(Not a) Nice Day for a Funeral

You could tell that Aunt May had lived a double life just by looking at the mourners. On the one hand, you had your dark two piece suits and black dresses and pantyhose - I myself was wearing a belted polyester dress with a just a soupçon of lycra – and on the other, you had your flowy florals and a notable preponderance of purple. When we arrived, someone had been drumming, and I said to Michael that we must have come to the wrong place, but he said how many Forest Funeral venues do you think there are in Herefordshire, and then I spotted my cousin Jeff in a pair of shorts and a white shirt and realised we had been right all along.

Jeff was the reason the funeral was on the Tuesday. Sunday would have been better for everyone, but Jeff couldn’t get a flight until the Monday night and the funeral director had said that if we waited any longer than Tuesday we may need to consider some compromises. So I knew Jeff had probably been awake since Monday morning, although with the time difference that might have been Monday night here, or Sunday night, depending, but either way I was aware he would be feeling quite tired as well as upset about his mother. The thing was though, if we had had it on the Sunday, it really would have been much easier.

The Tuesday you see, as well as being a Tuesday, was the hottest day of the year. So far. As it happened, the Wednesday was hotter, but on the Tuesday, the Tuesday was the hottest day of the year, and it was a hot year. Jeff wasn’t to know that, of course. Though the Met Office app is just as available to him as anyone else. So when I saw him, I did feel a little bit put out. “Jeff,” I said, “I’m so glad you could make it.” Which was fine, Michael said, but Michael said that saying “May asked for you often in her final weeks, she would be so pleased you came” was passive aggressive, and what did I think I was going to achieve by saying it. I don’t know what he thought he was going to achieve by saying that, considering I had already said my thing, but anyway. We had both been in the car for two hours with Lucy carrying on in the backseat I suppose.

Lucy is my granddaughter. Some people say a funeral is no place for a baby, but Rachel – that’s my daughter – said that I had promised to take her Tuesday and maybe I could just take her to the funeral and she was in a terrible bind, and so we brought her. She’s a delightful little girl, of course, but clingy. Mercifully, the conversation with Jeff was curtailed by the arrival of the hearse, which was electric. It had been what May wanted. A green funeral. It had sounded rather wonderful the way she described it, but that was before it was going to be on the Tuesday and it was going to be 38.1 degrees Celsius, although Jeff said it was 100 degrees even though he was raised in Worcester and went to the same school as me. I don’t know if you know this about electric cars, but apparently they now have very adequate cooling systems and so they hardly ever overheat. What they do do is run down their batteries somewhat more rapidly in hot weather. So when I say our conversation was curtailed by the arrival of the hearse, I mean quite the opposite.

There was one of those sweeping drives, you see, to make everything feel gracious and peaceful, although this one was meant to be a wildflower meadow rather than a lawn, and may well have been if May had died two months earlier. And the hearse made it onto the driveway and then, graciously, peacefully, ceased. We knew nothing about it, of course, until the funeral director came jogging round the corner, beetroot red under his top hat, and requested that the pall bearers accompany him to the far end of the drive.

Well, the plan was that the pallbearers would carry Aunt May in a pre-loved coffin from the reception building to the memorial pagoda where the service would take place, and then, after that, she would be lifted from the coffin on a kind of biodegradable stretcher type contraption and carried to the graveside, which was in a lovely spot, apparently, between two young silver birch. I had argued strongly for a wicker coffin at the very least, but May had insisted on a shroud. A shroud! But as it happens those poor pallbearers had to carry her from the far end of the drive all the way to the memorial pagoda, and in 100 degree heat! I was certain she was going to slither off someone’s shoulder, they were sweating so profusely but somehow or other she made it to the pagoda without being dropped, and I thought to commend them on it once we were sat down. We were sat behind a woman with a very long grey plait and a green smock, and an older man in a waistcoat but no shirt.

“Didn’t they do well” I said to Michael, but he just stared at me like he was two hands short of a clock. “With the coffin” I explained.

“Oh” he said, “looks like oak, I would say.”

I decided to let that one go. The pagoda was an open sided shelter and somehow we had ended up on the sunny side. Michael is no good in the sun.

By this time I could feel the sweat running in a few places. There were only a few places the sweat could run as my dress was quite clingy in reality. I was certainly not sure that the pantyhose had been a wise choice.

“Pass me my handbag” I said to Jeff. I usually keep a fan in my handbag these days.

“Where did you put it?” he said, and now it was my turn to look at him like he was making no sense because I distinctly remembered telling him to grab my bag while I grabbed the baby.

“I told you to grab my bag while I grabbed the baby” I said.

“Oh” he said. Then “sorry.”

It does not take long in that kind of heat, and you know what they say about English heat, for sweat to begin to pool in one’s dips and dimples.

“Well go and get it” I said, and the man nudged me and pointed at the officiant.

