‘You must have done once.’

‘It gets buried, Minty, under the everyday.’ He held up a hand and ticked off his fingers: ‘Bills. Travelling to and from work. Endless discussions about the children. House maintenance.’

I remember feeling outraged on Rose’s behalf. That was to my credit, at least. ‘She only bore your children, kept house, warmed your bed and, no doubt, sorted your socks. All to make your life easy.’

‘I can’t deny it.’ Nathan pushed me down, and kissed me, his mouth hot and lazy with spent passion.

Had he, when he was married to me, purchased a bottle of good champagne and stolen a lunch-hour with Rose? Had he drawn her down on to the blue and white quilt, kissed her bare shoulders and, afterwards, propped himself up for the delights of Elbow Talk? Would he have confided to his ex-wife, ‘Minty and I only discuss bills and house maintenance but you, Rose, offer me love more perfect than I imagined?

I wish, I wish, I’d told Nathan then, over the padded satin heart, that I loved him, because it would have made him happy.

The lawn was ragged, and the boys had trampled the worm casts into the grass. Very soon I would have to think about mowing it, which I had never done. That had been Nathan’s department. Felix’s football had been abandoned by the door, and I picked it up. Flakes of dried mud dusted my fingers.

I was ravenous, but food made me nauseous. I choked when I bit into a piece of bread or tried to swallow a mouthful of soup. Yet hunger was making me shaky and weak. I held up my hands and examined them. The fingers were trembling. One of my thumbnails had torn on the lock, and a tiny pearl of blood was drying on the cuticle. I sucked at it. The metallic taste made me retch.

I halted by the lilac tree – such a perfect resting point in the route round the garden. (Rose knew that.) I looked up into it. A few leaves in a bright, trashy green had shaken themselves loose. The colours hurt my eyes; the sounds and scents of new growth were unbearable.

‘The young and pretty,’ one of Rose’s friends had comforted her when Nathan left her (and Poppy had told me), ‘can be pretty wicked. But they only get away with it for a short time.’

‘Nathan,’ I murmured, into that sparkling morning, ‘what would you want? Do you want to lie in a peaceful churchyard under the yews? Or would you rather be where you lived, fought, hustled and made your children?’

My eyes filled. I would definitely have to mow the lawn, and I hadn’t a clue how to set about it. Yet mowing lawns couldn’t be that difficult.

14

Rose telephoned as I was planning the order of service. She asked how I was, and had I managed to sleep, then went straight to the point. ‘Minty, I’d like to give an address at the funeral.’

‘Do wives give addresses?’

‘I’m not his wife, remember. I’m a… well, friend-wife.’

‘I thought only people who didn’t care too much gave the address. Otherwise you break down.’

‘It’s my last gift to him. The children would like it.’

‘Your children.’

‘Nathan’s children.’ She sounded very far away. ‘Where are you?’

‘Romania. A trip that’s been planned for months. I couldn’t get out of it but I’m cutting it short. Is that agreed? Only five minutes, but I don’t trust -’

‘Trust,’ my voice echoed feebly.

‘Anyone else to give the real Nathan.’

Was the real Nathan the man who colour-coded his files? Who said, ‘We have to be careful with money’? The man who had longed to put on a worn pair of jeans, battered boots and walk the cliffs above Priac Bay? Or was he the man who had propped himself on his elbow and searched unsuccessfully for the words to explain how happy he felt?

‘Rose, I’ve made a decision. Nathan will be buried in Altringham. I thought it better he was somewhere where he’d been known. Where he won’t be alone.’

‘Oh, Minty.’ Rose was almost inaudible. ‘Thank you.’

Barely half an hour later, Poppy was on the phone. She was hostile and cold, and I no less so. ‘About the hymns, Minty. Dad’s favourite was “Immortal, Invisible”. We should start with that. He was very particular about hymns.’

‘Was he?’

‘You wouldn’t know, perhaps. You didn’t need hymns when he married you. And “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” to finish with.’

I groped for a dim memory of various weddings I had attended with Nathan when those hymns had been sung. ‘I don’t think he liked either of them. He thought they were boring.’

But Poppy had appointed herself keeper of her father’s flame, and in this matter she was not to be denied. Her voice trembled with anger. ‘I think we’re the ones to know what Dad liked or disliked.’

During the first verse of ‘Immortal, Invisible’, Sam bent his head and wept. Jilly slid her hand unobtrusively under his elbow and pressed closer. He edged away from her and blew his nose. Jilly dropped her hand and stared straight ahead.

