Capital

the Common and was still wearing jogging clothes. Mary knew about woman priests in theory but had never met one. The Reverend was bright and nice and immediately agreed to read the service, tapping the time and place and Petunia’s ‘details’, as she called them, into her smartphone, before looking up and smiling.
    ‘I know it looks funny, but I can back it up to my computer, so I’m less likely to lose it,’ she said. ‘I used to get through three paper diaries a year.’ Mary could see that she liked being more modern than people thought she would be. This meeting with the trim, practical, kind-faced priest made Mary feel sad. It gave her a sudden sense that it was now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually a stranger to the place you lived in. The woman priest with jogging clothes and a BlackBerry gave Mary a glimpse of what life must have been like for her mother as she grew older.
    But the priest read the service beautifully. Her speaking voice had been light and slightly breathy, perhaps from exercise, but her ceremony voice was richer and deeper.
    I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.
    I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God.
    Petunia hadn’t believed a word of that, to Mary’s certain knowledge, but the language felt right, as a way of talking about the very last things. After all, it really was the end of the world, for Petunia anyway. Her father, a roaring, furious, militant atheist, would have been livid at the idea of the Prayer Book being read; so this was a final, a very final, very much overdue, form of insurrection on the part of her mother. For once she had done what she wanted instead of long-sufferingly keeping quiet. Mary smiled and sniffed and felt Alan squeeze her arm, right there beside her, all flesh, all fifteen stone of him in his best black M&S suit, and felt reassured. On her other side, Ben was doing a heroic job of not being bored and fidgeting as much as he wanted to. Graham and Alice both looked pale and composed and she felt a moment’s pride in them and herself for raising them. Mary said to herself: I haven’t done so badly.
    The vicar read some more in her strong voice, and said a prayer for Petunia Charlotte Howe. Then she pressed a button, the curtains parted, and the coffin with Mary’s mother’s corpse in it trundled through a hole in the wall to, presumably, the fires beyond. Mary had expected more melodrama, a glimpse of licking flames perhaps – wasn’t that what happened in films? – but instead there was just that mix of the ceremonial and the municipal. She was glad of that; it could easily have been too much. Outside, people drifted about, some of them coming up to Mary and Alan and Graham and Alice and Ben and others chatting to each other in small groups. Alan, who had been brilliant, had booked a room over a pub for food afterwards, so they could all go for a drink to let off steam after the ceremony. This was a chance to tell people about that. ‘Give them a drink and a sandwich,’ he said. ‘People expect it. Part of the ritual. Then they can piss off home.’
    Home – that word had a different charge for Mary, now. Where was home? Maldon, of course. There was now nowhere else in her life, no bolt-hole, nowhere she could run away and hide, no mother to run to. This, the small-talky after-ceremony, was harder than the service itself had been. One of the men from the crematorium appeared in the entrance and disappeared back in again. Mary got the impression that lingering here was something of an inconvenience for the staff – maybe they had another cremation booked. In fact, thinking about it, they were bound to. But she could not find in herself any appetite for hurrying up, shooing people away, or any other form of being helpful. Not today.
    ‘I’m so sorry’ is what people mainly said, or sometimes ‘I am sorry for your loss.’ The Indian newsagent, whom Mary was surprised and pleased to see, said that; so did the man down the street whose name she didn’t know, who’d been smiley and friendly; so did the two of Albert’s old colleagues who came. Greatly to Mary’s surprise, so did the Polish builder who