The priest said a blessing, the bells started ringing, and we turned to walk out. I wasn’t aware that I was crying until Laurel gently reached across and wiped my eyes. I briefly faced everyone and was suddenly overwhelmed by the sea of purple in front of me. They had all taken up our invitation to wear something in Beth’s favourite colour, and she would have loved it; purple hats, purple flowers… purple shirts and coats. Even a purple feather boa around the neck of one of my bewildered and shocked university friends. The parents of Beth’s school friends were openly in tears, as were most of our work colleagues. Many of them kindly met my numb stare with gentle, sad smiles, and blew kisses.
And then I saw Simon, towards the back, right at the end of the pew. He was hard to miss in any case because of the purple velvet smoking jacket he was wearing. God knows where he’d found it. As I drew closer I saw he was seated with the headmistress, her husband, and Louise – all attending in their official capacity. Louise’s strained face was white and streaked wet. As I walked towards them, I noticed she had his hand tightly gripped in hers. Neither of them looked at me until right at the last moment; just as I was about to pass, Simon lifted his gaze and our eyes briefly met. I saw my own devastation and grief mirrored back to me in our second deeply private moment of shared parental loss – only this time Ben was walking right next to me – and I suddenly hated Simon with a fury I didn’t know I was capable of feeling. I didn’t want to be conspiratorial with him like this. It was Ben who had been there from the moment Beth had taken her first breath, not him; Ben who had got up to her in the night, bathed her, fed her, loved her. My anger must have shown on my face, however fleetingly, because Simon’s eyes widened with shock, and he visibly shrank back before looking away. This was not the place! This was not the fucking place for him to look at me like that!
But just as instantly, as I stepped into the cold outside air, my strength of feeling seeped away again and the strange emptiness of my new reality returned. I didn’t want to wear it. It didn’t fit. I wanted to wake up wrapped in the cosy blanket of my life of just two weeks ago.
* * *
It was at the burial itself – just me, Ben, Dad, my in-laws, and Ben’s brother and wife, plus Laurel, and Gav, Ben’s best man from our wedding – that it really began to hit me. Unlike at Mum’s funeral, it wasn’t because of the physical act of interment itself. I kept telling myself over and over and over again – as Ben had reminded me – that what was Beth had gone. It wasn’t her in there, and that’s how I coped with throwing a handful of earth on the coffin; I couldn’t have borne it otherwise – but moments later I violently realised that this was nearly it. We were nearly done; it was – bar the wake – nearly over – and I wasn’t ready to be finished.
* * *
So it was once everyone had finally gone, and we were alone at home, that I finally began to sob, uncontrollably. Ben had come into the sitting room and sat down next to me as I huddled on the sofa, staring at the flames flickering behind the glass of the wood burner. He held me while I cried because I didn’t want to have said a last goodbye to Beth. When my tears began to subside through sheer exhaustion, he said simply: ‘You need to eat something. There are about a million sandwiches out there. Shall I make you up a plate?’
I blew my nose. ‘No thank you, I’ll get something in a minute. I promise.’ We lapsed into silence. The house was silent at half past four on a Wednesday afternoon. No sound of children’s BBC, no rushing around getting tea on the go. No calling upstairs to Beth when it was ready and on the table only to discover that was when she’d finally decided to go up to get changed into home clothes. No hearing her shout that she was just coming.
Ben’s parents had already removed all of her toys from the room, as well as the small table that she liked to do her drawing at, and it looked too neat and sterile without all of her bits and pieces strewn everywhere, stuffed into corners because we never had enough storage to tidy it all away. I suddenly jumped to a stand, unable to bear it. ‘Sorry, the sofa cushions are slipping, can you just get up a minute?’ I asked Ben.
‘Leave it,’ he said, bewildered, ‘it doesn’t matter. Does it?’
‘I can’t get comfy.’
He hauled himself up, and moved across to the chair as I ripped them all off, stripping the sofa down to its frame. He watched silently as I started to whack and kick the cushions furiously into shape on the floor.
‘There,’ I said breathlessly, ‘that’s better. Let’s just tuck the sofa cover in properly too before I put them back on. It drives me crazy the way it drapes over the floor like this.’ I shoved my fingers violently right down the side, burying my hand painfully up to the wrist, but I immediately came across something plastic. I pulled it out, and uncurled my fist, only to discover a tiny pair of plastic wings in my hand. They belonged with a fairy that had come in a Kinder Egg; Beth had recently been looking for them.
‘Oh!’ I said, and tears sprang again to my eyes as I stared at them on my palm. ‘I’m sure Beth and I checked there. I can’t have done it properly.’ Suddenly, I made an animalistic noise, somewhere between a moan, a cry and a shout of sheer desperation and pain, as I doubled over, wrapping my arms around myself. Ben jumped up and caught me as I collapsed onto the cushions, sobbing again, and this time we cried together for our little girl.
* * *
Later, as we sat next to each other in the dark room, lit only by the fire and some candles on the mantelpiece, I watched the reflections of the flames dance on the windowpane, as we’d left the curtain open on the dark. I was still clutching the fairy wings tightly in my fist.
‘She’ll be pleased that you’ve found them,’ Ben said eventually, and reached out. ‘Shall I take them and put them on the mantelpiece?’
But my grip only tightened, and I glanced up over the fireplace at one of the pictures of the three of us hanging on the wall, all of us smiling on our first ever family holiday in Cornwall: my laughing, handsome and happy husband, Beth an absurdly fat eight-month-old baby, slightly squished into the corner of the shot, but beaming delightedly. How could this be happening? How?
‘OK,’ Ben said. ‘No problem. You hold onto them for a bit then.’
I have the strongest feeling God needs your daughter to know how much he loves her.
‘You know, I keep thinking about what that woman said to you in the street about God loving Beth.’
I looked at him, startled. ‘I was literally just thinking about that.’
‘Really?’ he said, carefully. ‘I mean, she was mad – but I’m actually pleased she said it, because it made you tell Beth you loved her. You would have done that anyway probably, I know,’ he added quickly, ‘but Beth got to say it back to you as well, which is a big deal.’
There was a silence.
I caught my breath, then blurted. ‘I feel like it was a prophecy, Ben. Someone was warning me that it was going to happen.’
He frowned. ‘If that woman had told you God loved Beth any other day you’d have written it off as a stranger being a bit weird, and forgotten about the whole thing.’
‘But it didn’t happen any other day, did it?’
‘You told Beth God loved her; you told her you loved her. What else could you have done?’
‘Taken her home,’ I whispered.