Chapter 18
18
“Where to, love?”
“Wilford Crematorium.”
“Ah, shame. Not a nice day for you, then?” the cabbie says, looking at me over his shoulder, trying to pitch this as sympathetic, as opposed to quite nakedly prurient.
No, of course it isn’t you dick, what kind of question is that?
“No.”
“Anyone close to you?”
“Yes.”
Actually, I don’t know if that’s true. That’s how bad I feel. That’s how humiliated and betrayed I feel. I can’t even say goodbye to Susie today, the way I thought I would, as I don’t know who exactly I’m saying goodbye to.
“Oh. Sorry to hear.”
The taxi reeks of a large and turnipy burp he did right before he picked me up, but I’m too British to roll the window down and thus communicate: “You smell.”
“... D’ya want the radio on?” he says, after deciding perhaps on balance he won’t inquire into my loss further, and I mumble: “Sure, OK.”
“Do you listen to Radio Two, ever?” he says, once it’s blaring out. I gather he’s in a chatty mood. Despite picking up a woman with gray-pale skin, wearing a black coat over a black dress, eyes red-rimmed and puffy from much crying and scant sleep, who has asked to be driven to a place where they incinerate dead people, and answering him in clipped monosyllables, he’s still going to press on with the banter he fancies having, in the guise of trying to cheer me up.
“Not much,” I say.
“See how many of these you can get for me in the pop quiz, I’m rubbish at this,” he says, twiddling the volume knob upward.
I rest my head on the car seat, close my eyes, and think: this could be annoying but, actually, the burble of T’Pau is better than thinking about the destination.
“‘China in Your Hand’!” the driver says.
“That’s ‘Heart and Soul,’” I say.
“The answer is ‘Heart and Soul’!” says the presenter.
“Very good!” the taxi driver says, visibly impressed.
“They only had two hits,” I say. “Process of elimination.”
I’ve successfully dodged any conversations with Ed since I read the letter. I’ve accidentally missed his calls by being “in the shower,” answered WhatsApps in a way that didn’t invite lots of back-and-forth. He no doubt concluded I’m in a state of agitation before the funeral and decided to let me lie low.
“Elastica,” I tell the driver.
“Sorry, Dave, that’s not right, it’s not Sleeper. It’s Elastica. Elastica ,” says the presenter.
“You’re brilliant at this!” says my driver. “Can I pick you up every day? We could win a yacht.”
I can’t manage a yacht, but I tip him well when we reach the top of the hill, whereupon my stomach lurches as I see people milling outside the crematorium chapel.
I wonder who they are, what their connection to Susie is—like some dismal photographic negative image of a wedding. They’re from different areas of her life, and there will be plenty I don’t know on sight. The one tour guide I need isn’t here.
And plenty I do. I spy Justin.
I feel the grief bubbling up uncontrollably at the sight of him looking handsome and adult and slightly uncomfortable in a narrow-cut, dark suit. It’s as if we’re playing characters in a drama.
He sees me and comes straight over. We hug, Justin muttering into my hair: “You’re OK, gal. Hang on to me.”
At this moment, I can tell he and Ed have had various conversations about how I’m coping, and I should feel good about their support. I don’t. I feel good about Justin’s, assuming he wasn’t in on the “torrid” (torrid, torrid ) banging.
Right behind Justin are Ed and Hester.
“Eve, my darling, how are you! I’ve not seen you,” Hester says, throwing her arms around me.
She’s had a blow-dry that is ruffled by the slight breeze, golden-corn waves against the navy of her coat, and black leather gloves. She smells of roses.
“Alright, you,” Ed says, tenderly, and I submit to an embrace, blank-faced, thinking: don’t bother with your faux-adoring chummy bullshit. It’s been a long, long con, but it’s over.
Hester starts fussing with Ed’s tie under his overcoat and I think, a strange aspect of my new knowledge is that I may revile her, but she’s the one who’s been wronged here, more than me. Ed and Susie only broke unspoken promises to me. He fully cheated on her.
But what a hypocrite I am—I never minded the idea of Ed being unfaithful to Hester, but it had to be with me. It had to be about love, and it had to promise a future together. Was the other unfaithfulness about love?
“Holy moly,” Justin says, with a low whistle, indicating to look over our shoulders.
Approaching over the brow of the hill I see the Teacup Girls, in black body-con dresses, pill-box hats with birdcage veils, and four-inch heels, two of them with crimson Louboutin soles, and fishnets. Despite the freezing weather, they’ve clearly opted to carry their coats to better show off their outfits.
“They look like mistresses attending against the wishes of the family,” Justin says.
“Do you know what, Susie would’ve loved it,” I say, with a tightness in my chest about what she did and didn’t love. Torrid . “Why not.”
