Hugo looked, bizarrely, more like himself than he had in months: hair smooth and neatly trimmed, cheeks filled out and ruddied by techniques I didn’t want to think about, the look of unruffled absorption he had worn when he was at work and on an interesting trail. A flash of memory hit me out of nowhere, Hugo bent over my finger with a needle and that same absorbed look, digging out a splinter. Cold sunny day and his hair all dark back then. Yes it will hurt but only for a moment—look, here it is, that’s a big one!
My father and the uncles, faces fixed in grim remote endurance, moved around shaking hands with people I half-recognized. A big bosomy woman cried, “Oh, Toby, you look dreadful, you must be devastated,” and enveloped me in a fragrant hug. I caught Leon’s eye over her shoulder and shot him a panicked stare; he mouthed Margaret, which wasn’t a lot of help. “Toby,” my father said quietly, in my ear. “Time to go.” It took me a moment to understand what he meant.
The sheer weight of the coffin was stunning. Up until then the day had felt completely unreal, just another bad dream to be stumbled through—I hadn’t even considered taking this on without Xanax—but the bite and grind of the wood into my shoulder was savagely, inescapably real. My leg shook and dragged, I couldn’t stop it, a jagged catch in the slow march, everyone watching— Sliding the coffin into the hearse, rain driving down my coat collar, I tripped and almost went on one knee on the tarmac. “Whoops,” Tom said, catching my arm. “Slippery out here.”
Ugly concrete church, long faux-homemade banners hanging 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. 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?”