Chapter 19
19
“The quiche is really good, actually,” Hester says, and I know it must be as she does not dole out praise willy-nilly, or indeed ever. “Want my other slice?”
She’s done the buffet drive-by heaped plate load, where you pick things up for the sheer hell of it and share your scavenger’s bounty when you get back to the table.
“No, thanks. Does look nice though.”
“Can’t eat?” Hester says, and I shake my head. “Well, at least think of how skinny you’ll get. Every cloud.”
This is such tone-deaf classic Hestering I can’t be bothered to mind. There’s no Susie to text, no 4G in heaven.
Your violent death had a silver lining, I now fit that Whistles dress. You know, the zebra-print one with a waist so tight it was like a religious test of penance.
Wait, you mean if you’d bought a size up, you vain crow, I wouldn’t have had to die?!
As Hester pokes through the potato salad, I look curiously at the top of her head, her immaculate platinum parting, thinking: I was so jealous you had Ed, but did you have Ed? What’s been going on all this time, exactly? What would happen if I told her he’d cheated? Would she dump him?
The wake is in the kind of kooky, plushy boutique hotel surrounds—chandeliers, mismatched crockery, and colorful Chesterfields, open fires—that would make for a great “do” at any other time.
As it is, it’s a peculiar, energy-drained sort of sub party. All the trappings of a get-together without the bonhomie. When a person goes “at their time,” as my mum says, you can find solace in that. You’re allowed to brighten up after the main farewell. Yet as much as we’re supposed to be “celebrating” Susie, obviously, we can’t. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called death. The volume level rises with inebriation, but it’s still half-hearted.
My mum wanted to come but she had a walking break planned with her friends, and I didn’t want her to miss it. Losing a holiday to a funeral didn’t seem fair, given the number of things she has to enjoy.
After we arrived, we found a table in a corner, territory with walls behind us so we could more easily defend it. Justin bought a bottle of Veuve in an ice bucket, declaring he couldn’t care less “if Uncle Rod from Chepstow disapproves.” (This is a generic relative, I don’t think Susie actually has an uncle Rod from Chepstow, disapproving or otherwise.) “It was Susie’s favorite drink and she’d not give a stuff that you don’t usually drink champagne at wakes. In fact, that’s precisely what would appeal to her.”
I still keep my back carefully turned to the room during the telltale phunk-splut-fizz noise of the cork emerging.
“To Susie,” Justin says, holding his glass up. “Our dearest girl. Not here, but as far as we’re concerned, never not with us.”
We hold ours up and mumble: “To Susie.”
I think of her on that gurney. Not moving.
“What was that daft thing she used to say when she got ‘one for the road’ in?” Ed says.
“A brandy for the reindeer,” I say, and Ed laughs, and I look away quickly in case he tries to make it any moment of connection.
Our dearest girl, not here. Her Not Hereness gives me a low hard stomach pain, what she and I used to call the empty sads . I lost a lexicon with her, a shared cache of things only the two of us understood.
If Susie was returned to me, though, would we have a friendship-ending size of fight? I would have to know the answers to things that I doubt we’d have fully recovered from. She’s died twice.
“Ed, want some quiche?” Hester says.
“No, thanks,” he says, with a smile. “Gorged myself senseless on the sausage rolls.”
Incredible how one revelatory discovery can completely change your perception of someone.
As we’re the primary group of mourners, aside from Susie’s saturnine brother, people have approached us to pay their respects. Instead of sitting down, Ed stands up, satellite to us throughout the arrivals—greeting people, thanking them for praising him for the reading, pointing them to the complimentary drinks, directing the traffic.
Before I’d have thought: oh, how good of Ed, both promoting and protecting us.
Now, it’s: I see you’re making yourself important again, being our ambassador, who asked you to do that?
Is it because Susie mattered more to you than any of us realized?
“Excuse me, are you Eve Harris ?”
A thirty-something man is tapping me on the shoulder, using my name as if he’s pronouncing something exotic he’d like to order from a menu. “I’m Andy. I was in Susie’s team at Deloitte. That was a beautiful reading. You wrote it?”
I say yes and thank him, and we chat about anodyne professional things and every so often Andy shakes his head and says, “Terrible thing, such a dreadful thing,” almost as if he fears I’ll think he’s forgotten if he doesn’t.
I think, I must tell Susie I met Andy , and then remember that I can’t. Whatever summary or insight that Susie would offer about him is a forever unknown. I imagine the machines in the hospital, with their unbroken tone. I want to go home and be alone.
“She talked about you a lot,” Andy says, and I reply, “Oh really?”—vacantly, so I don’t think about this, and crumple.
“Oh yes! She quoted you endlessly, said you were inseparable since school! We are exact opposites who are completely alike was how she described you.” Andy beams, he means so well. I can see he thinks he’s being comforting. Each word is like a screwdriver jabbed in my shins.
