The Last Anniversary (12 page)

T
he morning of Aunt Connie’s funeral there is frost on the grass outside Sophie’s flat.

‘Sophie, Sophie, Jack Frost has been!’ Gretel used to call on mornings like this, with such excitement in her voice that Sophie would leap from her bed and run to her window to see their white-spangled front lawn.

Sophie had believed in Jack Frost, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for an embarrassingly long time. It was her mother’s fault. She was too good an actress. For example, she described accidentally running into Santa Claus one night in the kitchen when she went to get a glass of water in such authentic-sounding detail: Santa had had such a fright that he’d said ‘Lordie me!’ and had to sit down and have a Milo and an Iced Vo Vo. He’d got crumbs in his beard. From outside on the driveway Gretel could hear the sleigh bells jingling in the breeze and the reindeers snorting and pounding their hooves.

On Christmas Eve and frosty mornings Sophie still feels a faint shivery tingle of that old magic. It makes her feel better as she eats her porridge. Aunt Connie’s funeral seems like some sort of horrible public-humiliation test.

She wears the black dress because Claire had been so adamant that it was right. Sophie has lost all confidence over what is right or wrong about this whole thing.

The funeral is at noon at Glass Bay. She plans to go in to work for a couple of hours and then catch a train from the city to Glass Bay, where she can get a cab to the church. She has allowed an hour and a half, to give herself plenty of time. Timing is crucial. Too early will appear too eager:
OK, let’s get this over with so I can get my hands on the old biddy’s house.
Too late will appear blasé:
Just dropping by to pay my respects…by the way, where are the keys to this house I’ve been hearing about?

In the end she is running late. A girl tumbles excited into Sophie’s office to make a report of sexual harassment. She has clearly not been sexually harassed (you should be so lucky, Sophie catches herself thinking, rather unprofessionally) but these things must be gently defused like a ticking explosive device.

Then the train stops inexplicably for twenty minutes in between stations. By the time she gets to Glass Bay and she is pelting up the stairs in her stilettos, she is hyperventilating with a mix of guilt and nerves.

There are pounding footsteps behind her and a man in a suit is suddenly running by her side. ‘You’re not going to Connie Doughty’s funeral, are you?’

‘Yes, I am,’ she says breathlessly as they both keep running.

‘Me too,’ he says. ‘We’ll share a cab then. That train–could you believe it? I was bashing my head against the window.’

Sophie laughs. ‘I was thumping my fist against the seat in front of me.’

She manages to get a fleeting impression of a big nose and deep laugh-lines. He is running easily, his briefcase held under one arm.

Stop it, she thinks. Stop it. It’s not him. If you think it’s him, it won’t be him.

‘Here’s one!’

She watches him run ahead and flag down a cab.

Nice square, broad back.
Stop it!

He turns around and smiles at her. ‘Our luck’s changing.’

Well, mine certainly is. His smile is funny and friendly and sexy all at once.
Stop it, stop it, stop it!

He opens the cab door for her and she slides across the seat. He hops in beside her and gives the cabbie the address of the church. It seems like the space in the back of the cab is very small and intimate. She can smell his aftershave. As he pulls back his sleeve to check the time she can see his very masculine-looking forearm. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Sophie!

‘Well, hello,’ she says. She can feel her smile is radiant and possibly beautiful. ‘I’m Sophie Honeywell.’

‘Aha,’ he says. He raises one quizzical eyebrow, James Bond style. He really is extraordinarily sexy. ‘So
you’re
Sophie.’

Oh God, it seems like it has been years since the last time she has felt this. Instant mutual attraction. She is not imagining this. Chemistry is frothing and fizzing all over the place. She can feel it in her kneecaps.

He reaches out to shake her hand. ‘Hello, Sophie.’

Sophie puts her hand in his: warm, dry, enfolding hers. She lets her eyes drop to her watch. It’s five to noon.

I knew. I knew the moment we sat in the cab and your father shook my hand. It was five to noon on Thursday the second of…

‘I’m Callum,’ he says. ‘Callum Tidyman. Grace’s husband.’

R
ose sits right at the end of the front pew of the church next to the aisle, with her walking stick propped up beside her. The seat offers no support for the lower back and already she can feel a stabbing pain. Oh,
sugar
! It hurts. It really hurts. She has to stop herself from crying out, that’s how much it hurts. If her back had ever hurt like this when she was twenty she would have been hysterical, demanding painkillers and cups of tea in bed, but she has found that nobody is especially surprised to hear you’re in pain when you’re in your eighties.
You
might find it astonishing, but nobody else does.

