GEORGE WOULDN’T HAVE GONE to the allotment if it was on the church grounds, because Ellen has a headstone in the graveyard and he never wants to see it. He didn’t want the funeral at the church, or the headstone, but stopping either of those things would have meant getting up and doing something and at the time he was incapable.

He let other people make the decisions. They wanted to pick her coffin and her flowers. They wanted to stand up at the front of a damp church she loved and tell each other their versions of his wife. He let them. None of it was going to bring her back. A diamond-encrusted coffin wouldn’t wake her, so what did it matter? She’d never smell the roses or hear their words and muffled-by-embroidered-handkerchief sniffles. It made no difference to him. A better man might have eulogized his wife, but George was still frozen in the shock that had shrouded him as he walked out of the hospital carrying a bag of his wife’s clothes while she lay naked in a morgue.

Ellen had told him she was feeling ‘peaky’ the day before she called for an ambulance. George had frowned at her and told her to stop being so dramatic. It was while he was telling her it was because of hypochondriacs like her that the NHS was up shit creek that he had noticed how grey her skin was. A colleague of his had broken his hand at work once, trapped it in a vice, and he’d seen the same greyness on his face. A waxy sheen. He remembered asking Ellen if she’d broken anything. Later he’d realize that she’d broken everything, including him.

He might have noticed her sudden deterioration sooner if he’d thought to look, but she’d been keeping herself busy with the housework and the cooking and phone calls in her bedroom. At the time, he’d thought she was organizing another raffle for the church. Now, he knew she’d been putting his life in order before she died. Spending her last days making his easier. Of all the things he resented his wife for, he resented her most for that. She’d remembered the pills and the appointments, the letters and the cooking, but she’d never thought to tell him she’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

She didn’t tell him she’d been to the doctor about agonizing back and abdominal pain, had undergone blood tests, had been sat down and told she had weeks to live. And George had only found that out from the doctors after she’d died in front of him. At the time he’d still thought it was just a bladder infection.