ADAM CURTIS
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Anna
When I think of funerals I think of grey skies and thunderous clouds. Crashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder. Not this. A beaming sun and bright yellow daffodils poking their hopeful heads through the earth, a painful reminder that life goes on.
Most days I wish it didn’t.
This is the church we married in five years ago. Instead of my gorgeous cream wedding dress, I’m wearing a black skirt and blouse. Instead of carrying a bouquet, I am weighed down by my heavy heart.
I step inside. Beeswax and roses. The temperature is startlingly cooler than it is outside. I am alone, but not. Adam’s parents said the journey would be too much for them, his mum not coping with the shock, but those closest to me are here: Mum, Nan, Josh and his parents, Nell and Chris. Oliver has flown over with Eva, Sofia and Luis. And Adam.
I can’t bring myself to look at the coffin.
I won’t.
I’ve been staying with Mum. Unable to bear sleeping alone in the bed that me and Adam once shared. She has been feeding me soup, baking scones I cannot eat. Sitting for endless hours with me, holding me when I cry. Offering to sort out the funeral if I couldn’t cope with it, but she had already been through the trauma of arranging Dad’s.
It was my turn.
It was torturous making the arrangements. My head fuzzy from the short course of sleeping tablets my doctor had prescribed. Making Josh and Nell check and double-check the details, convinced there was something I was forgetting. Something niggling at the edge of my mind.
Nell slips her hand into mine and whereas before she had followed me down the aisle, holding my train, today we make the journey down the red carpet stretching towards the front of the church, shoulder to shoulder. I feel eyes on me but instead of meeting the sea of familiar faces with jolly smiles like the last time I did this slow walk, I stare at the floor.
We sit next to Mum and Nan. The benches cold and hard. The vicar isn’t the same one who married us. He speaks about Adam as if he knew him before he introduces someone who actually did.
Josh clears his throat. It’s the first time I look up. I’m grateful he’s agreed to speak. I have a million words tying themselves in knots inside me, but I know if they rose in my throat they would choke me.
‘When Adam and Anna married, I was scared about giving a speech,’ Josh begins quietly. ‘Today, I feel much the same but this time it isn’t because the thought of public speaking terrifies me but because the thought of a world without Adam terrifies me.’ He pauses. I can hear someone sitting behind me sniffing but I’m holding myself together. Just. Because I know if I allow my sobs to break free, I will never stop crying. Around my neck is the pendant Adam bought me for our first Christmas. I pinch the star between my fingers until the sharp edges penetrate my soft skin, which allows me to feel something other than the solid ball of grief that is expanding in my chest.
Josh carries on, ‘I’ve thought long and hard about how Adam would want to be remembered. A husband. A friend. Almost a brother to me. A son to his parents who sadly couldn’t be here today, and a second son to mine.’ At this I hear an anguished moan from Josh’s mum. ‘He was many different things to many different people, but I think this one story sums him up.’
There’s a beat. Josh tightens his grip on the lectern. I have no idea what’s coming. He had asked me if I wanted to hear what he was going to say but I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting through it twice. Once is almost destroying me.
‘Adam adored his grandad, Ted. It was because of him that Adam wanted to travel the world. See all the places Ted had visited during his time with the navy. Before he died, Ted gave Adam his watch. Adam treasured it. It was an antique, valuable, but he didn’t care about the monetary value, just the sentimental value. Adam wore it every day. He didn’t have time to take it off all those years ago when he had rushed into the sea to save Anna. The watch wasn’t waterproof. It stopped working that day.’
I remembered it so clearly I could almost taste the sea water in my mouth, my throat. Coughing as we sat on the beach, thoughts clouding my mind of what might have been if Adam hadn’t saved me. Adam asking me questions about my relationship I didn’t want to answer and me changing the subject by running my fingers over the face of his watch. ‘I hope that’s waterproof?’ I had diverted the conversation away from me. ‘It looks old?’
‘It will be okay,’ he had said.
‘When we got home,’ Josh continues, ‘I had it repaired for him and again he wore it every day until, some months later, I noticed he didn’t. “Where’s your watch?” I asked him. “I’ve sold it,” he said. He’d sold it to buy Anna’s engagement ring.’
I twist the diamond ring around on my finger. Where it once felt like a sign of love, it now felt uncomfortable. I’d have been happy with a plain ring, a Haribo even. Why had he done that?
‘“What did you do that for you tw– you idiot?” I asked him. “Because,” Adam had told me, “once I had asked Grandad the story of how he’d met my grandma. He’d been docked at Southampton and the second their eyes met they knew they were right for each other. Knowing Grandad had to leave in a few days, they tried to pass it off as a holiday romance, the same as me and Anna. When it was time to say goodbye, Grandad had tried to picture the future without Grandma but he couldn’t. He knew she felt the same after she’d given him the watch because on the back she’d had engraved Love will find a way.” Adam’s grandad had told him, “We both knew that somehow it would all work out and it did. You’ll know too when you’ve found the love of your life because the thought of not seeing her every single day will break your heart. When you find that, you don’t let her go. You do anything, give anything, to keep her.” Adam had said that was the way he felt the instant he met Anna. The thought of life without her was impossible. He knew that his grandad would approve. Selling his watch to pay for Anna’s engagement ring made Adam feel that Ted was part of their new life. Involved. That thought made him very happy.’
The sparkle from my ring is blurred by the tears that film my eyes.
‘And that was Adam,’ Josh says. ‘Thoughtful. Generous. Loyal. Open and… certain. He was certain that what he’d found with Anna would last the distance and I know his only regret would be that it didn’t last for longer.’
I am crying now. Josh steps down and I stand, opening my arms and we hold each other while ‘Love me Tender’ begins to play, the music barely audible over the sound of raw grief. Many of the mourners had watched Adam and I take our first dance to this song.
The pallbearers balance the coffin on their shoulders as though it weighs nothing and for one, perfect second I believe that Adam is not inside the heavy wooden box after all, wearing his cotton anniversary shirt and his paper-plane cufflinks. That all of this has been a mistake.
It hasn’t.
Outside, I blink in the brightness. It still isn’t raining and I hate that the sky isn’t crying for Adam the way that I am crying for him.
‘You’re doing amazingly well.’ Nell hooks her arm through mine, as Josh does the same to my left.