January 1962
I only saw her once again (Doris was explaining the following week), the last time I went back to Patchley.
Must be—must be sixty years ago now, and ain’t that a thing.
Me and Bobby, we’d been married a bit less than ten years and we’d had all our little ’uns so we was as you might say settled.
But over New Year’s I’d got word from Tom—you remember Tom, we was evacuated together and stayed in touch—as how Sir Arthur had died and how a lot of us as had stayed with him was going back to pay our respects and would I like to come along.
I told him I would but as it’d be difficult what with Bobby and the kids and he told me it’d be all right. He’d done well for himself since Patchley. Things was tough after the war, but there was opportunities for them as knew where to look, and Tom had always been canny.
He showed up day of the funeral in a Mark II Jaguar that couldn’t have been more’n a year old and shipped the lot of us down to Surrey in style.
Well, sort of in style. Him and Bobby was up front while I was squeezed in the back seat with three kids.
It weren’t the best road safety, but it was the sixties and we didn’t think so much about it back then.
It weren’t at the house—the funeral, I mean.
You’d have noticed a graveyard and there’s not one, and though the Branninghams is an old family, they’re not so old as they’ve got some ancient crypt in the cellar full of big stone coffins.
No, for all they was rich, they got buried in a churchyard in Taplow same as a lot of poorer folks.
Swankier graves of course, but I don’t think that makes much difference to the worms.
Though the car was nice, the trip down was a bit of a bugger if you’ll pardon my French.
It was crowded in the back and young Robert wouldn’t sit still and little Maggie didn’t want to go and said so every six minutes.
Susan fell asleep nicely enough, but she fell asleep on my lap, which meant I had the weight of her the whole way, so by the time we got there my legs was asleep and I half staggered out the car.
Tom had tried to get all ten of us together for the funeral—sort of a reunion if a bit of a morbid one—and it had half worked.
Well, more than half by the numbers because he’d managed to get eight.
We was all alive still, back then—Tom was actually one of the first to go what with being older and not making it to seventy, but two of us was overseas, one in Australia and one in the States and though they’d sent their thoughts and all that, it was a hell of a long way to come for a man they’d not seen in fifteen years or more.
We made quite the crowd in the end, because I weren’t the only one had brought family.
All the girls and most of the lads had wound up married, and most of those who’d married had brung kids, so when we showed up at the church we near outnumbered the actual relatives.
Not that actual relatives was that big a part of the group anyway, what with friends and business associates and all the layers and layers of people that gather around money over the years.
I’d been to a couple of funerals in my time—lot more since, of course—and this had more folk at it than all the rest put together.
Some I thought I recognised from my days in service, old staff and old guests both.
The guests didn’t recognise me because back then it’d been my job to be invisible, but Mrs. Loris did.
It’s funny, thinking back on it now. Every time I met her, I thought she was old, though she couldn’t have been much older when we first met than I was when I met her again at the funeral, and when I met her again then, she would have been far younger than I am now.
Still somehow she’s old in my head and always will be.
“Cooper,” I remember her saying. Just “Cooper.”
Out of habit I wanted to look down and just say “Mrs. Loris,” back, but I weren’t Cooper no more and so I told her as much.
“Ah,” she said, and she looked at Bobby and the kids with a kind of approving expression. Then, “Congratulations,” and, “Are you, that is, I’m sure you’re very happy.”
I told her I was, because I was—least no less happy than most because life is what it is at the end of the day—and she looked relieved. I didn’t know how to take that. It was almost insulting.
After Mrs. Loris had said her piece, we was all ushered in for the service—us evacuees was at the back because there wasn’t room for a bunch of unwashed oiks from Stepney at the front of the big swanky church Sir Arthur was getting buried in, but we got a shout-out about halfway through when they was listing all the good things what Sir Arthur had done in his time.
And after that, we was brought back up Patchley House for the wake.
That weren’t normal neither.
A wake, the ones I’d been used to, was a couple of drinks in whatever pub was nearest the church and a couple of toasts from friends or family.
