Chapter 9 Zoe Spring 2025
Zoe
The coffin is larger than she expects. How odd to think that Mum is inside, all dressed up for her final journey, wearing her favourite pearls. She wouldn’t be Mum without those pearls. Zoe stands outside Highdown Hall, wrapping her arms around herself though it’s another warm day.
Fiona comes out of the house with a mug, still wearing slippers. ‘Mrs Gunn’s done a good job with the flowers,’ she says. The MUM on the top of the coffin picked out in daisies does look beautiful.
Fiona has organised it all single-handedly, thinks Zoe. She feels like she’s been in a daze since Mum died, unable to really focus on anything.
‘Everything’s set for the wake. The caterers will bring the food while we’re at church.’
‘Thanks for doing all of this.’ Zoe waves at the coffin.
Fiona squeezes Zoe’s arm. ‘She was our mum,’ she says gently. ‘Of course I was going to do it.’
‘I’m sorry again about last night. I was being silly.’
Fiona smiles. ‘It’s okay, Zoe, I get it.
’ She goes back inside, picks up her make-up bag from the hall table and stares into the mirror.
She seems to stand for a long time looking at her reflection.
Zoe wonders what she sees. Are we who we see in the mirror, or what the world sees?
Are they the same thing? After a while, Fiona pushes her hair behind her ears and carefully draws on her smile with lipstick.
Zoe turns back to her mother. The funeral people said they’d remove the pearls before they cremate her.
They’ll receive those back with her wedding band and ashes early next week ready for the interment in the village graveyard alongside the other DeProse family.
And then after that, her sisters will all go back to their separate homes.
What will happen to her? Zoe wonders. Everything seems so uncertain since they found the will.
She takes a deep breath and looks back at the coffin.
When they take off the wedding band before they cremate her, it’ll be the first time it’s been removed since Dad slipped it on in the same church more than fifty years ago. Zoe was always moved that Mum continued to wear it after her husband had died, as if their love transcended this world.
Zoe walks forward and touches the end of the coffin, lying on its base in the hearse. Two men in dark uniform stand at the front of the car, turned away from her.
The grandfather clock in the hall strikes eleven. ‘It’s almost time,’ calls Fiona from inside.
Missy jumps up into the hearse and curls up next to Mum. There’s something about this small gesture that makes her eyes tear up again. She knows. The cat knows. ‘You can’t come with us,’ says Zoe, picking her up and stroking her head. Missy purrs and Zoe buries her face into her fur.
Fiona emerges from the house with Sara, both looking immaculate. Steph follows, her dress baggy in the wrong places, and they stand by the coffin, as if they are at a macabre coffee morning with their mother. Sara picks cat hair off Zoe’s dress.
One of the men closes the car, encasing Mum in glass, and they start the engine.
It’s only a five-minute walk to the village church but it seems to take ages to even get to the bottom of the drive, walking uncomfortably slowly, the sun hot against their black dresses.
This house must have meant so much to Mum that she wanted to start her final journey from here.
Which makes Zoe not getting any of it all the worse.
But she’s not going to think about that now.
Through the gates, the hearse noses its way on to the main road into the village.
Someone Zoe doesn’t recognise stops and stands, head bowed, as the hearse passes them, and this small gesture makes the tears prick her eyes again.
They walk past the village school, which they all attended until they were thirteen, and next to it is the church, the spire picked out against the blue sky.
The hearse stops outside and the men open it up and gently slide out the coffin.
The sisters wait while a couple of latecomers sidle past and slip through the entrance.
The pall-bearers lift the coffin on to their shoulders and then the four of them automatically fall into step behind it.
Zoe and Sara, followed by Fiona and Steph, walking in a strange half-shuffle.
The church is packed, the pews crammed with people.
Mum lived in Hambrough all her life and had played a big role in the community.
Fetes, committees, the WI, chair of governors of the school, helping out in the church.
If there was something to be volunteered for, Mum had put her hand up.
They walk down the aisle behind Mum’s coffin to Mahler’s ‘Adagietto’ from Symphony No.
5 in C-sharp Minor, as Mum requested. All four dressed in matching black dresses, sombre bridesmaids.
Her legs are heavy and it’s an effort to put one foot in front of the other.
She can’t keep her eyes off the coffin, imagining Mum inside dressed in the floor-length dusky pink summer dress she and Sara chose.
Mum’s favourite. It seemed such a waste to burn that beautiful dress, but what was the alternative?
It might be environmentally friendly being cremated with no clothes but it would be odd to think of Mum naked inside the coffin.
She shakes her head. Why is she thinking such odd things?
There are so many familiar faces. The whole village is here and some of the townspeople too.
Mum was the last to carry the DeProse name.
Mum’s friends, many now leaning on sticks or slumped in wheelchairs.
A day out. At the back, there’s a man leaning against the pillar.
Ben? Is it Ben? She can’t turn her head enough to see.
There’s Alice standing with her husband.
Then near the front, Sara’s husband John and her three children have come for the day.
Will Sara go back with them and then just return for the interment?
Will that be the end of the four of them together at Highdown?
Her stomach tenses. Having hated having them here at the beginning, she now can’t imagine the house without them. Her sisters.
At the top of the aisle, the pall-bearers stop.
She turns to see if it is Ben by the pillar, but no one is there now.
There’s a moment when the coffin tips slightly and Zoe holds her breath.
Suddenly she’s back with Mum watching Queen Elizabeth’s funeral.
Mum said what a responsibility it had been for the young pall-bearers to hold the Queen’s coffin throughout the day.
Into Westminster Abbey, then off to Wellington Arch and then on to Windsor.
The two of them spent the day glued to the TV, Mum in black, with what she considered a tasteful Union Jack flag hung from the gallery, because the old flagpole had rusted solid, a full afternoon tea, including finger sandwiches which Zoe loved, in the late Queen’s honour.
The coffin slides on to the catafalque by the altar flanked by two lines of tall candles. The men melt away and Zoe finds herself alone in front of the coffin, unable to move until Sara grabs her hand and brings her back to the front pew where the rest of her sisters are sitting.
‘“I am the resurrection and the life,”’ saith the Lord; “he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die’,” starts the vicar.
She tries to listen to all the words he says – some of it about Mum but mainly the humdrum words of the standard Church of England funeral service.
Her mind keeps reeling back though to Mum doing the flowers for the harvest festival arrangements.
We plough the fields, and scatter the good seed on the land.
It’s a warm day – they all seem to be unseasonably warm these days – but she’s unable to stop shivering.
Sara puts an arm around her and draws her close, until one of her children behind grows jealous and clambers over the pew to nestle in her lap, Sara burying her face into her daughter’s hair.
Zoe watches her curl into her sister and feels strangely envious.
Not because she hasn’t got her own children, but never again will she be able to do that with her mother.
She thinks that in an odd way she’s an orphan now.
Can you call yourself an orphan at thirty-five? Probably not.
Sara gently hands back her daughter to her husband, stands up and Zoe realises it’s time for the intercessions.
They stand in a line, in the same place as she had to say the same prayers when she was at the village school.
But this time she’s not staring at Mum smiling back at her in the congregation but at her coffin.
Does she have her eyes open? Is she still watching them?
Or is she somewhere else in the church checking they’ve done it all as she instructed?