The Men in her Life

inappropriate a description that was. There had been nothing beautiful about it. Golders Green crematorium was a hideous collection of dark buildings designed to give an artificial sanctity to the send-offs of non-believers. The chapel was as cold as a real church but contained no warmth of spirituality in its secular walls. ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’ rang out from the CD player, filling the space with the recorded echo of a cathedral.
    Amid the quiet murmur of condolence, a mobile phone began to ring, and Clare watched as the men reached into their jacket pockets, the women flipped open their handbags to see if it was theirs. Eventually a long, lean man with floppy hair guiltily answered the call.
    ‘I’m at Jack Palmer’s funeral,’ he hissed, shaking his jacket sleeve back from his wrist so that he could check the time, ‘can I call you back in ten minutes?’
    The flowers were all extraordinarily tasteful. Amelia would approve of all the twigs and raffia, Clare thought, which made a kind of ersatz harvest festival in this fake religious setting. Just below the name-plate, where a card with the words Jack Palmer had been slotted in, there was a small bunch of bluebells. The sight of the flowers touched her as nothing else had done that day. She had known that she knew what his favourite flowers were, but the memory drumming like a forgotten tune somewhere in the back of her consciousness had refused to offer up the word. Bluebells. Her father had taken her once to Epping Forest at about this time of year and as they wandered through the blue shade he had asked her whether she liked it there. ‘Yes,’ she had said, shivering, frightened by the vastness of the forest and wondering how they would ever find their way out. ‘It is where I come when I want to hear silence,’ he had told her, after which she had not dared to utter a word.
    A couple of men filleted themselves away from the crowd in the cloisters and went walking across the well-manicured lawn side by side, looking straight ahead but clearly talking, taking up a negotiation they had started in the cab on the way, Clare imagined, that had been put on hold for a respectful half-hour. Business as usual. Still, why not? It was what Jack would have wanted. Isn’t that what people said at funerals, with great solemnity, certain in the knowledge that they wouldn’t be corrected?
    Clare had no idea what he would have wanted. She didn’t even know whether he would have wanted her to be there. It felt faintly ridiculous now to have trekked all the way up to town in a black dress she didn’t like and would never wear again in order to look at a box. She had not seen him in person for eighteen years and the irony was that had he been alive Jack would probably have glanced at her curiously when she tried to smile at him, then flicked his eyes away from hers, as these other famous people did.
    ‘Shall we round everyone up?’ Philippa whispered beside her, ‘Do you think there’ll be enough food?’
    Back at the house, there was a buffet lunch, a splendid affair that had been arriving since seven o’clock that morning. Clare wondered how soon after Jack’s death her mother had got on the phone to the caterers. How much notice did you have to give for food for a hundred of your closest friends? Did you consult a menu, or were Dublin Bay prawns with chilli and coriander and tiny marinated goat’s cheeses what one ate these days at the best funerals?
    ‘Of course there will,’ Clare said, but her mother had not waited for an answer.
    She watched Philippa sweeping the crowd of people towards the long line of limousines and black cabs, and wondered when her mother would allow herself to be sad. She had clearly made a stylistic decision to be the strong woman coping admirably, rather than the grieving widow. Clare was aware that for some reason her own presence was not helping. The house was big enough for a dozen people to live in without interfering with one another, but whenever she met her mother in the kitchen or wandering round the walled garden at the back Philippa would make a little cough of annoyance, as if there were something stuck inside her throat that she couldn’t quite bring herself to say.
    A woman with cropped red hair was lolling against one of the cloister arches. She was one of the youngest people there, and one of the tallest. Her height seemed to magnify her awkwardness. She was wearing the regulation black suit with a