A silver urn sat centrally on the altar and held the most stunning display of flowers. Her request had been simple: to include all the colours she knew Prim would adore. The arrangement was a credit to Sandie’s florist, and everyone commented on the variety of pinks and pale blues, the pastel shades of sweet pea and the dark purples and violets, all run through with frothy greenery and gypsophila. The flowers were, if anything, celebratory and not in the least bit maudlin, perfect for a woman who had so loved her garden and perfect for this blue-sky day, which even if she hadn’t known it, Victoria had been dreading her whole life.
It was comforting to have Daksha, Dr and Mrs Joshi in the pew next to her; she was aware that, without them, she would have been entirely alone. Victoria couldn’t help but mentally fast-forward and wonder how her life would be now. What happens tomorrow? Where do I fit? How do I live?
Mrs Joshi blotted at her eyes and nose with a handkerchief and, every so often, when able, she would reach over and squeeze Victoria’s arm, one time with quite a pinch, which in any other circumstances would have resulted in a yelp. But as Victoria reminded herself, these gestures were offered in affection.
Daksha, aware of her mother’s antics, rolled her eyes and sucked in her cheeks, able to lift Victoria’s spirits a little even on this, the very worst of days. Victoria listened to Jim Melrose, the vicar, with his bald head and abundance of facial hair, which stuck out like little grey brush heads, tufting from his ears, nose and resting above his eyes like giant caterpillars, as he gave his dawdling speech on the wonderful life of Mrs Primrose Cutter-Rotherstone, and, in truth, she more than struggled to connect Prim with the woman he described.
‘A wonderful woman! A pillar of the community!’
Victoria smiled inwardly, knowing that whilst her gran had indeed been a wonderful woman, she had never had time for the petty politics and antics of the various committees that sought her patronage. Everyone from Neighbourhood Watch to the Epsom in Bloom Society coveted her intelligent, frank and fearless input. Prim, however, politely declined them all and did so with such grace and that practised flourish of her hand that offence was never taken.
Gerald spoke beautifully, offering a more recognisable version of her gran.
‘Prim was a person for whom age wasn’t even a number – it was an inconvenience. She loved gin and dancing and staying up late to play cards and talk rubbish, keen to sit in the garden in all weathers and greet the first light.’ He paused to smile, as if recalling these exact moments with the woman he had been so fond of . . .
Victoria let her gaze wander over the congregation, trying to remember the saying that was something to do with how you could judge a person by the company they kept. Well, whoever came up with that had clearly never met Prim! With the exception of the Joshi family, there wasn’t a head present that wasn’t grey. The men were jowly and slack-jawed, a little crooked, and they walked slowly, leaning on whatever they could grab en route to remain upright, whether it be a pew or the arm of the person closest. The women uniformly had bloated ankles, gripped sticks and were clad in polyester – black mostly, apart from one older lady who was resplendent, head to toe, in lemon. All wore flat, sensible shoes that Prim would have deemed so ugly she would not have worn them to tend the garden. These people were old! So old! Victoria wondered what they might possibly have had in common with her gran. Prim was nothing like them; she was, in fact, the opposite of them: young and active, busy and fast!
Her eyes fell upon the glossy, blonde-wood coffin with the brass handles and a lump formed in her throat as a fresh batch of tears sprang.
Maybe you were like these people, Prim. Maybe you were a little bowed, a little frail, and I just couldn’t see it, or maybe I didn’t want to see it . . . To me you were and always will be magnificent! I hope that if there is a heaven, you and Sarah and Marcus have made up, maybe you will all sit around a dinner table together with Grandpa . . . and I have to admit that I envy you and I wonder if I might prefer to be with all of you than here, by myself. I am scared. I am so scared. And I love you and right now I don’t know how I am going to put one foot in front of the other and make it out of this church. I feel lonely, even here among all of these people.
The congregation made a slow procession along the path to the church gates, where the vicar stood and gave each person a two-handed clasp in lieu of a shake. When it was her turn, Victoria thought it felt a little possessive for a stranger and it did nothing to ease her discomfort.
‘Primrose was a wonderful woman. I met her quite a few times over the years at various concerts, Christmas services and so on, and of course when we laid your grandpa to rest. She was a real tour de force. I was a little terrified of her, truth be told!’ He whispered the last from the side of his mouth. ‘But mostly I found her to be terrific fun!’
‘She was.’ It still felt alien to be talking about her in the past tense. ‘And thank you for today.’
‘My absolute pleasure, and you know where we are if you want a chat or need an ear. My wife makes a passable lemon drizzle and it goes very well with a cup of tea; just the ticket when the world can feel a bit too big.’
‘Thank you.’ There we are again with the tea . . . She eased her hand from his, genuinely touched by his offer.
As she climbed into the back seat of Dr Joshi’s car she noticed for the first time a woman with short, dark hair hovering to the side of the path. She was wearing a long, black coat, despite the warmth of the day, a coat more suited to winter, she thought. Bernard-the-handyman was standing to the side of her and he reached out and touched the woman’s arm tenderly. Victoria wondered if it was his wife or daughter, neither of whom she had met. She smiled at them in a way that she hoped conveyed her gratitude for making the effort. Bernard raised his hand and then looked to the floor. She was touched at how affected he was and knew Prim would have been too.
Mrs Joshi reached back between the front seats of the plush car and squeezed her leg, hard.
‘You are doing your grandma proud, Victoria. You really are. I think that is the hardest bit over.’
Victoria wasn’t sure this was true, fearing that actually the hardest bit was yet to come. The bit where everyone’s lives got back to normal – Prim was her everyday, her normal, so where did that leave her? She felt a shiver along her limbs at the prospect, but smiled at Daksha’s mum, and rubbed her thigh where she could still feel the throb of her grip.
Despite the house having so many visitors, it was oddly quiet, quieter than the church had been. She considered putting some music on but was unsure of the right thing to do. Plus, she didn’t think the mourners would necessarily appreciate her playlist and she didn’t want to hear Prim’s music; her gran’s taste had been eclectic – everything from Sarah Vaughan to Simply Red – but today, to surround herself with the sounds she could only associate with the woman she had lost would, she knew, be too much. She wished at some level that a party had broken out, giving her licence to drink too much and dance and cry until her feet ached and her body collapsed in the kind of sleep that had proved elusive in the two weeks since Prim’s death. No such luck. The elderly guests gathered in huddles, ate slowly and sparingly, and spoke at an irritatingly low volume that sounded like the collective hum of pensioner bees.