“I need my handbag.” I whispered.

“I’ll get it after the service” he whispered back.

I did not like to check, given we were in the woods, but my legs had started to feel as if spiders were crawling all over them.

“I need my fan. Now.” I said, which made a few people turn around. Several. But not Michael. Fortunately there are kinder people in the world that Michael Evans, because the woman in the row behind me tapped me on the shoulder and passed me an exquisite Spanish fan that was entirely inappropriate for a funeral, and I whispered “that is SO kind” and commenced fanning myself vigorously.

Whereupon Michael leaned towards me and whispered “Slow down love, you’ll get too hot going at it like that.”

Had I been certain my brassier had not been compromised by saturation, I might have hit him then, but the officiant called for a moment of silent contemplation and I availed myself of it. Or would have done had Lucy not woken. She is a very good baby, you know, but awfully prone to crying. I had her in her buggy beside me with the canopy up because of the sun, and I would have taken her for a short walk but one doesn’t just get up and wander off in the middle of a funeral, and so I lifted her out and sat her on my knee. Well, she was not at all content with that of course and I was forced to put her against my shoulder, despite the fact that neither she or I had any need for bodily contact with another living creature. Do you know how hot babies are?

I handed the fan back to the woman behind me, my hands now being tied, and endeavoured to concentrate on the service and not the fact that I had inadvertently married an odious prick, but there I was, sandwiched between the slick, squirming furnace of Lucy and the offending bulk of my husband, and I was quite afraid, for a minute, that I might simply turn molten. Lucy persisted in screaming in my ear, and the officiant appeared to be dealing with that little irritation by speaking more loudly than ever, and in the corner of my eye the sun was glaring at me like I deserved it while my skin crawled and sweated and burned like a fire beneath a cauldron filled with rage. But still, I patted Lucy’s back and sat still and waited.

“Here,” I said, as soon as the speeches were over, “take her, and I’ll bring the buggy.”

Micheal’s arms remained by his side. “Just pop her in the buggy if you’re tired of carrying her. I’ll go and get your bag from the car and catch you up.”

“Well take her with you then.” I was desperate to get her hot hands off my neck, but every time I started to pull the child away from my she held on tighter and the crying intensified.

“No, you keep her, I’ll be back in five minute.” Michael was backing away now as the pallbearers gathered beside the coffin.

“Leave the fucking bag” I hissed. He looked disappointed, but stayed put.

It’s a strange thing, watching a body taken OUT of a coffin. Not that you could see the body, the shroud worked rather well from that perspective. You could see it WAS a body, but it could have been any body. I remembered Aunt May though. How she used to shout at me when I put paper in the general waste.

It was rather stately, in a way. There she lay up on the litter and us following after, black and green and blue and purple in amongst the trees. And the baby of course, who was screaming blue murder over the top of the chanting going on around Aunt May. Michael was useless of course. He pushed the empty buggy like he doing a good deed, while Lucy wailed and wriggled in my arms. More than once I thought I might drop her, the skin between us had become so wet.

When the smell began, I was not the first to notice it. Lucy had started weaning a few weeks before, so who knows what was passing through that child but as we set off down the path there started up the most awful reek. Everyone seemed to glance at us then, the old woman and the baby, like it was my fault. Between the smell and the sweat and the stares, I began to feel a little peculiar.

“Michael, take the baby.” I recall saying it. And I recall that when I turned to look for him he was talking to a woman in a kaftan.

“Michael” I called, “could you….” He laughed at something the woman had said, which seemed rude under the circumstances.

And then I fainted. I wondered later whether I did it on purpose, a bit. Maybe I did. I am told that another woman caught the baby as I went down, thankfully, and that then a clearing formed around me, just in time for a woman called Ruth to join the party from the rear, having been held up in traffic. I am told that I lay on my back most terribly still, and that Lucy stopped crying, and that Ruth, poor Ruth, approached me gently with tears in her eyes and lay a single sprig of Rosemary across my breast before kissing my forehead and joining the throng.

Of course Michael told me none of this. Michael, only told me that the funeral director insisted that the funeral must continue without further ado, and was quite insistent in the face of protest.

“It is imperative” he said, according to Jeff “that May is buried now.”

So Michael stayed with me, and Jeff went on ahead, and when I came too, it was quiet and the lady with the fan was holding Lucy and the air smelled of rosemary and pine and someone had brought a lilac and orange parasol, and was holding it over my head.

Well, I didn’t stop being angry with Michael, but some very nice women insisted I take off my tights and swap my dress for a lighter one from someone’s overnight bag, and they sat me under the fan, and brought me water to drink, and I began to wonder whether he was such an idiot all the time or whether the heat had got to him too. Either way, Aunt May’s friends were quite lovely. There is no denying though, the funeral would have been far better placed on the Sunday.