Across the aisle, seated on either side of me, Felix and Lucas shifted uneasily at the sight of their big brother’s grief. For the hundredth time, I questioned if they should be at the service. Both had gone missing as we were due to leave Lakey Street and, after an increasingly tense search, Eve discovered them in Nathan’s cupboard. I bribed them out with a bag of normally forbidden Tangfastics. As Felix got into the car, he asked, ‘If we put Daddy in the ground does that mean he’ll grow again?’

In the pew directly behind us, elegant and sombre in black, Gisela’s voice was a pleasant alto, ‘… God only wise.’ Beside her, Roger sang bass rather badly. Gisela had been as good as her word and had kept in constant touch. ‘Ask me anything,’ she said. ‘I’m a professional widow. I know what to do.’

I held Felix and Lucas’s hands in my gloved ones and sang the hymn chosen by Rose, Sam and Poppy. I rarely wore gloves, and the weather was warmer, but they seemed necessary at a funeral, as necessary as this rite of passage, and I longed for the funeral to arrive. ‘The dead are always with us,’ runs the truism. Everyone is accompanied by a crocodile of ghosts, trailing fore and aft. I sensed that Nathan was hovering over us now, seeking permission to leave.

The church at Altringham was as pretty and ancient as Poppy had vowed, and every pew was taken, which, considering Altringham was more than an hour’s journey from London, was a tribute to Nathan. The nave was filled with the scent of the narcissi and lilies that had been placed in the window niches in huge bowls. More were massed on the altar and beside the coffin, which was made of bamboo – Nathan was going to his grave with impeccable green credentials. There were two flower arrangements on top. The first was a bouquet of pink and white camellias whose label read: ‘Nathan and Daddy, with love’. The second, white roses woven with laurel leaves and ferns, read, ‘From Rose, Sam and Poppy, with all our love’. The scent was dense, almost solid. I pressed my gloved fingers to my mouth. For ever after, I would associate this light, sweet, unbearable perfume with death.

Earlier, just after the coffin had been brought in and before the service, I had left the boys in Eve’s charge and sneaked into the then empty church. The porch was cluttered with leaflets, service manuals and postcards whose edges were curling. Have I got it right? I wanted to ask the presence in the coffin, which was not quite body and not quite spirit. Do you like the flowers? Gisela’s florist had been more than helpful. ‘Just leave it to me, Mrs Lloyd,’ she said. ‘I’ll make sure I get what you and he would want.’

Would the wine, to be served at the funeral wake at the local hotel, be drinkable, the sandwiches acceptable? The rules of this ritual and how it should be conducted were as mysterious to me as those that had governed my faltering marriage. I had a nagging feeling that a good funeral lasted longer in the memory than a wedding. I owed Nathan so much, a debt I could never repay, and if nothing else, I could ensure that the reach of his memory stretched long.

Hymns… undertakers… tea for the twins… There was a hint of hysteria as I ticked off the mental list, walking down the aisle. There had been so many to work through, and so much advice of which, mostly, I couldn’t remember a word – except what Mrs Jenkins had offered at school. Glasses positioned at the end of her nose, a gesture designed to ward off intimate contact, she had said that Felix and Lucas should go to their father’s funeral because it offered ‘closure’.

I approached the coffin, craving the moment of silence and calm in which I would try to talk to Nathan for the last time.

I planned to tell him again: I am sorry.

My heels clacked on the uneven tiles and a woman sitting in the front pew swivelled round. I thought it would be you,’ said Rose. Her hair was twisted into a chignon, and she wore an exquisitely cut linen dress and jacket (French, no doubt). A bouquet of white roses lapped with laurel and ferns lay on her lap. She was pale but she had presented herself with distinction as the not-quite-but – almost-widow.

I slipped into the pew beside her, then gazed into the face that was bent towards me. Like my own skin and bone, Rose was impossible to eradicate. I could never scrape her away. Nathan had lived with her first, had had his first children with her, died with her. On that last day, stricken and beaten, he had fumbled his way… to Rose.

She was to blame for everything and nothing.

In the window embrasures, the bowls of flowers seemed to float, poised on the boundaries of this world and some spectral realm. ‘Do you think the flowers will do? The florist was uncanny. She seemed to know,’ I said.

Rose hesitated. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I had a word with her and told her what Nathan preferred.’ She touched one of the roses in the bouquet on her lap. They were creamy white, on the edge of full bloom, perfect, as flowers chosen by Rose would be. ‘I thought I wouldn’t be treading on your toes. You’d want what Nathan liked?’