At the other side of Pete sat his twin brother Griff. There was only one man as good to have in a crisis and that was Pete himself.
The white coffin was lowered into the churchyard ground and dozens of pink roses were kissed and dropped in with her. Except for two red roses from Pete; one for his wife, one for his unborn child.
The pregnancy kit was still in Tara’s handbag when her effects were returned to Pete. She had wanted him home that night to tell him to his face that she was pregnant.
Chapter 5
‘Don’t be late home, Laurie. There’s something important I have to tell you.’ The last words Alex had ever spoken to her, except he hadn’t spoken them to her because her meeting at work had overrun and she’d heard them on her voicemail when she came out and switched her phone back on. She’d tried to ring back but annoyingly all the calls went to his voicemail. She’d rushed home then, as much as the weather would allow her to, to find that he wasn’t even there and then she’d been a little cross.
Later she’d found out that he was going to cook dinner for them and she knew this because an M&S dine-in meal for two had been found in the passenger side footwell. Alex was smashed like an egg, but their romantic dinner à deux survived. No champagne though. She’d thought that strange when her brain was sifting through the details of the crash. He had a diamond solitaire ring in his pocket for her but no champagne and he was a champagne sort of guy.
He promised her once that she would never forget the date when he proposed, that he’d make it memorable so it was forever etched in her mind. Well, life had certainly taken that promise and given it a twist because just as he assured her, 6 February – the date of their supposed engagement – was certainly one unforgettable day.
*
When Alex’s effects had been handed to her at the hospital, the engagement ring had been in his jacket pocket along with his phone and wallet and the receipt from M&S. They hadn’t given her the shopping bag of food and afterwards she did wonder if the police had had a discussion about it, should they or shouldn’t they? It was funny where the mind went after a catastrophic event, ruminating about policemen handing over chicken cooked in a lemon sauce, the profiteroles she loved and a bottle of Tempranillo; the stupid details it fixated on. The ring was platinum, from Van Cleef & Arpels in a heart-shaped box and had a simple but exquisite carat of square diamond set in the mount. Inside the band had been engraved in tiny letters ‘Always on my mind’, like the song. It must have cost him a small fortune – but it didn’t fit. It was far too small, which she’d also found odd because Alex would have wanted to slip the ring on her finger, make a trumpeted moment of it. Alex always had been about the big showy gestures, always perfectly executed. Something else that didn’t fit.
She’d tried to have the ring resized at three jewellers, but they said they couldn’t do it, so she wore it on a chain around her neck. Anyway, she didn’t want to put the ring on her own finger and declare herself the fiancée of a man who would never be able to make her his wife. Her hand strayed often to it, when she needed to feel close to him. Always on my mind. They were important words and they were for her, she knew that. They were why he’d come back to her three and a half years ago, because he couldn’t forget her.
She hadn’t been able to listen to the song since he died and it had haunted her: on the radio, on the TV, even blasting out of speakers on her first trip to the supermarket to buy food for one. She’d abandoned her full trolley and left the store barely able to see for the tears pumping from her eyes, almost too fast to clear. There had been frozen things in the trolley and she’d felt guilty enough never to return to that Tesco in case everyone pointed her out as the woman who ruined food. One more thing to fret about. A therapist would have unravelled her worries, airbrushed them into a smooth sheet of calm but therapy equalled weakness, unable to cope-ness. She didn’t want to start talking about Alex’s death to someone because she thought she might not be able to stop. She would vomit out all those stupid points plaguing her brain, like why the ring didn’t fit and why there was red wine and not champagne in the M&S carrier bag and she would overrun on her fifty-minute session and not manage to spoon her broken liquid heart back into her chest in time to exit so the next screw-up could sit in her still-warm chair.
*
Alex’s parents had started off helping Laurie organise his funeral and then completely took over, but she hadn’t resisted his mother Meredith’s insistence on her choice of reading, hymns, guests. Meredith had wanted Alex to be buried in his dark green Armani suit, the one he had worn to the engagement party of his sister Naomi and best friend Jefferson. Sharp white shirt, green tie, waistcoat. Laurie hadn’t fought her on that, even though she thought the blue one suited him much more. Not that it mattered. Meredith and Brendan had insisted on paying for everything, refused to take a penny. It hadn’t sat comfortably with Laurie who was determined to reimburse them somewhere along the line, when it felt right and proper. They’d chosen the best of everything for their only son, lots of it unnecessary. The only thing that Laurie contested was Meredith’s decision to bury him next to her parents because that, she was adamant, he wouldn’t have wanted.
They’d had a boozy discussion with friends over dinner a couple of years ago about burial versus cremation and Alex, albeit flippantly, had said that he wanted to be kept in an urn in his bedside cabinet. Less flippantly he was terrified of being buried alive. On the way home, he’d made Laurie promise that if anything happened to him, he was to be cremated. He’d then started choosing his funeral songs and Laurie told him to stop because he was being morbid. He’d been twenty-seven years old at the time. She laughed then and said that they’d pick up this discussion again when they were in their eighties.
It was the first time that Laurie had been witness to a Meredith that didn’t get her own way and that one was very different from the twittery, frothy Meredith that was the norm. Luckily for Laurie, Alex had written a will and in it cited his command to be cremated and for those ashes to be entrusted to Laurie who would ‘lay him to rest in the place she best saw fit’. She found out that he’d written it days after they’d had the dinner conversation. Meredith was forced to concede but she wasn’t happy at all about it.
Laurie’s mother had flown in from Spain the day before the funeral. Thankfully she had been alone and not with her dreadful present partner for whom Laurie had no tolerance. Her mother had a habit of picking affluent, grateful men with no personality and zero charm. She had been as much comfort to her daughter as she had been of use throughout Laurie’s formative years. Her visit to England was short and not sweet.
In his will, Alex left everything he had to Laurie, give or take a few disbursements: his collection of wristwatches to his father, the rather vague instruction ‘anything his mother wanted’ and his vast music and DVD collection to his best friend Jefferson. Laurie had always liked Jefferson until he turned up unannounced a few days after the funeral to collect what he’d been bequeathed, car full of packing boxes in preparation. After the shelves had been cleared, Jefferson asked for a coffee, which Laurie had duly made. Within the half hour, Laurie had flung her lukewarm drink in his face and told him never to come back. He had walked out then, silently and dripping. This, the man who was going to marry Alex’s sister in November, and who had been his best friend since school, had just made a pass at her. And she’d been so wrong-footed by it that he’d more or less had to spell out what he wanted to happen between them before she’d reacted. The goalposts of normality in Laurie’s life had been shifted so far they were off the pitch.