The wake is in the kind of kooky, plushy boutique hotel surrounds – chandeliers, mismatched crockery and colourful Chesterfields, open fires – that would make for a great ‘do’ at any other time.
As it is, it’s a peculiar, energy-drained sort of sub party. All the trappings of a get-together without the bonhomie. When a person goes ‘at their time’, as my mum says, you can find solace in that. You’re allowed to brighten up after the main farewell. Yet as much as we’re supposed to be ‘celebrating’ Susie, obviously, we can’t. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called death. The volume level rises with inebriation, but it’s still half-hearted.
My mum wanted to come but she had a walking break planned with her friends, and I didn’t want her to miss it. Losing a holiday to a funeral didn’t seem fair, given the amount of things she has to enjoy.
After we arrived, we found a table in a corner, territory with walls behind us so we could more easily defend it. Justin bought a bottle of Veuve in an ice bucket, declaring he couldn’t care less ‘if Uncle Rod from Chepstow disapproves’. (This is a generic relative, I don’t think Susie actually has an uncle Rod from Chepstow, disapproving or otherwise.) ‘It was Susie’s favourite drink and she’d not give a stuff that you don’t usually drink champagne at wakes. In fact, that’s precisely what would appeal to her.’
I still keep my back carefully turned to the room during the telltale phunk-splut-fizz noise of the cork emerging.
‘To Susie,’ Justin says, holding his glass up. ‘Our dearest girl. Not here, but as far as we’re concerned, never not with us.’
We hold ours up and mumble: ‘To Susie.’
I think of her on that trolley. Not moving.
‘What was that daft thing she used to say when she got “one for the road” in?’ Ed says.
‘A brandy for the reindeer,’ I say, and Ed laughs, and I look away quickly in case he tries to make it any moment of connection.
Our dearest girl, not here. Her Not Hereness gives me a low hard stomach pain, what she and I used to call the empty sads. I lost a lexicon with her, a shared cache of things only the two of us understood.
If Susie was returned to me, though, would we have a friendship-ending size of fight? I would have to know the answers to things that I doubt we’d have fully recovered from. She’s died twice.
‘Ed, want some quiche?’ Hester says.
‘No, thanks,’ he says, with a smile. ‘Gorged myself senseless on the sausage rolls.’
Incredible how one revelatory discovery can completely change your perception of someone.
As we’re the primary group of mourners, aside from Susie’s saturnine brother, people have approached us to pay their respects. Instead of sitting down, Ed stands up, satellite to us throughout the arrivals – greeting people, thanking them for praising him for the reading, pointing them to the complimentary drinks, directing the traffic.
Before I’d have thought: oh, how good of Ed, both promoting and protecting us.
Now, it’s: I see you’re making yourself important again, being our ambassador, who asked you to do that?
Is it because Susie mattered more to you than any of us realised?
‘Excuse me, are you Eve Harris?’
A thirty-something man is tapping me on the shoulder, using my name as if he’s pronouncing something exotic he’d like to order from a menu. ‘I’m Andy, I was in Susie’s team at Deloitte. That was a beautiful reading. You wrote it?’
I say yes and thank him and we chat about anodyne professional things and every so often Andy shakes his head and says: ‘Terrible thing, such a dreadful thing’ almost as if he fears I’ll think he’s forgotten if he doesn’t.
I think, I must tell Susie I met Andy, and then remember that I can’t. Whatever summary or insight that Susie would offer about him is a forever unknown. I imagine the machines in the hospital, with their unbroken tone. I want to go home and be alone.
‘She talked about you a lot,’ Andy says, and I reply: ‘Oh really?’ vacantly, so I don’t think about this, and crumple.
‘Oh yes! She quoted you endlessly, said you were inseparable since school! We are exact opposites who are completely alike, was how she described you.’ Andy beams, he means so well. I can see he thinks he’s being comforting. Each word is like a screwdriver jabbed in my shins.
I thank him effusively and excuse myself to go to the loo. I bump into Finlay Hart in a doorway, in a way that necessitates some sort of interaction. He looks as delighted about that as I feel. He’s clean-shaven now, and there is the glimmer of those Susie genes again. It’s interesting how his forbidding attitude leaks out of every pore: despite his evident pretty boy credentials, I sincerely doubt even the Teacup Girls are giving him sidelong looks. Well, OK, maybe they are, and getting nothing back but radiation sickness.
I have a hideous flex of resentment that God chose the sister to die and the brother to live. God didn’t choose anything, of course. Any more than He or She chose what I’m drinking.
I always thought that anyway, but I’m more sure of it than ever, no chance of me finding religion in this. No wonder we play the what’s for you, won’t pass you mind games with ourselves, when the brutal senselessness is so hard to swallow.
‘Thanks for organising this,’ Finlay says, formal, bloodless. ‘It’s gone off well. As well as could be expected.’
The king of qualified praise.
I nod and say: ‘Thank you.’
The redheaded girlfriend with poor etiquette from his mother’s funeral is nowhere to be seen, but that could be because she decided that when it came to meeting his British relatives, once was enough.
‘Is your dad not here?’ I say.
Fin shakes his head.
‘He couldn’t be made to understand Susie was gone, so it wasn’t possible.’
‘That’s a shame,’ I say.
‘It is and it isn’t. He’s spared the pain of it,’ Fin says.
‘I suppose so.’
Whenever you say something blandly sympathetic to Finlay Hart, you get batted back as if you’re a juvenile intellect, as opposed to saying the comforting, polite things people say. It riles me.
‘Is it possible he’ll understand at some point in the future, and be upset that he missed the funeral?’
‘That’s not how his illness works. He’s not himself on Tuesday and dementia sufferer again on Wednesday.’
‘No, I know, but I thought his memory might come in and out, like the tide. Susie said he could be completely lucid?’
Fin stares at me, appraisingly, weighing his response.
‘That’s not my experience of how it is with him. Some things are fixed. Susie being a teenager seems that way.’
‘And you? He thinks you’re the same age?’
I know this is nosy and possibly unfair. It’s hardly a comfortable subject. I feel myself doing that thing with someone I dislike: baiting them into saying something that proves my dislike is justified.
‘I’m – I was – two years older than Susie, so in London at that age, I think.’
‘Right.’
‘While we’re discussing your interest in my family, I’ve consulted a lawyer over those letters. In absence of a will, Susie’s house and possessions belong to myself and my father. What you did was illegal. You’d be much better off returning her things to me now, rather than letting this turn official and expensive.’