PART 1 — THE RING
It did not build. It arrived, all at once, halfway through the second hymn, and I went down onto the carpet of that funeral parlour with both arms under a nine-month belly and a noise coming out of me I did not recognise.
Lilies. That smell is in everything now.
Tobias was eleven feet away in a mahogany box and he had been the only thing standing between me and that family for two years.
The funeral director had given me his wedding ring in a small envelope that morning and I had it in my fist because I had not been able to put it anywhere.
Eleanor came down the aisle.
And I had a flare of something stupid, because she has never liked me but she had just buried her son and I was carrying the last of him.
“Please.” I got hold of the hem of her dress. “Call an ambulance. The baby’s coming.”
She did not kneel down.
She pulled the fabric out of my hand as though I had put something on it. And then she reached down and took Tobias’s ring out of my fist, and she had to open my fingers to do it.
And she said, to a room with about sixty people in it:
“Give me that. It’s a family ring — you’ve been in this family two years. Get up, you’re ruining his funeral.”
Nobody said one word.
Sixty people. Two of his cousins. A man who had worked with Tobias since 2014. My own colleague from the practice, four rows back, who has since told me she froze and who I have forgiven.
And then Arthur came up the side and got both hands into my shoulders.
“You’re not ruining his send-off.”
He took me the length of that aisle on my feet and not on my feet, past sixty people, and put me out through the oak doors into the rain.
The doors shut. Then the bolt went.
I got as far as the wall of the alley and the next one came and took my legs out.
I am not going to write about the next two hours. It is mine and it belongs to my daughter as well and I have decided that neither of us is putting it on the internet.
What I will say is that an ambulance came at nine minutes past six because a man called Ferris who runs the kebab shop on the corner came out for a cigarette.
Both of us were all right. She was five pounds eleven.
I named her Marguerite, after nobody in that family.
And twelve days later there was a knock on my door at eleven in the morning, and it was Eleanor and Arthur, and Eleanor had a folder under her arm.
“We’ve come for our grandchild,” she said. “And to talk about the estate.”
I stood in my own doorway with twelve days of no sleep in me and I said:
“Which grandchild?”
PART 2 — POSY
Arthur has a daughter.
Her name is Posy. She is nine. She lives in Ardenmoor with her mother Nuala, forty minutes away.
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