Then I see it. The bare field we’d flown the hawk upon is covered in gossamer, millions of shining threads combed downwind across every inch of soil. Lit by the sinking sun the quivering silk runs like light on water all the way to my feet. It is a thing of unearthly beauty, the work of a million tiny spiders searching for new homes. Each had spun a charged silken thread out into the air to pull it from its hatch-place, ascending like an intrepid hot-air balloonist to drift and disperse and fall. I stare at the field for a long time. It reminds me of an evening last autumn on that trip to Uzbekistan. I’d been sitting on the ground outside my tent wondering if the terrible smell was a decomposing cow, or something much worse. Before me were miles of marsh and desert and in the far distance the Fergana Mountains, fading into haze. Then I saw the strangest things hanging in the air, and I could not work out what they were. They looked like white question marks, and they disobeyed the laws of physics alarmingly. There was no wind at all, yet they hovered, and sank, and rose with supernatural slowness. What the hell? I ran after one. I walked up to it so that it was within six inches of my nose, and I still couldn’t understand what it was. It was as long as my hand from wrist to fingertip; it was white, and squiggly like the doodle you make with a running-out pen, and made of some material I couldn’t identify. I thought of manna, and soda, of ash and silly string. And then I looked very, very closely, as it rose very, very slowly upwards, and there, from the base of this white frothy squiggle, was an almost-invisible line. And right at the bottom of the line was a spider exactly this size, the size of the word Ah.
The next day I left Mabel at home and took a train to London. I didn’t want to leave her, and I didn’t want to go. I remembered the city after my father’s death as a ghastly place, pale and caustic under toppling clouds. But now, rounding the corner of Fleet Street, I found the city wasn’t empty any more. It was a dark and fathomless warren of litter and glass, bankers and traders streaming through its sunken lanes. Sills, barricades, alleys. Tipping gutters, anti-pigeon spikes, pavements patterned with spots of trodden gum. And then, suddenly, St Bride’s Church, caged behind railings on a raised platform of green-stained stone. The picture editor of my father’s newspaper was there, waiting with my mother and brother at the door. I had not met him before. Blue eyes in a fierce, sad pugilist’s face, a strong handshake, a pinstripe suit. He’d set up this meeting: the newspaper was organising a memorial service for my father, and we’d come here to discuss it with the canon of the church. And so in the vestry office we talked of hymns, of invitations, of readings and speakers and songs. I said I would make a speech. We talked some more. My mother sat very upright in a grey sweater and pink gilet, her hair carefully brushed, her face taut and pale. Oh Mum. James was even paler. He shot me a tight smile. My eyes prickled and burned. He turned to the canon. ‘I work as a designer,’ he said. ‘I could design the Order of Service?’ The canon nodded and pushed a handful of printed booklets across the desk towards us. ‘These are from past services,’ he said, dipping his head in a gesture of unconscious, anxious tenderness. ‘They might help you with your father’s?’ I picked up the nearest. On its cover was a smiling middle-aged stranger in a piano-keyboard tie. I looked at his face for a long time, pressing the pad of one finger hard into the corner of the stiff cover to make a tiny flare of pain to cover the ache in my heart.
When we got up to leave the canon pressed business cards into our hands. Business cards. Absurd. The tie. The incongruity. This. All this. I looked back at the office. Striplights and pinboards, coat-hooks and fax machines. Diaries and schedules. The offices of death. I felt laughter rising inside me. I tried to stifle it. It came out as a broken cough. This had happened before; once, on the morning Mum and I had to choose my father’s coffin, sitting in wing-back armchairs in the undertaker’s office before a small vase of salmon-coloured roses. Dim light. A cramped room. A stifling hush. The undertaker handed us a laminated folder, and it fell open onto a page of coffins painted with football colours, with photorealistic spitfires, golf-courses, saxophones and trains. We’d laughed then as I laughed now. The coffins, like the tie, made the small loves of life ridiculous in death, the business card made the memorial mundane. The laughter was because there was no way of incorporating these signs of life into the fact of death. I laughed because there was nothing else I could do.
On the way home I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much. The train curved and sunlight fell against the window, obscuring the passing fields with a mesh of silver light. I closed my eyes against the glare and remembered the spider silk. I had walked all over it and had not seen it. I had not known it was there. It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world was an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them – that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky, this might somehow be revealed to me. And the sun on the glass and the memory of the shining field, and the awful laughter, and the kindness of that morning’s meeting must have thinned the armour of silence I’d worn for months, because the anger was quite gone now, and that evening as we drove to the hill, I said in a quiet voice, ‘Stuart, I’m not dealing very well with things at the moment.’
I said, ‘I think I’m a bit depressed.’
‘You’ve lost your father, Helen,’ he said.
‘I’m training a gos. I suppose it’s quite stressful.’