everywhere, stylized images and smooth soundbites about harvests. It was fuller than I had expected, mostly older people—I recognized some of them, they had visited Hugo—and there was a constant muffled buzz of shuffling feet, coughs, murmurs. Over the gray heads I caught a flash of gold, and my heart leaped: Melissa had come.
Hymns rising in the cold air; only the old people knew the tunes, and their voices were too thin and ineffectual to fill the vast space overhead. The priest’s voice had that awful unctuous fall that they all pick up somehow. Wreaths propped at the foot of the coffin, candles guttering in a draft. Phil read out something from a sheet of lined paper, presumably a eulogy but his voice was hoarse and almost inaudible and the acoustics blurred it so that I caught only the odd phrase: always at the heart of our . . . went down to the . . . Something that made everyone laugh. We knew he would . . .
Hugo in firelight, looking up laughing from his book, hair falling in his eyes and a finger on the page to mark his place: Listen to this! Beside me my father was crying, silently and without moving a muscle. My mother had her fingers woven through his. “He was,” Phil said, louder and firmer, raising his head defiantly, “possibly the best man I have ever known.”
In the foyer afterwards—people milling about, everyone lining up to shake hands with my father and the uncles—I cast around wildly till I caught that gold flash again, and practically shoved people out of my way getting to Melissa.
She was on her own, pressed back against a wall by the crowds. “Melissa,” I said. “You made it.”
Sober navy-blue dress that made her look paler and older, hair pulled back in a soft twist. There were mascara smears under her eyes where she had been crying, and it went straight to my heart; every cell of me was howling to put my arms around her, hold her tight while we sobbed into each other’s unfamiliar grown-up clothes.
“Toby,” she said, holding out both hands. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m really glad you came.”
“How are you doing?”
“I’m OK. Getting by.” Her hands in mine, so small and so cold, I almost breathed on them to warm them. “How are you?”
“I’m all right. Sad.”
Did she mean about Hugo, or about us? “Me too,” I said. And then, with a thump of my heart: “We’re going back to the house, afterwards. Come with us.”
“No. Thanks, thank you, but I can’t, I have to—” She was half a step too far back from me, as if she thought I was going to hug her or grab her or something, what the hell was that about? “I just wanted to come and tell you how sorry I am—and your family, them too. He was a wonderful man; I’m lucky that I got to know him.”
“Yeah. Me too.” I couldn’t bring myself to believe that this was it, good-bye, here in a crowded church foyer. I almost said it, the way I would have if this had been a normal breakup: Please can I call you, can we talk . . . It took everything I had to stop myself.
She nodded, biting down on her lips. “I should go find your dad,” she said, “before you have to leave for the, I don’t want to miss him—” Just for a second she squeezed my hands so tightly that it hurt, and then she slipped past me into the crowd, weaving through it deftly and delicately until even that flicker of gold was gone.
Hoist up the coffin again, back to the hearse, load it in—everyone but me seemed to know by instinct where to go and what cues to wait for; I did whatever my father did. Back into the car. “Those painkillers you had,” Leon said in my ear, when our parents were deep in discussion of what to do with the flowers. “Have you got any on you?”
“No,” I said.
“Back at the house?”
“Yeah. I’ll get you then.”
“Thanks,” Leon said. For a moment I thought he was about to say something else, but he just nodded and turned to stare out the window. The coffin had left a sharp line across the shoulder of his suit.
And, at last, the crematorium. It was a decorative chapel on the grounds of a cemetery: shining wooden pews, elegant arches and clean lighting, everything perfectly gauged and sympathetic.