Relative Love (79 page)

Which was precisely why people had funerals, Frances reflected grimly, clenching her jaw as Felix stepped up behind the lectern, his fine, pale features flexed with the effort of managing his own emotions. To pay a public tribute to his father had been entirely his idea, his way, Frances supposed, of putting the seal of peace on what, recently anyway, had not always been the most harmonious of relationships. Daisy, more weepy than Frances herself, had been half appalled and half admiring of her younger brother’s determination in the matter.

‘I won’t be able to talk to anyone, let alone proclaim anything moving or clever from the pulpit. I’m dreading it, seeing everybody, knowing that they’re staring at you, feeling sorry for you, it’s unspeakable.’

‘It won’t be so bad,’ Frances murmured, stroking her daughter’s cropped mop of bleached hair, ‘people will be there to offer support, to show how much they liked and respected your father…’

‘And to see how much you cry, and whether you’re coping or cracking up. I know because I’m like that too – curious about other people’s misery – we all are.’ She seized a fresh tissue from the box which had taken up permanent residence on the kitchen table and left the room.

‘Leave her,’ growled Felix, seeing his mother push back her chair.

Frances had sunk back into her seat with a sigh. As with the glib responses she had been spouting for friends, some part of her was aware that she was merely going through the motions of offering comfort to her children. The truth was she felt too numb to offer anything. It took all her strength to walk through the course of each day, to open her eyes at dawn and maintain the pretence of being conscious and sane until an hour respectable enough to swallow one of the Valium tablets prescribed to her by Dr Leigham.

While Felix addressed the congregation, Frances clutched Daisy’s bony hand, inwardly longing for some of the protective numbing gauze that helped her drift off to sleep each night. Although with his head of sandy fair hair and delicate features he had always looked much more like her, his voice was uncannily like his father’s. Even the way his eyes flicked nervously between his script and the congregation reminded her of Paul, cautious but fundamentally confident, modest but ultimately sure of his place in the world. Although barely eighteen, Felix was just a couple of weeks from taking up a place at university. In many ways he already seemed much more mature than his twenty-year-old sister, who had dropped out of art college the year before in order to move to Paris with an art dealer boyfriend called Claude, to whom the family had barely been introduced. Frances swallowed hard in a vain attempt to dislodge a new lump blocking the back of her throat. Worrying about Daisy had been very much a shared burden, jointly taken up during the year their carefree, freckled twelve-year-old metamorphosed into a creature filled with enough self-revulsion to want to starve herself into nonexistence. Without Paul she wasn’t sure they would all have weathered the crisis as they did. He was always better at remaining calm, the one who stepped back and was rational, the weight of common sense that kept her rooted to the ground.

The image of Felix blurred. Frances’s cheekbones and jaw were beginning to ache with the effort of not crying, of keeping her mouth still and closed. Inside she could feel a howling, a swelling of private sound pushing to get out. She tried to focus on the coffin, but could think only how small it looked, how absurd it was that Paul’s impressive six-foot physique could fit inside. If Daisy’s hand had not remained clenched round hers she would have slid to the edge of the pew and raced out of the church, and run till her heart burst. A celebration of life, indeed. Who had she been trying to fool?

Outside in the fresh September air, the urge to howl receded. As the coffin was lowered into the plot, an orderly rectangle dug into the large, well-groomed graveyard backing on to St Martin’s church, Frances felt brave enough to glance along the semicircle of solemn faces on either side of her. Paul’s younger brother, Thomas, was standing ashen-faced, the palms of both hands resting on the shoulders of his youngest son. The child looked as mournful as his father, but self-consciously so, as if determined to prove equal to the adult emotional demands of the occasion. Next to them, Thomas’s wife, her eyes masked by stylish black sunglasses, fiddled nervously with a crumpled handkerchief. In the row behind was Frances’s own sister Carol, who had kindly flown over from New York. In high black heels she towered above the other women, the picture of pallid composure, her arm linked authoritatively through their mother’s. It was only at such times that not being a close family mattered, Frances reflected, casting around for a face that offered more reassurance and lighting upon Alistair and Libby Taverner, clustered together at the back with their four teenaged children. Their two families had met and become friendly ten years before, during the first few months after the Copelands’ move to the country. While Alistair and Paul had enjoyed manly bonding over the delights of trout fishing and a potent local brew of real ale, Frances’s and Libby’s fondness for one another had blossomed out of the more practical challenges of motherhood and school runs. Since the Taverners’ ramshackle farmhouse was only a couple of miles away, on the other side of Leybourne, friendships amongst the children had flourished for a time as well, until divergent interests and activities took them down separate paths.

