The church was cold and smelled of hymn books. She watched Gareth casting his eye over the simple village church, without stained glass, silver ornaments or gilded crosses and only worn old flagstones to floor the nave and the aisles. Then frown at James, as if wondering why the funeral hadn’t been held somewhere grand.
But there was a nice enough choir and a breathy organ and the red-faced vicar, raising his voice to the rafters, managed to avoid giving that speech about the deceased having merely stepped into the next room, which, far from comforting the loved ones, usually left them enraged.
And one of Valerie’s friends read a eulogy about keeping Valerie alive in their minds – especially whenever they heard a sports car gunning past.
Gareth listened, motionless. Harold’s complexion was so grey that he could have been carved from the same stone as the church. James stood between his softly weeping daughters, holding their hands.
Chapter Thirty-One
Had she ever been so busy?
These days, Diane’s ‘to do’ list was as long as her arm. Top of the list was Unity’s order, which she had scheduled by the simple expedient of calculating how many garments there were left to make and dividing that figure by the number of weeks before delivery was due, which left her still three garments to make each week; frightening, bearing in mind that she had to take Gareth to his outpatient appointments and physio, which always took hours.
And Diane found herself calling at the supermarket on the way home from these appointments because the fridge and the cupboards emptied themselves quickly and thoroughly now that Gareth and Bryony were both living at home.
Bryony contracted a stubborn chest infection and a cough like an old coalminer, making her hot and listless. Because of her pregnancy, she didn’t want to use a steroid inhaler. Diane, dropping automatically into worried mum mode, found herself driving Bryony to her antenatal appointments even though Bryony had bought a little Ford KA now. Lots of the mums-to-be seemed to have their mums or friends with them, either for moral support or to look after existing children during check-ups and Diane loved the feeling of being involved, but then had to work long into the evening to keep up with her punishing schedule. Somehow she’d squeezed in the meeting about Christmas stock with Unity, resulting in an order that she was trying not to think about, yet.
When Bryony began to get better she embarked on a shopping spree for the baby, an activity that Diane just couldn’t entirely resist.
And when she was at home visitors were a constant interruption. Melvyn and Ivan persuaded Gareth into spending some of his money on an immense new television and satellite TV box – whereupon they called much more often.
Bryony visited Harold to keep him company in his desperate mourning for his daughter and reported that, filleted by his grief, he didn’t seem to care whether he ate or not. Very worrying. Diane began inviting him for meals.
George brought Tamzin to visit Diane ‘to cheer her up’, although Diane did keep explaining to him that Tamzin wasn’t suddenly going to get over her bereavement, as if it were a bad cold.
In between, Diane kept her head down, battling grimly to deliver Unity’s order on time.
Then there was James. Before she crashed into all-too brief sleep, sometimes she’d send him carefully friendly texts.How r u? How r u coping? How r the girls? Do you need help?He’d reply,Lots of crap to get though. Taxman a pain. Tamzin worrying but Nat and Ally spending lots of time with her.Occasionally, he drove Tamzin to the house and Diane’s heart bled at the shock in James’s dark grey eyes as he somehow steered his family through the uncharted land of grief.
One task on her ‘to do’ list kept sliding down the order: Diane still needed to investigate why a shop in Covent Garden Market was selling her garments at a huge mark-up. But then the day finally came when she could deliver her entire order to Unity – feeling quite important at drawing the Peugeot up to the delivery entrance.
‘I never thought you’d manage the whole lot,’ confessed Unity, slender in a gold tunic that brought out the lights in her hair. ‘You must have worked your poor fingers to the bone.’
‘I did.’ Diane hung the last garment on the hanging rail with a, ‘Phew!’ ready for Unity to inventory and price.
‘You deserve a rest. But I will need the first of the Christmas order ASAP …’ She pulled an apologetic face.
‘Some of the fabrics have arrived and I’ll get onto it in a few days,’ Diane had promised. But she knew that before she plunged up to her eyes in beads and bows, she had to face the evil hour.
The train to London took only an hour from Peterborough, yet Diane hadn’t been to London for years. At least ten. She tried not to look too country-mousey as she stepped down from the train and shuffled along the platform at King’s Cross, the voices of fellow passengers battling the thrumming of the trains in the echoing station.
Country Mouse had wanted to wear her ‘best dress’, the beautifully cut black number from Unity’s. But Idiosyncratic Fashionista had dressed in a skirt in dingy pink and drab blue – wonderful colours – overlapping and pockety, and every edge unfinished, dark-pink corduroy dancing slippers belonging to Bryony and a white top spattered with appliquéd metallic blue shark fins.
Almost falling into the stairwell, she descended into the tiled corridors leading to the underground station. Although she’d pored over the map in the back of her diary and knew very well that Covent Garden Station was only three stops down the Piccadilly Line, the diagonal, dark blue one, she still checked again with a large map on the wall before committing her travel card to the slot in the barriers.
Clutching her safely returned ticket, her stomach rose to meet her heart as she descended into the warm air of the subterranean network. Where were all these people going? Why was she the only one who had to pause to scan each colour-coded sign before selecting her route?
She wished she could have come down to London when she had first learned what was going on and was still good and angry. Then she wouldn’t have felt so trepidatious about storming into some swanky shop in Covent Garden.
The tube was almost exactly as she remembered it; first a crowded platform and then a crowded train, the passengers divided into sitters and standers – the sitters having to watch their feet weren’t stood upon by the standers – breathing overused air as the hissing monster trains clattered and whooshed through the tunnels. Diane clung to a metal pole near the doors and tried not to think about a breakdown in a tunnel. She alighted at Covent Garden and became one of a block of passengers herding into the big sheep-pen lifts. There, she tried not to think about a breakdown en route to the surface.
Relieved to reach fresh air, outside the station she was transfixed by a shop mannequin, wearing a red suit and a stupid hat, unaccountably left on a picnic chair in the middle of the pedestrian street with a guitar across his lap. Three giggling teenaged girls were waving their fingers in his face. Diane seemed to be the only one astonished when the ‘mannequin’ came to life and played a few bars on his guitar. He must be one of the famous living statues she’d read about.
‘What a bloody tedious way to make a living,’ she muttered, disgusted. Further down the busy paved street she found another of these curious creatures, painted entirely in silver and striking a pose he was only motivated to change at the chink of money in his basket. Mr and Mrs Tourist and all the little tourists were out in force and seemingly willing to break off their chatter in order to donate coins to this end. Good luck to them.
Diane turned her attention to the right and a columned building,Covent Garden Marketarching over the doorway in gilded lettering.
The shop was in there, somewhere. The Monkee Box.
