“Come to pay my respects.” It was only half the answer and she knew it.
“There’s a book for that in the house. I think they have it laid out in the ballroom.” She weren’t looking at me. She was staring at the water like it’d done something cruel and personal to her. And though it’d been nearly ten years she still looked like a furious angel. “I wanted to have a think,” I told her.
Almost dreamy, she picked up a rock, weighed it into her handand then flung it into the river like she was trying to kill something. “About a man you barely knew? That seems melodramatic.”
“We didn’t talk much, but he was good to me.”
“He fucking well was not.”
“He took us in when he didn’t have to.”
Emily threw another stone. “Please, it was wartime. Everybody was doing it. Patriotic duty and all that.”
“All the same”—I began, but she weren’t in a mood to listen.
“All the same what? You think he’d have come to buryyou? You think he’d have descended from the big house on the hill to whatever grubby little churchyard in Stepney they’ll throw you in when you go and told your unwashed children how great a loss you were?”
“Don’t matter what he’d do. It was right for me to come here for him. And my kids ain’t unwashed.”
She didn’t say nothing more about the children, she just turned and looked up at me, all spite and challenge. “So will you come back for me, too?”
“What do you mean?” I knew, but either I didn’t want to say it or I wanted her to.
“When I die, nymph. When I am dead and in the ground, will you come and stand in the church and weep for me?”
Even then, somehow, I didn’t like to think of it. Though I’d not seen her in going on a decade, the idea of her being dead cut my heart like a fish knife. “Don’t talk like that.”
She stood up then and walked very close to the river, staring down into it like it was the edge of everything. “I shall talk,” she said to the water, “as I please. As I always have.”
I didn’t really think she meant to drown herself—there’d always been a dark edge to Emily, even when she was young—but Iwent towards her anyway so as I could catch her if she fell. Because it’s not always the things we means as hurts us.
“Would you speak?” she went on. “Would you stand up at my funeral and tell the world what you thought of me?”
“If I had to,” I said, and only then realised I’d fallen into her trap.
“And what would you say?”
I’d never had the same fire as Emily, but time to time I’d known how to borrow it. “Same as you’d say about anybody—that you was a good person, even if you wasn’t.”
“And am I?”
“You know,” I said, “I think maybe you ain’t.”
“That’s a bold thing to say to a woman at her father’s funeral.”
“No bolder than what you said to me at my wedding.”
That shut her up, but only for a couple of seconds. She turned to face me—she was wearing this narrow-fitted jacket and men’s trousers; all black but on her it didn’t look like mourning, it looked like armour. “I meant every word.”
“And if you’d said ’em a year earlier, I’d maybe have listened. But you waited.”
“I was young. I’d spent so long trying to forget you and—”
“And you think I hadn’t tried the same?” I weren’t angry with her, not really. But I also didn’t believe her entirely.
She smiled all cruel and wounded. “You seemed to have moved on from where I was standing.”
“Then why didn’t you just let me?” I asked. Though even then, even at the time, even now, I’m not sure I’d wanted her to.