Sensing she was being watched, Libby glanced up and offered Frances a tight smile of encouragement.

‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust…’

Even their hermit of a neighbour had turned up, Frances observed, touched in spite of herself at the sight of Joseph Brackman hovering awkwardly in the background, his sallow, unkempt features shrouded under the protective hood of his green anorak. When she looked again he was already dodging through the gravestones back to the main path.

‘You’re doing so well,’ murmured Libby, putting her arm across Frances’s shoulders for the walk back to the cars. ‘Are you sure you want people to come to the house? I mean if you’re not up to it I could easily—’

‘No, of course they must. Daisy and I have been up since dawn making sandwiches. Gave us something to do,’ she added with an attempt at a brave smile. ‘And there’s all that champagne from the party. Paul would have wanted us to make merry…’ Her voice tailed off, defeated by the sense that at last even the platitudes were running out of steam.

‘It’s an amazing turnout,’ said Libby gently. ‘You should be very proud. And Paul would have been proud of you, the way you’re getting through it, all three of you.’

Frances turned to check on the progress of Daisy and Felix who were walking arm in arm behind. At the sight of them, tucked so closely together, looking sombre and adult, she felt such a twist of protective love and terror that she almost groaned out loud.

A few mourners had taken the precaution of bringing brollies, but there was no need. Where grey skies during the previous few days had led to rainy afternoons, on this occasion the sun broke through just as most of the congregation were manoeuvring their cars off the muddy grass verge opposite the church gate. It was late early September at its most alluring, filled with the lush green legacy of a long wet summer, yet already heavy with the impending full arrival of autumn. It would be dry enough to use the garden, Frances realised with some relief, staring glassy-eyed out of the window as the long black car provided by the undertakers cruised round the narrow country lanes, its engine purring like a predatory beast.

With so many guests it was impossible not to be reminded of the party. They had used the garden then too, decked the branches of the apple trees with multi-coloured lights and positioned flame torches to mark the edges of the path and the perimeter fence separating the bottom of the garden from the path down to the river. The area of grass nearest the fence had been so boggy that Paul had placed several rows of wooden planks by way of a false floor, to minimise the amount of dirt being trailed through the house and to preclude the possibility of lost or ruined party shoes. The river was so full that for the first time that either of them could remember, it was lapping right up to the edge of the path itself, only a few yards from the garden gate. The cellar, in spite of the expensive water protective treatment injected into its walls a couple of years before, had flooded again, so badly that all Paul’s precious wine stocks had had to be moved upstairs to the spare bedroom.

A live jazz band, housed in a small marquee along with several round dining tables, had been one of the many memorable touches to the evening. The players performed tirelessly, providing a subdued serenade through supper and then raising the pace and volume once the furniture had been pushed back for dancing. Paul, an eager performer whenever the moment called, had led Frances by the tips of her fingers to the centre of the boarded floor, where he began jiving round her, much as he had at their wedding party twenty-one years before, ducking and swaying to the clapping encouragement of on-looking guests. Frances, moving as always with more reserve, had clapped too, happy for her husband to take the spotlight, happy to see him happy. It was his night. His swan-song, as it turned out.

Aided considerably by the necessity of distributing food, Frances managed to circulate amongst the mourners, accepting compliments about the service and offers of help. ‘Anything we can do, anything at all…’

But what? she wanted to ask. What could anyone possibly do? When the impulse to voice such retorts out loud grew dangerously strong, she dumped her triangular, whole meal, egg-and-cress offerings on the hall table next to Carol’s huge, still unwrapped bouquet of lilies, and fled upstairs to the sanctity of the spare room. She was sitting on the bed, winding the tassled hem of the counterpane round her fingers and sadly contemplating the case of vintage port which Paul had been saving for Daisy’s twenty-first, when Libby appeared in the doorway holding out a mug of tea.