I see Finlay in the distance, immaculately suited and booted, chatting to elderly attendees unknown. I can’t see his dad.
The hearse with the white coffin comes crawling up the path toward us and I breathe in, and breathe out, and Justin grips my arm tightly to let me know he knows how hard this is, but doesn’t try to speak to me, and I’m incredibly grateful for his getting it right.
The somber-faced undertakers perform their rituals with the arrangement of the car and another terrible moment arrives, Justin loosening his grip on me and stepping forward to join the pallbearers. We agreed it would be Ed, Justin, Finlay, and one of her friend’s husbands.
Being a pallbearer, and concentrating on not messing it up as they shoulder the weight of the coffin, looks less difficult than watching them do it, which is a sight I will never forget. It leaves scorch marks on my soul.
To my chagrin, Hester is suddenly by my side, grasping my hand and dabbing at her eyes.
I don’t doubt Hester is upset; you’d need to be an alien life-form not to be. I also know she’ll bounce back in no time, because Susie was a familiar feature of her life courtesy of Ed, but not anyone truly vital or valuable to her. They pissed each other off. Hester is performing a proprietorial sadness in public that won’t smudge her mascara. Now she can’t, in this moment, be Ed’s elegant fiancée, she has to be Susie’s best friend’s comfort. I don’t mind her not hurting as much, but leave me in peace to hurt more.
We follow the coffin inside to the classical music we chose, heads bowed, mourners who recognize each other murmuring hellos. The coffin, the celebrant explained to us prior, will sit in the chapel space in this room and the cremation takes place elsewhere on site afterward. I’m glad, as the “pressing of a button, coffin sliding out of view to the oven” section has always struck me as faintly bleakly comic.
We take an order of service from the box— oh, her face, her joyful, smiling, unwitting face —and I choose my seat carefully, knowing Ed and Justin will slide in alongside myself and Hester.
I pick the opposite side from Finlay and other distant family members, and a few rows back, so as not to overstate our importance.
I glance across at the Teacups, at others from Susie’s office. Something bothers me, and at first I can’t figure out what it is. As I watch them riffling through the service card, craning to see who’s here, and if anyone’s about to take to the lectern, it hits me—they’re excited.
Not in a malicious way, or that in they wished this upon Susie. But a premature, dramatic exit like hers—it’s plot. It’s a major narrative twist. It’s like a famous person dying and everyone’s smartphones lighting up with the newsbreak, people scrabbling to post it first online. You know of them but don’t really care about them, so are free to enjoy the thrill of the event.
I finally understand why my late gran used to scan the obituaries column in the local paper with such relish, despite her enhanced odds of ending up in it herself.
“Welcome, everybody, to this service to remember the life of Susannah Hart, a person I know was very dear to many of you gathered here today.”
And yet not very dear to one.
I look at the back of Finlay Hart’s head, staring straight ahead, and wonder what he’s thinking.
A Celebration of the Life of Susannah Hart
I focus on these words until they’re no longer the English language. It feels like they’ve bored holes into me.
The celebrant’s recitation of the key dates and events in Susie’s life, reiterating her value to all of us, a poem, “Life Goes On” by Joyce Grenfell, read by Susie’s Auntie Val.
“Nor when I am gone / Speak in a Sunday voice.”
A piece of music, Billie Holiday, “The Very Thought of You.” We wrestled with this choice: Vivaldi and Val Doonican are so easy to slot in when a pensioner passes, crematorium-appropriate, but Susie’s love of the Pet Shop Boys wasn’t quite so useful. Much as we loved them too, it was hard to imagine everyone trying to remain impassive and pensive listening to “Paninaro.”
“‘Being Boring’?” Justin said, but although there was consensus it was great and apt, we couldn’t imagine the poppiness of it working.
Thankfully, I remembered how much Susie loved Billie Holiday sound-tracking a late bar we found in Rome, her seeking an album out and playing it endlessly when we got home. It’s a catalyst, and as soon as it starts up, I’m back getting drunk on Aperol spritzes with her, in a bar lit by a jukebox and tealights, making plans for a future she barely got to see. My face is a flash flood.
Then, it’s Ed’s turn, I see him stand up at the end of the row, his notes in his hand. Listening to Ed read out my tribute to Susie was going to be extraordinarily agonizing, before last night’s discovery. Now I don’t have a way of categorizing my emotional response.
At the lectern, he coughs into a curled fist and looks up at everyone. The sight of him momentarily blurs in my tears as I blink them back.
“Morning,” he says. “I may only be thirty-four years old, but I’m going to guess this will forever be the toughest public speaking gig of my life. As a teacher, I include the time fifth years smuggled a dozen two-liter bottles of Magners Cider in on the last day of term.”
He gives a thin smile. It’s not as if audiences at funerals can give you much encouragement by way of laughter.
