an older couple beside her—her parents perhaps. Another couple, the tall man with a rather imposing and self-important manner, the woman at his side signalling by her body language that she considered herself above the proceedings, as she held herself slightly aloof from the others. She was dressed in a way that proclaimed her county origins; the Hermés scarf was plainly not a copy and neither were the immaculately polished loafers she was wearing. She looked the type to have sons at one of the better boarding schools and daughters who rode in gymkhanas and did a season working in Val d’Isére for a friend of a friend at one of the most exclusive chalets before marrying men who were something in the city with the right kind of county connections.
Without knowing why, Deborah instinctively disliked both of them.
There were a handful of other mourners, their numbers barely filling the front two rows of seats, and suddenly she felt not just out of place but guilty almost of the kind of tactless and distasteful rubbernecking she had always despised. Mark had been right. She should not be here. Quickly she turned round and hurried towards the door, slipping silently outside.
Ryan would laugh at her when he knew what she had done, mock her for her squeamishness, but as she looked at Andrew’s pale, fragile blonde widow she hadn’t been able to stop herself imagining how she would have felt in her shoes … the pain and anguish the woman must be experiencing … Had she known what her husband had intended to do? She could not have done, of course. How much greater then must be her pain and despair, her sense not just of loss, but also of having somehow failed him.
She got into her car, switching on the ignition. Suddenly all she wanted was to be at home with Mark. Just the two of them together, safe in their own private world where no one else, nothing else could intrude.
‘Just the local paper, thanks,’ Joel told the girl behind the counter in the newsagent’s as he handed over his money.
It was all over the factory that there was to be a big meeting with the bank and some firm of accountants on Monday morning. And then what? The spectre of redundancy hung heavily over him as he left the shop. He didn’t really know why he had bought the local rag—he already knew what he would find in the ‘situations vacant’ column, or rather what he would not find. This area, this town which had originally grown prosperous from the profits of the small local engineering firms which had supplied the car industry, now had no jobs for men like himself. The apprenticeship he had been so proud to get, the skills he had worked so hard to learn—what use were they to him now? A piece of machinery programmed by a computer had virtually made his skill obsolete.
As he paused in the street, turning to the ‘situations vacant’ page, the print blurred in front of his eyes. Part-time check-out girls for the local supermarket, newspaper-delivery boys and girls, auxiliary nursing aides at the hospital.
He grimaced as he read this last entry. Sally complained fiercely that he objected to her working, calling him old-fashioned and unfair, but it wasn’t her working that he minded but the fact that it was necessary. It hurt his pride that he no longer earned enough to support his own family, and it hurt him even more sensing that Sally found an enjoyment and pleasure in her work that she no longer seemed to find with him.
He folded the papers, his attention caught by the slow progression of a funeral cortège. His mouth twisted as he watched it.
They were cremating Andrew Ryecart today—that pale, fragile-looking little blonde in the front car must be his wife. She looked younger than he had expected. He felt the anger and bitterness swelling inside him as he stared at the car. It was all right for her. She would be financially secure; that sort always were. She would not be scanning the papers praying desperately for another job … any job just so long as it was a job. He was forty-four years old and the shadow of his father and the way he had lived his life, earning a few pounds here and there through a variety of casual jobs, not seeming to care about the contempt others held him in or how it might affect his family, hovered over him.
Joel had sworn that that would never happen to him; that his kids would always be able to hold their heads up high, that they would never know the humiliation he had known as a child, or the deprivations.
When his teacher had suggested putting him forward for the qualifying examination for a free place at a local independent school, his father had laughed out loud. A son of his, go to some posh private school?
‘You can forget it,’ he’d told Joel. ‘That’s not for the likes of us. Come sixteen you’ll want to be out earning, not wasting your time getting some fancy education.’
Joel seldom thought about that these days. What was the point? And besides, he had been happy … happy and content with his life until they had started having all these money problems, until Sally had started making him feel inferior to that brother-in-law of hers, with his posh job and his detached house.
Well, there was no way he would ever be able to give Sally anything like that. Not now … They’d be lucky to keep their existing roof over their heads if he was made redundant, even with Sally working full-time.
Philippa glanced idly out of the car window. There was a man standing on the side of the road, staring fiercely at her, his black hair ruffled by the sharp breeze. He had a hard, sharp-boned face, his body tall and lean, and just for a moment, although really there was no physical resemblance between them at all apart from the dark hair and the fact that they were both male, there was something so hard and angry in the way he was looking at her that her heart jerked in angry panic and she was momentarily thrown back into the past to another man and his anger.
Quickly she looked away, biting down hard on her bottom lip to stop it from trembling.
Michael, her second brother, lived in Edinburgh and couldn’t make it for the cremation. He had telephoned her the night before to apologise, explaining that he was committed to giving a presentation to the clients of the design company he worked for.
Philippa had reassured him that she understood. She had always been closer to Michael than she had to Robert. Three years younger than Robert and three years older than herself, Michael had been the ideal older brother, offering her comfort and sanctuary when the criticism of her parents and Robert had been too much for her.
She had missed him when he had left home to go to university and now that he was working quite a distance away, but, although they had always kept in touch, he and Andrew had never really hit it off.
Elizabeth saw the funeral cortège on her way back to the office after lunch.
She paused automatically and quietly by the side of the road, noting as she did so how few of the other pedestrians trudging down the street even glanced at the slow procession, never mind paid it the old traditional mark of motionless respect. Those who did were in the main like herself, offspring of a generation to whom strict observance of society’s conventions had been important.
As the cortège passed, leaving her free to cross the road, she gave a small shiver. Such sad things, funerals. Both she and Richard were fit and healthy and not old by any means at all, but not young any more either. She had her daughter and a grandchild, her work and some very good friends, but none of them could ever fill the space, the emptiness in her life that would come if she lost Richard. Physically he looked much closer to fifty than sixty, with a full head of hair and a lean, athletic body.
She smiled a little to herself, recalling just how athletic that body could be and just how much pleasure she still got from touching him and being touched by him in turn, but then he had always been a particularly tactile man, hugging and kissing his daughter and showing her physical affection, which had not been common at the time among their peers.
She remembered once seeing him reach out and fiercely hug one of his young male students when the boy had finally passed his examinations after two daunting failures. The boy had looked surprised and slightly embarrassed at first, but Elizabeth would never forget the look of pride and joy which had quickly followed. It had brought home how severe and hard the pressure was on boys to conform to their sexual stereotyping from a very young age. For a moment that young man had looked again like a small boy, thrilled by the acknowledgement and acclaim, the approval of a male