy little scrap of a girl with a cannabis habit and a deep smoky singing voice like the early queens of American blues. Yet here Craig was, at Richie’s funeral, and when Dil y said to him, sniffing, ‘Dad thought a lot of you, you little toerag,’ Craig said, ‘I didn’t come just for him,’ and that remark had given a sudden lift to spirits that Dil y had, only seconds before, believed would never rise again. So, a while later, she had felt a dawning renewal of her appetite for social life.

‘Why didn’t you let Sue come?’ Dil y said. ‘We could have had her and Fran and Kevin and the kids. Couldn’t we? It would have been a laugh.’