“What I’m about to read to you has been written by Susie’s best friend, Eve.” Justin squeezes my knee as Ed looks toward me. I would squeeze back, but I will primal howl.
Who are you, Ed? I never needed to rely on you more than now. The rug has been pulled from under me. I can’t imagine ever trusting you again.
“Eve was not only one of the people who Susie loved most in this world, and vice versa, she’s also very good with words,” he says. “We thought it fitting she say a bit about Susie from the perspective of her friends. Eve can write, I can read, so this is a team effort.”
He coughs again and I tense, waiting for my words in Ed’s voice. Whatever else, I’m very glad I didn’t try to read it myself. I wouldn’t make it through a sentence.
“Eve met Susie in primary school in the 1990s. The first photo of them together is in a nativity play. Susie was the Virgin Mary, always natural casting as a lead, and Eve was the back half of a camel. Always a natural to cast as a dromedary’s arse.”
Ed looks up and says: “Just to remind you again, Eve wrote this.”
He gets an actual laugh.
“There followed what was to become a notorious incident at Saint Peter’s C of E Primary, where the front half of the camel passed out and vomited into the head of the costume, and the back half of the camel struggled out and stood there dressed in vest and pants, and some vomit spray. Other children screamed. Susie Hart, ever the one to make lemons from lemonade, shouted, ‘Look, the camel also gave birth, like me!’ and incorporated it into the storyline.”
This too gets a ripple of amusement.
“From that day on, they were an inseparable duo. On the face of it, Susie and Eve were a total clash. Susie was the captain of netball, whereas Eve wore a fake bandage so she could sit PE out and read Sweet Valley High books.
“Susie didn’t much care for rules and would do anything for her friends. Susie was one of life’s winners, until a split second of horrendous bad luck took her from us. Yet she could never pass by on the other side. She strongly identified with the underdog, while being a straight-A student who succeeded at everything she tried to do. That was her particular magic. Eve remembers a time when a girl in their class was getting bullied for having cheap shoes and Susie not only stuck up for her, she bought the same pair and came to school in them the following week. When Eve said she was heroic, Susie shrugged it off and said: ‘Ugh, I just hate bullies. And anyway, I think I look quite good in gray patent.’”
Another laugh.
“That was Susie. Sardonic, audacious, confident, with a humanity and humor that always shone through. When Eve came to write this, she says she realized that all of Susie was contained in that moment, aged eight years old, when Susie anointed her as God’s vomit-covered baby camel. Confidence and compassion and a metric ton of sass.
“There’s no way to explain how much our group of friends will miss Susie, or how we can begin to calculate how much has been taken from us. From everyone. There’s something exceptional about friendships with friends you’ve known since you were young. They know all the versions of you. They know how you were built. They have a map for you. There’s a shorthand between you, and a love that is as strong as any blood tie.” Ed’s voice wavers and he pauses to gather himself.
“I’m going to read Eve’s summing up in her own first person:
“What I didn’t expect, after Susie died, was to feel this panic. A panic she’d be forgotten. Not her name, or her face, or achievements. The official things. The panic that her voice, the way she spoke, her attitude, all that was unique and specific to her, would pass into history. I wanted her to be here, and for her contributions and opinions to still be with us. That she is past tense feels so impossible, when she was so vividly alive. As I wrote this tribute, I asked myself, what would Susie say if she read it? Hers was the only opinion I wanted, and the only one I couldn’t have.
“I pictured her scanning through it, chin on hand, chewing the drawstring on that terrible rowing club hoodie she wore. She’d giggle at the camel anecdote, and say something about ‘God, do you remember that games teacher though? Put the “hun” into Attila the Hun.’ Then she’d say, at the end, mouth going a bit wiggly and wiping a tear: ‘Oh, you sentimental oaf, give me a hug. I’m not sure, it’s so sweet. Does it make me sound a bit like a cross between Mother Teresa and Samantha from Sex and the City though? I can’t even remember the shoes thing, are you sure? Oh well, if you say so. You can be my official biographer; you’ve got the job. Someone else can write the scandalous stuff about me singing “Happy Birthday Mr. President,” and then bunking up with him.’”
Ed pauses.
“... I hope I never stop hearing Susie’s voice or keeping her memory alive. So, the final line is delivered fully in the spirit of Susie Hart, as we knew her—Susie, you were always too much. But we wanted more. Thank you.”
Ed closes his notes and steps down from the lectern.
People clap, which I’m not sure usually happens at funerals and which I will take to mean we did Susie justice.
Justin puts his hand on my leg, and says, in a strangled voice: “Perfect, Eve. Perfect.”
I barely hear the celebrant’s wrapping-it-up speech.
As we file out to the Twin Peaks music, all I can think of is Susie’s costume that said: She Is Filled with Secrets.