But for Sir Arthur it was—well, you remember how they used to open up the house at Christmas?
It was that, but for death. Catering for hundreds, a book of condolences with messages from folk as I’m sure never met Sir Arthur in their lives.
Crowds and crowds and crowds and crowds and crowds.
But that’s the gentry for you, isn’t it?
They don’t live like us so why should they die like us?
Now we was at the house, I was feeling that neither here nor there sort of way that you get when you go back somewhere after a long time.
Like I’d never left but also like I’d never been there before.
And Bobby must have known something was up because he looked at me quiet like and said as I could take a minute if I needed to. And I did.
I let my feet take me down the hill—I told you I’ve been up and down it a lot and that I’d no need to get moved on account of it—and to the river and to the spot where I’d found her all them years ago. Where she’d been throwing rocks at frogs.
Where I found her again. Where a silly little part of me thought I might always find her.
“Why are you here, nymph?”
“Come to pay my respects.” It was only half the answer and she knew it.
“There’s a book for that in the house. I think they have it laid out in the ballroom.
” She weren’t looking at me. She was staring at the water like it’d done something cruel and personal to her.
And though it’d been nearly ten years she still looked like a furious angel. “I wanted to have a think,” I told her.
Almost dreamy, she picked up a rock, weighed it into her hand and then flung it into the river like she was trying to kill something. “About a man you barely knew? That seems melodramatic.”
“We didn’t talk much, but he was good to me.”
“He fucking well was not.”
“He took us in when he didn’t have to.”
Emily threw another stone. “Please, it was wartime. Everybody was doing it. Patriotic duty and all that.”
“All the same”—I began, but she weren’t in a mood to listen.
“All the same what? You think he’d have come to bury you? You think he’d have descended from the big house on the hill to whatever grubby little churchyard in Stepney they’ll throw you in when you go and told your unwashed children how great a loss you were?”
“Don’t matter what he’d do. It was right for me to come here for him. And my kids ain’t unwashed.”
She didn’t say nothing more about the children, she just turned and looked up at me, all spite and challenge. “So will you come back for me, too?”
“What do you mean?” I knew, but either I didn’t want to say it or I wanted her to.
“When I die, nymph. When I am dead and in the ground, will you come and stand in the church and weep for me?”
Even then, somehow, I didn’t like to think of it. Though I’d not seen her in going on a decade, the idea of her being dead cut my heart like a fish knife. “Don’t talk like that.”
She stood up then and walked very close to the river, staring down into it like it was the edge of everything. “I shall talk,” she said to the water, “as I please. As I always have.”
I didn’t really think she meant to drown herself—there’d always been a dark edge to Emily, even when she was young—but I went towards her anyway so as I could catch her if she fell. Because it’s not always the things we means as hurts us.
“Would you speak?” she went on. “Would you stand up at my funeral and tell the world what you thought of me?”
“If I had to,” I said, and only then realised I’d fallen into her trap.
“And what would you say?”
I’d never had the same fire as Emily, but time to time I’d known how to borrow it. “Same as you’d say about anybody—that you was a good person, even if you wasn’t.”
“And am I?”
“You know,” I said, “I think maybe you ain’t.”
“That’s a bold thing to say to a woman at her father’s funeral.”
“No bolder than what you said to me at my wedding.”
That shut her up, but only for a couple of seconds. She turned to face me—she was wearing this narrow-fitted jacket and men’s trousers; all black but on her it didn’t look like mourning, it looked like armour. “I meant every word.”
“And if you’d said ’em a year earlier, I’d maybe have listened. But you waited.”
“I was young. I’d spent so long trying to forget you and—”
“And you think I hadn’t tried the same?” I weren’t angry with her, not really. But I also didn’t believe her entirely.
She smiled all cruel and wounded. “You seemed to have moved on from where I was standing.”
“Then why didn’t you just let me?” I asked. Though even then, even at the time, even now, I’m not sure I’d wanted her to.
Still, whatever I wanted, she gave half a laugh back. “I suppose you’re right. I’m not a good person.”