‘The crematorium, I imagine,’ said Henry thoughtfully. ‘The flowers I saw at the grocer’s couldn’t have been for me.’
‘You saw the flowers?’ said Rita, amazed.
‘Imogen works at Blooms the greengrocer’s. They were arranging flowers for Henry’s funeral.’
‘There are lots of Henrys,’ said Rita, thoughtfully.
Rita wondered which one of the assistants at Blooms was Henry’s wife. She only went there occasionally. Mostly she bought her fruit and veg from the store. She got discount so it would have been mad not to. Blooms sold nice organic veg though and sometimes Rita would splash out and get some.
‘Precisely,’ agreed Henry. ‘It could be anyone.’
‘We’ll need the 167 bus,’ said Rita knowledgably.
Henry nodded, impressed, and together they strolled to the bus stop.
‘It will take about fifteen minutes to get to the crematorium,’ she said. ‘I hope we won’t be late for your funeral.’
‘Me too,’ chuckled Henry.
However, the crematorium didn’t have a funeral booked for Henry Booker Frazer or anyone else come to that. A sign on the gates read ‘Crematorium closed today for maintenance work.’ Henry wondered what kind of maintenance went on at a crematorium but didn’t want to think too deeply about it. It was always good to maintain things, he thought. Better that everything runs smoothly.
‘Is there another crematorium?’ Rita asked.
Henry shook his head.
‘Not locally. I suppose we should go to St Andrew’s then, just to be safe. I feel sure it won’t be there, though. What is the time?’
‘Nearly two,’ said Rita, looking at her phone.
‘Thirty minutes,’ said Henry.
‘It will take us ten minutes on the bus,’ said Rita, her brain calculating the journey. ‘We’ll have a ten-minute walk from the bus stop. We have to get the 87 and then change to the 33.’
‘Yes, yes,’ nodded Henry. ‘We shouldn’t delay.’
Although Henry was not at all sure what he was going to do at his funeral. It would be rather futile, he felt, to go racing in, shouting ‘Stop the service, I’m not dead,’ considering no one would hear or see him, apart from Rita. He wondered why Rita had special powers that enabled her to see him. What was it about her that he also found magical and enticing? From the first day that he had tried her wares, he had felt something strange resonate inside him. Once he had been in a museum on the Isle of Wight and he’d felt certain he had discerned her delicious fragrance. It had drifted across the echoic rooms of the museum and he’d become quite desperate in his desire to trace it back to its source, which turned out to be the elderly steward in the next room and Henry had then quickly realised that it smelt nothing like Rita’s perfume at all.
He turned to her now and said, ‘thank you for coming.’
‘That’s alright,’ said Rita. ‘What will you do when we get there?’
‘I’ve absolutely no idea,’ said Henry.
Chapter Eleven
Henry supposed the cortege would leave from their semi-detached in Mayberry Terrace.
‘Maybe we should go there,’ he said to Rita.
Rita looked decidedly uncomfortable.
‘Well …’
Henry shook his head. Watching his own funeral cortege leave his home might be a bit close to the knuckle.
‘Perhaps not,’ he said.
No doubt, the neighbours would come out of their houses to stare. Henry acknowledged that there was something about a funeral that was hard to resist. It hammered home the realisation that life was fragile. Everyone would no doubt breathe a sigh of relief that it was someone else in that coffin and not them. The women would make a decision to quit worrying, and to stop shouting at their husbands and children over things that didn’t matter, because life was too short for all that. For a brief moment, they would appreciate that life was beautiful. They had been the lucky ones and anyway, things like that didn’t happen to them. By dinnertime, more important things would have moved to the forefront of their minds and Henry and the fragility of life would quickly be forgotten. They would continue as they always had, as though Henry had never been. However, for a moment, they would stare in silence at his coffin and think ‘Poor Imogen’.
