were named and labelled.
‘A stiff upper lip for Daddy’s sake,’ her mam encouraged.
‘Yes, Mam,’ Flora said, moving closer to her mother. Flora felt it was more a case of a numb upper lip, numb face, numb – everything. She had been so utterly shocked to see her daddy there, dead, in the hall on Sunday morning, lying on the red rug and the geometric tiles, that she hadn’t been able to feel anything else since. She’d gone through the motions of getting up, washing herself, dressing, eating – at her mam’s insistence – small amounts at each meal but really she could barely swallow water, never mind eat food. Somehow she’d done what she needed to do for five, dazed days.
‘Daddy would appreciate the effort you’ve made with your shoes,’ her mam commented, her voice quavering.
Flora checked the time on the kitchen clock. People spoke about funerals honouring the dead. Flora, though, only wanted the funeral service to be over with because the day felt so intolerable. She knew there would be a service, a burial, and high tea afterwards but she felt benumbed and was expecting nothing from the day.
‘He’ll be here in a minute. He knows the way,’ her mam said anxiously.
The undertaker had come immediately to collect the body, so soon it was almost unseemly. Flora had been unable to go downstairs to meet him – she was too upset and had told her mam to say she was resting in her room. A few days later the funeral hymns had been chosen: ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’ and – Daddy’s favourite – ‘Bydd Myrdd o Rhyfeddodau’, then the order of service had been printed on thick white card with a black rim. She imagined the grave had also been dug. Finally, she had hand-washed her best blouse which she had last worn, utterly heartbroken, in 1918, and now again.
‘I thought we would grow old together,’ her mother confided plaintively to the quiet room.
‘Don’t fret, Mam.’
‘I didn’t think it would come to this.’
The mantelpiece clock chimed half past the hour. At the sound of the car’s tyres approaching the house, Flora and her mother went through the porch. A moment before she left the house Flora pulled her veil from her hat and placed it across her face. All I have to do, she thought to herself, is get through this day.
Wilfred opened the back doors of the car for the two women who were waiting on the doorstep.
‘Good afternoon, mam. Good afternoon, miss,’ he intoned, doffing his top hat. His apprentice-master, Mr Auden, had taught him that, drummed into him the importance of good manners. ‘A funeral director is always polite,’ he’d state. ‘No effing and blinding around a corpse, Wilfred.’ Mr Auden would say it like an aphorism every time he settled into the driving seat and revved the hearse engine, the coffin in the back, before they pulled out of the garage and drove to another funeral. ‘No damn and bloody blasting around the dead, Wilfred.’
He waited, standing to his full height while the two ladies quietly came forward. Mrs Edwards and a younger woman – that must be her daughter – stepped into the motorcar. His eyes were drawn towards her. Wilfred noticed the younger woman’s well-shaped ankles in delicate stockings. Her head was slightly lowered and Wilfred couldn’t see her face clearly because she was wearing a black veil and, besides, he could only glance as it would be unkind to look closely into the face of someone who was so newly bereaved. Nevertheless, Wilfred noticed beneath the fine netting of her veil the elegant lines of her profile: her graceful brow and her delicate neck. Her hand was to her throat, touching her jet beads, and he saw her slender golden arm. The young woman had the straitened air of someone in great shock, and beneath her veil her face glistened with the wet of recent tears. Wilfred was used to this, but it never failed to move him.
At Mrs Edwards’s request, Wilfred was to drive the chief mourners to the funeral and, as Wilfred didn’t have a car – apart from the motorized hearse – Mrs Edwards had offered the use of her late husband’s motorcar. Though unfamiliar with the car, Wilfred deftly swung the vehicle in a wide arc so it was facing the opposite direction then he peered in his driving mirror to check that the two ladies were settled before embarking on the slow drive to