‘Are you all right?’ Orla said, rolling vowels in a Cork accent.

Dorothy blinked and brushed at her hands, which stung. The sun seemed too bright in the sky. She looked at the crematorium and thought she saw the vines moving, reaching out to wrap around her, pull her into the vegetation, make her one with the earth, reduce her to constituent molecules, just like her dead husband. She could smell the dirt and trees, pollen sucked into her lungs, and she could smell the sewage plant across the road, imagined the atoms of people’s excrement mingling with her own to form a new kind of life. Somewhere in the trees behind her sparrows were chattering, the trill of wings flapping as they scuttled from branch to branch, and she longed to be up there with them.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, getting to her knees, which ached. She was an old woman now. She accepted that as the way of the world, but 86right now she despised her body, the wreck it had become, a collection of failing parts waiting to end. And at her core was a hole where her love had been, where her husband had been, where everything she invested in their relationship was lost because he hadn’t been truthful.

‘I’m fine,’ she said again.

She pushed herself up to standing, felt the weight of her skull, throbbing pressure through her body.

‘Are you sure?’ Orla said.

The men were still watching her, holding the coffin, as Dorothy had a breakdown or whatever it was.

She nodded and the men shuffled into the building. Archie threw her a worried look, lines across his forehead, eyes narrow.

She brushed the lap of her skirt as Orla offered the crook of her elbow to take.

‘Thank you,’ Dorothy said, and let herself be led inside by a woman she didn’t know, to the funeral of another woman she didn’t know. But as Dorothy was realising, she didn’t really know anyone.

87

17

HANNAH

She looked at the menu, full of ham hocks and fish she’d never heard of. Montpelier’s wasn’t cheap but Dad was paying, Hannah liked to choose somewhere decent for his guilt lunch. Montpelier’s was a magnet for the rich Morningside brigade, full of old money and aspiring Tories, posh students who didn’t make it to Oxbridge. There were hunt paintings on the wall and a sense of extreme deference from the white-clad staff. Hannah sipped her Malbec. She had no idea if it was a good wine but it was £38 a bottle.

‘Here’s to a lovely guilt lunch,’ she said.

Craig smiled and raised his glass. ‘Cheers.’