‘Drink this. I’ve put in a spoonful of sugar, for energy. You’ll faint if you’re not careful.’

Frances dabbed at her eyes with the counterpane and accepted the drink gratefully. ‘Forty-three doesn’t feel old enough to be a widow…’

‘It isn’t. It’s hateful and unfair.’

‘I always thought seven years was a bit of a gap – I mean, I did wonder whether it would come to matter at some stage, whether Paul might go ga-ga like his mother somewhere in the run-up to eighty, while I, a mere sprightly seventy-year- old, would end up devoting the last few years of our married life to wiping dribbles from his chin and helping him shuffle to the loo…’ She broke off to let out a laugh which somehow transformed itself to a sob. ‘I just never thought…’

Libby squeezed her arm. ‘None of us did. We’re all in shock.’

‘I mean, just at the party, just two weeks ago, I thought – so many times – how well he looked, how young and energetic for his age. And it wasn’t just me – loads of people said things about how fit he was, joking about it…’

‘Drink your tea,’ murmured Libby, hoping she did not sound as at a loss as she felt inside. Paul Copeland had indeed been a model fifty-year-old, an amiable country solicitor who enjoyed the pleasures of life without taking them to excess. Libby’s own husband, Alistair, a forty-four-year-old self-employed architect, had for years been under far more daily stress than ever seemed to afflict the Copelands. Whereas Paul’s small practice had seemed impervious to the vagaries of the economy, Alistair was still reeling from the most recent recession. Without Libby’s own enterprise, a gift shop on the outskirts of Hexford with a maddeningly fluctuating profit margin, and Charlie and Beth’s music scholarships, they would long since have floundered in deep financial distress. Arrested by this particular train of thought she found herself blurting, ‘Are you all right for money? I mean, don’t they freeze everything for a while, probate and so on…’

‘They do, but I’m fine. Heaps of the bloody stuff. We’d just transferred some savings for a down payment on converting the garage. Which I’ve cancelled now of course…all Alistair’s lovely drawings…’ Frances broke off to take a swig of tea, scowling at the sweetness, but swallowing like a dutiful child. ‘From what I can gather I’ll get some kind of lump sum and also Paul’s pension – and we’d already put aside the money for Felix to go to university…’ She managed a wry smile. ‘From the point of view of being well-looked after, I couldn’t have asked for more.’

Seeing that she was on the verge of tears again and wanting to distract her, Libby leant across to study the two pencil sketches of Daisy and Felix which hung above the bed. ‘I love these. They ought to be downstairs instead of skulking up here where no one ever gets to appreciate them.’

Frances shook her head, muttering. ‘The children would be embarrassed to have their mother’s etchings of their formative years on public display. The sight of them always makes me feel guilty for somehow never having the time to get out my pencils and start on…’

The sentence hung incomplete between the two women, ensnared in the harsh truth of Frances’s new circumstances. The days of Paul appearing home four days out of five in the hope of a bowl of homemade soup for lunch were over. There was no longer anybody to cook for each evening, no shirts with fiendish double cuffs to iron. Soon, there would not even be Felix, who preferred to wear his clothes as crumpled as possible, but who nevertheless made considerable demands on the fridge and washing machine. Adjusting to his impending absence was something Frances had been dreading anyway. She would even miss the muffled thump of his music, the one apparently vital accoutrement to the business of revising for A levels which had driven his father – for whom silence had always been a prerequisite for mental exertion of any kind – into paroxysms of anger. Remembering the rows earlier in the year, Frances flinched and shut her eyes. Thinking of the bad times felt too disloyal. ‘I suppose I better go back downstairs,’ she said, not moving.

Libby crossed to the window and stared out with a sigh. ‘I think it might be going to rain after all.’