“Thank you, Tom,” I said, shrugging on my coat. “That’s so thoughtful of you.”
“Think nothing of it,” he said, his expression solemn and stoic as it ever was. He held out his arm for me to hold and walked me down the cobbled pathway to the road. Just as we reached the gate, I saw the nose of the hearse turning in from the main roadway.
Tom was silent as we rode to the church, and I imagined, briefly, that he’d be like this on our wedding day. Staid, silent, sombre. There was a time when we were very little that all the neighbours decided we’d be a married couple, running two farms between us. Tom’s prosperous pastoral farm, and then our field and smallholding, which would be developed to join his.
Not ours, even though it was my farm, my land. His.
I stared at the back of mother’s wicker coffin in the car before ours and pictured our lifeless marriage in the dales, fruitlessly repairing some crumbling brick or wastedpatch of roof, knowing in our hearts that it’d be better to demolish the thing. Give in, before we died with it.
“Will you be saying a few words?” asked Tom, surprising me.
“I had planned to read a short eulogy. Just talking about how mother faced her illness with such bravery, and that she’s with my father now.”
What else was there to say? I didn’t know. My mind had been a muddle with the concept of being alone now, all alone, with that house weighing heavy on my shoulders – and no sick mother to distract me now. Just me and the empty shell, waiting for a gust of wind to knock it flat.
Waiting for my own end, I supposed. I was half a ghost already.
“She’d have liked that,” said Tom.
I delivered my brief eulogy to a healthy number of guests, perched eagerly in the pews in their raincoats in the small, bleak church. So few events happened in the dales that a funeral was an excitement, a day out for some.
Once the service was over, we followed mother to the church yard and watched them lower her into the mud. Tom held his hand to my waist for a moment but, as if afraid to commit, let his hand hover there just above my coat. We retired to David’s pub, the Coach and Horses, for mother’s wake, and it was all over.
As the darkness fell over the hills beyond the window, my stomach churned, becoming ever more terrified of returning to that house alone. Intrigued, curious to know what it would be like to have the place to myself...but terrified all the same. Mother, even in death, had been my companion. Now she was gone for good. This was it, now –this was my new situation. Just me and the heather and the few cows and chickens and a house that was disintegrating.
“I’ll get your coat and escort you back home, Grace,” said Tom, finishing his pint. “It’ll be too dark for you to walk back on your own, soon.”
“Please don’t trouble yourself,” I said, but he was already gone in search of my coat.
I had hoped to use the walk home to clear my head, breathe in the fresh air and be one with my own thoughts, but Tom was being chivalrous and I didn’t want to dismiss him. He was all I had, even if I had no feelings for him...though what his plans were, I didn’t know. I couldn’t help but wonder if Tom had some motive for sticking by my side while I was at my most vulnerable.
But I was too tired and worn out by now to care.
Mavis O’Shaughnessy , from the post office, smiled meekly as she made her way around the bar to me, holding a stiff piece of card in her hand. She looked just the same as she did when I was little; old, grey, with large round glasses and a cardigan which matched the colour of her hair. The only difference about her was the hollow aspect to her eyes, and the thin tube feeding oxygen to her nose from the tank she wore on her back.
She’d been sick for a long while now, and it had been wearing her down slowly, but still, she soldiered on. That was the way of Yorkshire women, let alone ones of Irish descent, like her. I had no doubt she would be tending the shop when she took her last breath and fell upon the cold, hard floor.
Mavis touched her small, gentle hand to mine andsqueezed my fingers.
“I’m so sorry about your mother,” she said. “She was a good woman. She did a marvellous job, to raise you into such a capable young person.”
Capable. I didn’t feel at all capable, not now that I had no distractions, and the work of the house and the farm and simply living was on my shoulders alone. Winter was looming on the horizon, and in a few months the landscape would be nightmarish with the stream frozen over and the green grasses turned to snow banks.
But I didn’t convey any of that to poor Mavis. I just said, “Thank you.”
Mavis slid the piece of card she held in her hands over the bar-top to reach me. As I glanced down at it, I noticed it was black with a matte-finish and a motif of a crow and a thorny rose on the back.
“This was handed in to me by one of the pallbearers to put up in the shop window. I was going to pop it in tonight, but when I read the advertisement, I thought about you,” she said. “All alone in that house, without your mother...well, I thought perhaps you’d relish the opportunity.”
“What is it?” I asked, turning the card over and finding out for myself.
It was an advertisement from the London flagship branch of the funeral parlour I’d used for mother’s service. Crowthorne Funeral Care were looking for an assistant who would live-in with the owner for a lower rate of pay, but with full board offered and bills included. Training would be included in the form of an apprenticeship for the right candidate.
Must be a self-starter, independent, and eager to learn. The right candidate will be familiar with death and its processes, and comfortable spending long hours indoors.
It sounded like my idea of heaven. I turned the card over in my hands and examined the embossed logo of the crow, stroking it with my thumb. I wondered about the owners, whether they resembled the crow with its black eyes and glossy black feathers.
“I’d be surprised if somebody didn’t take this offer up within minutes of it going out,” I said, sighing. “It’s in London, after all. I’m not sure what chance I’d have.”