I thank him effusively and excuse myself to go to the loo. I bump into Finlay Hart in a doorway, in a way that necessitates some sort of interaction. He looks as delighted about that as I feel. He’s clean-shaven now, and there is the glimmer of those Susie genes again. It’s interesting how his forbidding attitude leaks out of every pore: despite his evident pretty boy credentials, I sincerely doubt even the Teacup Girls are giving him sidelong looks. Well, OK, maybe they are, and getting nothing back but radiation sickness.
I have a hideous flex of resentment that God chose the sister to die and the brother to live. God didn’t choose anything, of course. Any more than He or She chose what I’m drinking.
I always thought that anyway, but I’m more sure of it than ever, no chance of me finding religion in this. No wonder we play the what’s for you, won’t pass you mind games with ourselves, when the brutal senselessness is so hard to swallow.
“Thanks for organizing this,” Finlay says, formal, bloodless. “It’s gone off well. As well as could be expected.”
The king of qualified praise.
I nod and say: “Thank you.”
The redheaded girlfriend with poor etiquette from his mother’s funeral is nowhere to be seen, but that could be because she decided that when it came to meeting his British relatives, once was enough.
“Is your dad not here?” I say.
Fin shakes his head. “He couldn’t be made to understand Susie was gone, so it wasn’t possible.”
“That’s a shame,” I say.
“It is and it isn’t. He’s spared the pain of it,” Fin says.
“I suppose so.”
Whenever you say something blandly sympathetic to Finlay Hart, you get batted back as if you’re a juvenile intellect, as opposed to saying the comforting, polite things people say. It riles me.
“Is it possible he’ll understand at some point in the future, and be upset that he missed the funeral?”
“That’s not how his illness works. He’s not himself on Tuesday and dementia sufferer again on Wednesday.”
“No, I know, but I thought his memory might come in and out, like the tide. Susie said he could be completely lucid?”
Fin stares at me, appraisingly, weighing his response. “That’s not my experience of how it is with him. Some things are fixed. Susie being a teenager seems that way.”
“And you? He thinks you’re the same age?”
I know this is nosy and possibly unfair. It’s hardly a comfortable subject. I feel myself doing that thing with someone I dislike: baiting them into saying something that proves my dislike is justified.
“I’m—I was—two years older than Susie, so in London at that age, I think.”
“Right.”
“While we’re discussing your interest in my family, I’ve consulted a lawyer over those letters. In absence of a will, Susie’s house and possessions belong to myself and my father. What you did was illegal. You’d be much better off returning her things to me now, rather than letting this turn official and expensive.”
“We’re really doing this at her wake?” I say, feeling a lot more rattly and intimidated than I let on.
“I don’t want to be doing this at all. It’s your choice that we are.”
“Finlay? It is you! My goodness!” A sixty-something friend-or-relative joins us and I’m very glad of the interruption.
I walk away before I say anything more, which would definitely not be in my Sunday voice.
“W HAT WERE YOU having intense confidentials with the sinister brother about? I’m starting to get a crush, you know. He flounced into that Caffè Nero like Dracula returning to his crypt at two a.m., after drinking his fill of virgins.”
“Ugh, you have always had the worst taste. Apart from Francis.”
“True.”
Justin conceding this immediately shows he’s in a reduced state. Francis shone briefly for a matter of months, a year ago, as a rare Justin official boyfriend and general joy to have around. Until Justin declared that sorry, that much nice is just too much pressure! while Susie nodded her firm understanding and Ed and I boggled at each other. (“You want a massive arsehole?” “Poorly phrased, Edward!”)
Justin’s rosy-eyeballed with champagne and crying and is clearly finding it hard to be his usual ebullient self. Every so often he pats my arm absentmindedly: to wordlessly convey, once again, what on earth has happened, how has this happened?
We’re dreading life on the other side of this day.
When there’s a sense of that’s that, then and “normality” resumes. We’ve agreed we’re not honoring the pub quiz tradition for the foreseeable, to show our respects. In truth we’re fighting shy of it because the empty chair, the comeback that never comes, the bag of chips we don’t need to buy, is going to debilitate us that much more. When this strangeness is over, the Not Hereness will truly land.
“Thing is...” I glance over to check Fin’s safely on the other side of the melee. “He wants me to return a box of diaries from Susie’s house. Remember when me and Ed played clean-up squad? He says anything in Susie’s house belongs to the family.”
“How did he know it was there?”
“He asked if I’d taken anything and I blurted it, like an idiot. Now he says he can lawyer up and make me give it up if I won’t.”
“He wants her diaries that much? Why, for God’s sake? Who wants to know who fingered their sister in the third year?”
I nearly spit my wine out at this.
