She arrived at the church an hour early; Harriet, the florist, was still working. The church was a great bower of flowers, everything white and pale blue – lilies, roses, stephanotis, scabious and love-in-a-mist – with huge urns, looking like seventeenth-century paintings, either side of the altar steps where the coffin would stand. Persephone winced at the supports, already in place. Small vases stood on every windowsill, with candles on either side of them, and at the end of each pew, a single lily, tied with a white ribbon.
‘Oh,’ said Persephone. ‘Oh, Harriet, it’s beautiful. So lovely. Thank you.’
‘I do hope it’s all right. I was afraid it was a bit – a bit happy, but the service is called a celebration and –’
‘No, no, the happier the better. That’s what we’re trying to do, you’re right. That’s what we said. I can’t thank you enough.’
‘I didn’t know Ned, of course,’ said Harriet, weaving a thread of gypsophila through the pulpit garland. ‘But I’ve built up such a picture of him, hearing you all talk, and he was obviously the most lovely man, very, very special.’
‘Yes,’ said Persephone. ‘Yes, he was. Very special indeed.’
The organist arrived, came to speak to her, said how lovely the flowers were.
‘Aren’t they. Is it still raining?’
‘No, it’s stopped. Pretty grey, but not raining. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to sit up there in my loft and just strum away for a bit.’
Glorious strains of Wagner and then Mozart filled the church; it didn’t sound too much like strumming to Persephone.
She sat and looked at flowers, and thought about her beloved Ned, who she had loved so much and who had been taken from her by his father and the law when he was only four, a solemn brown-eyed little boy, his shining dark hair flopping over his brow, with a slow, cautious smile, and a laugh that bubbled and leapt out of him. But she could not entirely blame the law: most of the blame was her own; she should have stayed, not run away, kept him her own. Only – James had disliked her so much, disapproved of her so deeply. How had they got married, how could they have thought it was in any way a proper match? He had been handsome, of course, and rich, and she had been only seventeen and by the time she discovered her mistake there was Ned.
Persephone dropped her face into her hands and wept, as she had been weeping so many times over the past two weeks.
‘Persephone, I’m here.’ It was Jillie. ‘Mummy and Daddy are just coming. We wanted to be early, we thought you might be here.’
Persephone looked at her through swimming brown eyes and said, ‘Oh, Jillie, thank God for you. Please sit with me, you and your parents. Then I can be brave.’
‘Of course. I just hope I can be too. And you know, it’s stopped raining. So – there might be a God.’
Persephone looked at her and blew her nose, wiped her eyes.
‘I want a bit better than that,’ she said. And managed to smile.
Jillie sat next to Persephone and held her hand, very lightly; her father’s hand she clung to rather more fervently. She was dreading more than anything the entry of the coffin; that would finalise it, make it real. Make their parting truly for always: that dreadful evening when he had told her he couldn’t marry her and she had thought her heart would break was still, in part, the stuff that dreams were made of. While Ned was still alive, she could love him, even while at first she had hated him; he occupied the earth, he breathed the air, he moved, he laughed, he talked. Now that he was not alive, he was still, silent, solemn and she could love only his memory, fading with time as it must.
The church was filling up now, rows and rows of people, all come to say goodbye. She didn’t recognise many of them: some powerful and important, some quite the reverse. There were the distinguished surgeons who had guided Ned’s early career, two of his tutors from Cambridge, the dean of the medical school at St Bartholomew’s, and Sir Digby Harrington from St Luke’s, who, as she would have expected, was looking carefully sorrowful. A row of pretty young St Mary’s nurses, and – how dare he come, how dare he – Sir Neil Lawson, who had threatened and virtually sacked Ned, made his life so wretched, looking painfully solemn.
There was another group, she had no idea who: three or four couples, the women all in tailored black, all wearing pearl chokers, the men in what were clearly Savile Row suits, with highly polished shoes, stern expressions. And then she saw that, pinned to the lapels of their suits, were rows of medals and realised: Ned’s contemporaries in the navy. How nice that they came, after all that time. He had clearly made his mark even there.
Then there were several obviously poor families, sitting together in the pews at the back leaving those further forward empty, clearly feeling it was not their place to occupy them; the fathers stiffly awkward in seldom worn suits, the mothers in dark Sunday-best dresses, and their children: three or four in leg irons, a couple on crutches, a pale, huge-eyed little girl coughing intermittently, several looking completely healthy but overawed just the same.
‘Jillie,’ her father whispered urgently. ‘Where is Josh? He should be here, we’ve held his seat.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, looking wildly round, wishing rather fervently that he was there, she didn’t know quite why. ‘He’s just – just not here.’
‘Odd. Very odd.’
It was.
And then, as the introit began from the organ loft, the glorious waterfall of Bach’s Fugue in G Minor, she turned back to the front, to the flowers and the altar; thereby missing the arrival of a young man with wild dark hair, dressed in a black linen jacket and palest grey linen trousers, who had come to say goodbye to Ned who he had known a little, introduced by Josh, and perhaps see Jillie, risking the agony of her being there with the man she had clearly chosen to spend the rest of her life with.