Rowan had lived in Oxford for twenty years but she’d never been to the crematorium. She’d been too young to go to her mother’s funeral. Looking online for directions, she’d discovered it on the very eastern fringes of the city, out among the fields beyond Headington. It made sense, of course, you wouldn’t build a crematorium in the centre of town, but at the same time, the location felt cruel, as if the idea were to remind the dead that they were out of it now, on their way to oblivion.
Turning off, she followed the driveway between an avenue of trees and out across a sodden but immaculate swathe of grass dotted with rosebushes and weedy saplings. Restfulness and order were the intended effect, no doubt, but instead it felt soulless. Crematorium was a word that sounded right: ceremonious, foreboding, heavy with finality.
The building itself was single-storey, made of bricks that the rain had turned the colour of turmeric. It was strikingly plain, its walls blank apart from a row of narrow windows high up under a roof of ugly clay tiles. It looked like a public lavatory.
But there was the chimney, frank and unapologetic. Ready. Rowan was hit by sheer horror: they were going to burn her. They were all going to sit and watch as Marianne was trundled off into the fire.
She parked the car and drank some water to moisten her mouth. A stream of people passed the window, some barely a foot away, but they were hunched under umbrellas, intent on keeping their feet dry, and it was impossible to tell if she knew any of them. In the rear-view mirror she watched them congregate in the porch. It was almost twelve-thirty. She took a moment to steady herself then opened the door and put up her umbrella. The cold air felt bracing as she made the dash across the car park.
There were so many people waiting that she barely found space to stand under cover. The lobby area inside the large glass doors was packed, too. How many were here? A hundred and fifty? Two hundred? Nonetheless, it was quiet, the few murmured conversations almost drowned by the hiss of rain on tarmac.
The air smelled of perfume and wet wool. She buttoned her umbrella and looked around. Next to her on one side stood an elegant couple in their late sixties, she guessed, both impeccably groomed. When Rowan’s hand brushed against it, the woman’s coat was soft as down, obviously cashmere. On her other side, by contrast, a woman with a biker jacket and an earful of studs rested her cheek on the shoulder of a shaven-headed man in a fringed cotton scarf. The crowd seemed to divide along these lines: those in their twenties and thirties belonging to the art world, she guessed, and older, affluent-looking people, Marianne’s patrons perhaps, the people who collected her work. Rowan scanned around for Charles Saatchi; she’d read a rumour that he was a fan. There was no sign of him but, of course, he wouldn’t be standing outside, would he? By the pillars, she recognised a man who’d come to lunch at the house years ago – he’d been a colleague of Seb’s at St John’s, another don – and then, with a jolt, she spotted Marianne’s aunt Susannah and her husband. Susannah was Jacqueline’s sister; they’d always looked alike.
A ripple ran through the crowd, a collective straightening, and the murmured conversations died. A man in a morning suit pinned back the glass doors and Rowan heard the melancholy opening notes of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor. It would be Jacqueline du Pré’s recording, Marianne’s favourite. A flash of memory: lying on the sitting-room floor at Fyfield Road as twilight threw petrol colours across the sky outside the bay window, Marianne standing to set the arm of the record player back at the start of the first movement again and again. Neither of them had spoken and they’d let the music flow over them like water, revelling in the drama of it.
Beyond the silhouetted heads and shoulders in the lobby was a large doorway through which came a pall of weak light. Into it now, shoulder-high, was lifted the dark shape of the casket. Stomach turning, Rowan joined the edge of the crowd as it began to shuffle its way forward.