The Men in her Life

of the hearse, trying to feel appropriate emotions, but her mind kept returning to the troubling thought that he might not be in there at all. How often did undertakers cock it up, she wondered, how often did they bury people who wanted to be cremated or take the wrong box to the wrong funeral?
    She stood holding the little hand-tied bunch of bluebells and ivy in front of her like a bridesmaid, then swapping it into her left hand, casually, so that it wasn’t quite so visible. It was her first funeral. She hadn’t known that you sent flowers, you didn’t bring them along with you. It didn’t matter, she told herself. She wanted to feel that she was giving them to him. They Were his favourite flowers. It was one of the things he had told her the first day they went out alone together in his red E-type Jag. Holly had phoned six florists before finding one who was prepared to get them for her, and they had cost a fortune.
    One of the crematorium officials, a rotund man with a nice smiley face, took her aside as they were going into the chapel and asked her if she would like him to put the posy with the other floral tributes. She smiled gratefully at him.
    ‘Not with,’ she whispered, ‘just a little bit apart, so they don’t get swamped?’
    ‘They’ll have pride of place,’ he whispered back in friendly conspiracy.
    An actor Jack had worked with several times did the oration. It was further proof, Holly thought, that Jack wasn’t in the coffin at all, because if he had been, however dead he was, he would have bellowed ‘cut!’ after the first sentence. The actor wasn’t talking about Jack. You couldn’t say Jack was marvellous, generous and visionary, without also saying he was difficult, mean, and bloody-minded. The actor was playing his role rather well, pitching it somewhere between Julius Caesar and Four Weddings, Holly thought, but, just like the white lilies, it had nothing to do with Jack. But perhaps Jack, when he was with his posh friends, had not been the Jack she knew. Perhaps that was what he had meant when he had said that he only felt real with her and Mo. Great, Holly thought, he feels real with us and ignores us most of the time. Mo was right, Holly thought. There had been no proper place for them in his life, and there was no place for her here. Many of the guests were the same as those who went to Louis Gold’s parties, but there were no canapés for her to hand round.
    It was only when the coffin began to crank out of sight that she suddenly wanted to scream, no, don’t go. Not yet. I haven’t finished talking to you.
    The widow walked out to a recording of organ music. Philippa Palmer had been undeniably beautiful in her youth and she had aged well. She knew just how to soften the neck of her black suit with a silk scarf the colour of pearls and to dab away her tears before they smudged her make-up. Just behind her walked a much younger woman with hair that shone like a cornfield in late summer sun, and a complexion as pale as the moon. She was thin and slight, and her bare arms were goosebumpy in the chill of the red brick chapel. As the widow walked past Holly she missed her step, and the younger woman reached out to steady her, but the hand offered in compassion was shrugged off in a gesture subtle enough to go unnoticed by everyone except Holly, who was only a foot away. The younger woman’s stricken eyes met Holly’s and her face was instantly transformed by a smile, as if she were greeting a long-lost friend. Then the smile suddenly faded and she lowered her eyes again, bewildered.
    Clare was not feeling as she thought she ought to feel. She had expected the funeral to be a kind of watershed after which everything would be different, but oddly it only seemed to be confirming her place in the world, rather than offering her a new one. Occasionally she would recognize a face she knew among the mourners, but when her smiles were met with bemused, even slightly irritated, frowns, she realized that these were people she had seen only on the television or while flicking through the magazines in the doctor’s waiting-room. They did not know her, and in the dress she had bought from Dorothy Perkins, they did not want to. It was as if she had a label round her neck saying chain store.
    The whole party repaired to the cloisters and stood around not quite knowing whether to be silent or to talk in hushed tones. She overheard one woman whisper ‘beautiful service’ and thought how