People are murmuring to each other, or sitting silently, hands clasped carefully on their laps, looking self-consciously solemn. Occasionally there is a hollow-sounding cough. Funerals all have the same smells and sounds. The cloying, nose-twitching scent of lilies. That muted rustling. Sometimes, a sudden, shocking, uncontrollable sobbing. Although there is not much sobbing at the funerals Rose seems to spend so much of her time attending these days. People would consider it excessive and rather Italian if you started wailing at the death of an elderly person. Instead, you say things like, ‘Well, he had a good innings, didn’t he!’

No surprise you’re in pain, no surprise you’re dead. You’re old. That’s what is meant to happen. We don’t care that
you
forget you’re old. We
know
you’re old.

Rose thinks of that poem she used to like and is pleased with herself when she can remember the first few lines.

That’s right, she thinks. We should all be raging and raving and brandishing our walking sticks:
We don’t want to go! And by the way, we want our legs and arms and backs to stop HURTING!!

She will ask Thomas to find the rest of that poem on the Internet for her. He can find anything on his lap computer. He’s a sweet boy, Thomas. Such a pity it didn’t work out with Sophie. They’d all liked Sophie.

‘What’s the hold-up? It’s so chilly in here!’

Enigma is sitting on Rose’s left, jiggling around in her bright red outfit. Her feet don’t quite touch the ground. When Rose looks straight ahead she can almost believe that it’s still a little girl sitting next to her, not a seventy-two-year-old Enigma.

‘Rose? Isn’t it cold! You’d think they’d have a heater. No need to make us feel like we’re in a morgue just because we’re at a funeral, eh? Rose?’

Rose ignores her. She doesn’t feel like talking. Enigma makes an offended sound and turns to talk to Margie, who is sitting on her other side and never ignores her mother.

Rose and Connie had chuckled, just last week it was, about how funerals had become their new hobby. Throughout their lives they’d taken up various convivial pastimes together–tennis, art classes, lawn bowls. Now they’d taken up funerals.

Their friends had got so old that whenever Connie bought a get-well card she also bought a sympathy card at the same time, to save herself the trouble of going back to the newsagent when they didn’t ‘get well’. Rose had thought that was just terrible, but Connie always liked to be the practical one.

The light inside the church is like twilight, shadowy and strange, making it hard for Rose’s eyes to distinguish anything except the giant stained glass picture at the front, which makes her flinch with its assault of colour: ruby, emerald and sapphire. The picture features a handsome, melancholy Jesus stretching out an imperious, drooping hand to his poor mother, who kneels distraught at his feet. Both Jesus and Mary have glowing circles around their heads, like psychedelic motorcycle helmets, and they’re surrounded by macabre baby-faced angels.

Why did you want a church, Connie? Is this your last shot at pretending we’re good Catholic girls?

It is unbearable to think that she won’t ever hear Connie’s acerbic response.

Above the stained glass there is a window revealing a square of pale blue sky and a wispy cloud. The sky looks comfortingly mundane compared to the garish kaleidoscope of the stained glass. It makes Rose yearn to be reliving any one of a thousand ordinary days spent with her ordinary older sister, who has now done this extraordinary thing and died.

A lifetime of ordinary moments crowd her head. Teenagers, sitting in a train station, picking at the green peeling paint of their chair and bickering desultorily over something to do with a pair of shoes. In their forties, driving somewhere, running late, looking for a parking spot. ‘There! On your right! Too late, you ninny!’ Little girls, fishing off Sultana Rocks: Connie holding a frenzied flapping slimy-silver fish trapped with her foot, while Rose crouched down to remove the hook, saying ‘I’m sorry!’ to the begging-for-mercy eye. Whole afternoons with baby Enigma on that old red checked rug in the backyard when the jacaranda tree was in full purple bloom. They didn’t have the slightest inkling of how to look after a baby. They made it up as they went along and played with her like two children with a doll.

Thousands of cups of tea. Thousands of conversations about what to eat and what to wear and how to get there. Thousands of shopping trips. Thousands of circuits of the island: running when they were children, strolling languidly when they were teenagers, power-walking with hand-weights when they were middle-aged and worried about cholesterol and osteoporosis, and then slower and benter and even slower, until they bought their ‘hotted-up’ bikes, the best thing they ever did, and once again they were children again, with the air skimming their cheeks as they soared around the new unfurling sandstone footpaths that always reminded Rose of the yellow-brick road in
The Wizard of Oz
.

