the sole contract for the nation. There was no spacious, neatly mown park, no carefully positioned conifers and larches, shrubberies and flower beds, no low brick buildings or featureless waiting rooms with their dusty arrangements of artificial flowers.
Instead, Putney Vale was a gigantic, scruffy, over-populated graveyard, set behind a superstore, dotted with clumps of trees with a dark avenue of shaggy yews leading to a dinky Victorian Gothic church, converted somehow to take the crematorium’s furnace. Despite its idiosyncratic appearance the same mood always seemed to accrue around these places – regret, sorrow, dread, all the soul-sapping mementi mori – except Putney Vale had them loudly amplified: the acres of the encroaching necropolis, the bottle-green unpruned lugubrious yews seeming almost to suck in light out of the air like black holes (trees of death. Why did they plant the wretched things? Why not something prettier?) – all adding up to this atmosphere of municipal melancholia, of standardized, clock-watching obsequies.
But as if to prove him wrong he sensed at once, as he stepped out of his taxi, that his family were in jovial and buoyant mood. As he approached the church he heard a blare of laughter rise above the hum of animated chat. Groups of B and B drivers were gathered on the lawn outside having a smoke, their cigarettes held respectfully out of sight, in cupped hands behind their backs, keeping their distance from the central knot of Bloçj family members. He saw Trevor one-five, Mohammed, Dave, Winston, Trevor two-nine and some others he did not recognize. They greeted him boisterously. ‘Milo! Hi, Milo! Looking good, Milo!’
His family was gathered before the arched doors waiting for their turn: his grandmother and mother, Slobodan, Monika, Komelia, Drava and little Mercedes – all looking smarter than normal in new clothes he had not seen before, hair coiffed and combed, make-up prominent. Slobodan was wearing an orange tie and had reduced his ponytail to a sober bun, and Mercy ran up to show him her new shoes agleam with many silver buckles.
Slobodan actually embraced him, in new head-of-the-family mode, Lorimer assumed, slapped him on the back and squeezed his shoulders repeatedly.
‘Phil’s on the box,’ Slobodan said. ‘Just got a skeleton crew on. Dad wouldn’t want us to shut down completely.’
‘I’m sure he wouldn’t.’
‘Everything all right, Milo?’ Monika asked. ‘You look a bit tired.’
‘I am. And I find these places incredibly depressing.’
‘Hark at him,’ Monika said huffily, as if he were somehow lowering the tone. He turned away and kissed his other sisters, his mother, his grandmother.
‘I miss him, Milo,’ his mother said briskly, clear-eyed. ‘Even though he never say a word for ten years. I miss him about the house.’
‘We have saying in Transnistria,’ his grandmother chipped in. ‘We say, “A cat may have nine lives and a man may make nine mistakes.” I don’t think Bogdan he even make one mistake.’
What an appalling saying, Lorimer thought, instantly computing the big mistakes in his life. Nine? Why only nine? And after the ninth mistake, then what? Death, like a cat? And how did you define the error or misconception or blunder or slip-up that tipped over into mistake-category? He was still pondering this piece of unsettling Transnistrian lore when a man in a dark suit announced that their time had come and they filed into the chapel.
At once Lorimer realized he had left his tulips in the taxi that had brought him here and the thought depressed him unduly. He had not been concentrating on his father’s funeral. He had been thinking about himself and his endlessly mounting problems. Perhaps that was mistake number nine? Get a grip, he told himself sternly – this was irrational, panicky stuff.
A young priest who clearly knew nothing about Bogdan Bloçj conducted the service and uttered a few weary platitudes. Everyone bowed their heads as the curtains slowly met to obscure the casket – everyone except Lorimer, who kept his eyes fixed on the pale oak hexagon as long as he could. An organist struck up a busy fugue and Lorimer strained his ears to catch the whirr of machinery, of belts moving, of doors opening and closing, of flames igniting.
They filed sheepishly out into the chill of the overcast afternoon, where there followed the ritual lighting of the cigarettes. For the first time the full carnival spirit seemed to have left the mourners and they talked in lower voices, scrutinizing the rows of cellophane-wrapped bouquets with scientific intensity as if they might contain rare species,