Scarlatti playing softly. More speeches. Phil crying, eyes closed, finger pressed across his mouth.
Hugo, testy, glancing over his shoulder at me sprawled on the study floor, pushing up his glasses with a knuckle: Toby if you’re just going to play with your phone then go somewhere else, you’re distracting the rest of us.
All day I had been steeling myself for the big moment: the wall opening wide, the slow measured slide of the coffin into the darkness; the clang of the heavy door behind it, the great muffled roar of fire. It had run through my dreams. Instead the lights over the coffin gradually dimmed, like a stage effect, and a curtain came to life and inched across the chapel, cutting off the coffin from view. Everyone took a long breath and turned towards each other, murmuring, shuffling out of their pews, buttoning coats.
I was so stunned that I stood there gaping, waiting for the curtain to open again, until my mother linked a hand through my elbow and turned me towards the door. But wait, I almost said, hang on, we haven’t— Surely that had been the moment at the heart of the whole day, the reason for all the suits and hymns and handshakes and ritual, that moment was what all of it was about? Where had it gone? But before I could put words together my mother had steered me down the aisle and out the door.
In the car park Susanna was leaning against a wall, watching Zach and Sallie chase each other in circles through the spitting rain. Zach had found a stray lily and was whacking at Sallie with it; her laughter had a rising note of hysteria. “They wanted to come,” Susanna said. “I don’t know if I called it right. I figured if they need to do this, then OK; Tom’s parents can take them home if it gets to be too much. But the actual cremation—yeah, no.”
“There wasn’t anything scary,” I said. It was still playing over and over in my head, curtain closing demurely across the coffin, the end, off you go home. “You didn’t see it go into the furnace, or anything.” The open space of the cemetery gave the wind room to build momentum; it came charging across the car park and slammed into us like a solid object. Deep inside that grayish building, Hugo was burning to ash. The bemused crease between his eyebrows, his quick smile.
“Huh. I thought we’d see it.” She pulled her collar tighter. “They probably needed a run around anyway. Zach was getting fidgety.”
“They must have changed things in the last while. We saw Granny’s coffin go in, didn’t we? And Granddad’s?”
“Granny and Granddad were buried,” Susanna said. “Up there.” A flick of her chin towards the cemetery, crowded headstones stretching on and on, rise after rise of them. “Don’t you remember?”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
“I fucking hate this year,” Susanna said suddenly. She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and headed off across the tarmac towards the kids.
* * *
The food-and-reminiscence part was at the Ivy House. I had been dreading it—invading crowd, noise, meaningless chitchat—but actually it was such a relief to be home that I almost slid down into a heap on the hall floor. Instead I went up to my room, took another Xanax and leaned my forehead against the cool wall for a long time.
When I went back down the house was packed and buzzing. I went looking for Leon—I had a couple of Xanax in my jacket pocket for him—but he was telling some story in a corner of the living room, surrounded by old people. My mother and the aunts were passing around wineglasses that had materialized from somewhere, along with platters of whimsical miniature sandwiches involving brioche buns and improbable ingredient combinations and fiddly bits of greenery. Zach had found an unsupervised plateful on a side table and was licking every sandwich and putting it back. “Toby,” my mother called over—I was still standing in the doorway, trying to work out what I was supposed to be doing about any of this—“I’m running out of white. Could you find a couple more bottles?”
There was already a sizable cluster of empty wine bottles in one corner of the kitchen. My father was at the table, peeling back clingfilm from another massive platter of winsome little sandwiches. “Good turnout,” I said, which was what everyone in the church foyer had kept saying to everyone else.