“... That’s all it’ll be!” Justin says. “God bless our Sue but they won’t give Samuel Pepys any competition. She once said to me, why would I read a book when I could watch Steel Magnolias with a tub of Chubby Hubby again?”
“I don’t know what’s in them. I’m not going to read them,” I say, uneasy.
“There I was thinking the nose bag was the controversial discovery. I’d give them back to him, E.”
“ Really? ” It seemed so morally obvious to me to resist.
“Yeah. If it’s going to turn nasty. You don’t need that.”
“But... she’d hate him having them.”
“She’d hate a lot about this but it’s not in our power, huh.”
This surprises me. Justin is much more of a pragmatist than I am. He was also much more like Susie than me, which makes me think even she might agree.
“She was his sister, Eve. He’s entitled.”
“Yeah well, you’re right there.”
I glance over at Finlay and the clenched set of his jaw, se questered in his corner of the room. I bet he despises everyone here. I bet he wants to run from this place straight to the jet bridge to board his 747, shuddering with repulsion and pity. We’re the small town he escaped. Well, city.
“They hated each other,” I add.
“Maybe. It’s not for us to play judge and jury though.”
“But it was Ed who thought we should protect her reputation.”
As I say these words, I realize their full meaning, and their irony. If it was to conceal this information, however, he didn’t seem interested in Susie’s personal effects. I don’t know what to believe anymore. I don’t know who he is, who my best friend was, or why the world’s become unrecognizable to me in a matter of days. I can’t surmount a sensation that I’ve been hugely, horribly negligent, to allow this whole timeline to happen.
“I’m going to be frank in order to shock you, now. It doesn’t happen often, admittedly, but Edward Cooper is capable of error.”
Justin slides a look, seen only by me, in the direction of Hester, who’s rearranging strands of hair around her face while gazing into a hand mirror.
“Heh. I’m going to get some air,” I say, with a smile, picking up my glass and, as an afterthought, one of the many bottles too, because I need a proper escape from company.
The hotel has a terrace with canopied wooden tables. The paved space is lit by fairy lights and heat lamps, as the winter sky’s darkened. I know the doors are unlocked as I’ve seen smokers sidling through them, in furtive ones and twos, grasping lighters.
God, I wish I smoked right now. Susie demanded I give up that vice and then hers contributed to her getting killed.
I head out and adjust my body language to do not speak to me please, which is contained in the determined scowl, the tension in my shoulders and the lack of eye contact. It works, in part at least as I think people know not to hassle a solo mourner.
I find a table at the edge of the terrace and set my wine down. The bitter temperature is a sobriety aid and the view of the city rooftops at nighttime is quite lovely. Aided by a deep swig of white wine, I try to find some sort of inner calm.
I briefly imagine standing on the wall, like I’m a swimmer on a diving board, and plunging into the ink-dark tangle of bushes below. Rolling and bouncing down the hill toward the road, until I hit something hard enough to stop me. It feels more appealing than it should.
I glance back at the wake, staring resentfully at the throng beyond the steamed-up windows. What I hate is, yes, of course they’re sorry this happened, but their lives will resume, seamlessly, as soon as they leave.
Nothing for us will ever be the same. It’s like losing a leg and everyone coming to gather around the hospital bed, consoling you over the fact you only have one left, and walking out doing a hop, skip, and a jump on their two again. I’m envious of these people.
“Hey you. Taking a break?” Ed says at my elbow, giving me a startle.
“Oh? Yeah.”
I wish I’d planned for his approaching me, thought of something to say that could icily dispatch him without revealing anything. One on one, Ed can’t be avoided, the way my injured feelings require. I can’t bear to pretend warmth toward him.
“It’s gone alright, I think? We did her proud,” he says. His black tie’s been removed and his dark gray suit looks good with his sandy coloring. May he shrivel and perish.
I shrug.
“I hope so. Hard to judge. It’s not for people who knew her, this thing, is it?” I gesture back at the hotel with my glass and pause. “Actually, it’s worse than that,” I say, vaguely picking a fight. “It’s for people who don’t really care.”
“They care,” Ed says. “Just not as much as we do.”
“This isn’t the time for your super-reasonable balanced perspective. Let a shit thing be shit.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t shit.”
I hunch my shoulders and turn away from him, looking back at the cloud-streaked ink sky.
“We’ve got to look after each other. That’s the only way to get through this,” Ed says, thickly. “That’s the only conclusion I’ve drawn.”
I don’t respond.
“Are you angry with me about anything?” Ed says, hesitantly. “Did I mangle the eulogy?”
“No.”
“No to both questions?”
I didn’t know I was going to say it, until this moment. Amid turmoil and inebriation and not knowing what else to do, whomp, it tumbles out of my mouth:
“You slept with Susie.”
The actual words spoken feel jagged. It’s as if I swallowed something sharp and metallic, and it tears up my insides as it makes its way out of me.