I didn’t properly appreciate one damned moment.

Someone starts a CD and music begins to play. ‘What a Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong. It must be Connie’s choice. According to Margie, Connie has specified every tiny detail for her funeral.

Rose didn’t even know she liked this song.

People turn their heads towards the back of the church, keeping their faces blank, reminding themselves that they’re here to see a coffin, not a bride. Rose twists slightly in her seat and her back shrieks in pain. There is no surprise about Connie’s choice of pallbearers: Jimmy’s four nephews who used to come and stay on the island for school holidays.

The boys are men in their fifties now, but to Rose, as she watches them walk down the aisle, they don’t seem all that different from the four little boys they were. None of them have lost their hair: they still have identical curly mops, like clowns. They were extremely naughty children, always breaking things. You had to watch them like hawks. As they walk down the aisle of the church, each with one shoulder hunched to carry the gleaming coffin, their heads solemnly bent, Rose realises she is still carefully monitoring their behaviour, as if at any moment they’ll let the coffin crash to the ground and go pelting off to play with their water pistols.

Connie was always very good with the boys, whereas Rose felt a bit scared of them and tried to cover it up by acting too strict and schoolmarmish. Connie cooked them enormous meals and she and Jimmy had midnight water fights with them, whooping around the island in the moonlight.

It should be Connie’s own sons carrying the coffin, not Jimmy’s sister’s children. Jimmy should have let her adopt. He’d let her do anything else she wanted. Rose feels a fresh surge of anger, as if it had all happened yesterday. She should have spoken up after the war, when it became clear that Jimmy and Connie would not be contributing to the baby boom. She should have said, ‘Don’t be so stubborn, Jimmy. It doesn’t suit you. Pick something else to be stubborn about, if you must prove yourself a man, but let her adopt a baby for heaven’s sake!’ People thought bringing up Enigma gave Connie all the mothering she needed. Rose was the only one who knew why Enigma wasn’t enough. Rose was the only one who knew, without ever talking about it, how much Connie yearned for her own babies. The problem was that Jimmy got in a bad mood when he learned the truth about Alice and Jack. That was his ace and he played it. Connie should never have told him. It offended his pride. Made him feel silly. ‘You women have all been sniggering behind my back!’ he kept saying.

The coffin passes and Rose looks at her lap. Next to her Enigma is sobbing with abandon into a man’s handkerchief. Ever since she was a baby, Enigma has cried when she’s unhappy and laughed when she’s happy. For a person whose whole life is built on a mystery, she is very un-mysterious. There is nothing enigmatic about Enigma.

The boys lower the coffin onto its pedestal and walk back down the aisle, separating to go to their wives and children. Rose tries to smile at them but they have their heads bowed.

Another song starts.

‘Danny Boy.’

Oh, Connie,
really
!

The sly old thing. Rose can just imagine her chuckling as she threw that one in. ‘This will get the waterworks going!’ Enigma is now howling like a two-year-old. Like the two-year-old she was. Margie is making soothing sounds. Like the two-year-old
she
was. Margie was born motherly.

Rose carefully shifts again to see which members of the Funeral Club have turned up and their expert reaction to ‘Danny Boy’. Good Lord. The first person she sees is Mick Drummond, with his ancient bobbing head. Would that man never die? Was he immortal? Was he
real
? Would he outlive them all? He’d been old for decades, it seemed. Wait till she tells Connie!

She turns back around and sees the coffin again, lustrous black, like a grand piano. It hits her with a horrible lurch that she won’t be eating cinnamon toast tonight at Connie’s kitchen table and telling her all about her own funeral. It is pointless saving up the good bits. Rose’s big sister is lying flat on her back in her good burgundy suit, inside that shiny box, with her face collapsed and her lipstick perfect but somehow not quite right.

I’m the only one left in the Doughty family, thinks Rose. You’ve all abandoned me. She wants to wail and sob and stamp her feet. She is five years old and stuck in a dreadful old woman’s body that aches and creaks. Mum, Dad, Connie! How could you just leave me here all alone? It’s not right. I’m the youngest! I shouldn’t be left here on my own!