‘I’d like to raise a toast to Stephen,’ he says solemnly. ‘A good man, who lived a great life.’

‘To Stephen,’ the crowd repeats, nodding respectfully.

‘To Stephen,’ I say quietly. ‘May he rot in hell.’

64

TULLY

Mum didn’t come to the funeral. Under the circumstances, it didn’t feel like the greatest idea. Dad would probably have been disappointed about that. Tully had to say, there was a bit of a thrill in being able to disappoint him from beyond the grave, after what he’d done.

She and Rachel and Heather occupied the front pew of the church. People gave them a wide berth – offering just a polite smile or brief condolences – which was fine by Tully, but also a little disconcerting. It took her a little while to realise that in fact there were only a few faces she recognised in the crowd. Mary and Michael, Elsa and David. Most of the others were colleagues or old uni friends of Stephen – people Tully might have met once or twice but whose names she would struggle to conjure up. How often had she taken pride in how wonderfully civilised her family was, how they knew the right way to behave, the right way to do things? It turned out they were so civilised they didn’t have a huge number of good friends.

It was a funny thing, attending the funeral of a man everyone thought was a hero. Several people volunteered to speak when Rachel, Heather and Tully said they were too traumatised. All were good, competent speakers. They put on a good show. Which was appropriate since, as it turned out, putting on a good show was all Dad really cared about.

Heather was clearly uncomfortable in her role of grieving widow. Several times when people approached to offer their condolences she said, ‘Well, we really weren’t married all that long.’ Once she even said: ‘Offer them to Pam, she was his real wife.’ Her odd comments were attributed to grief and shock or, later, at the wake, alcohol.

There was plenty of that; they’d made sure of it. It was the one thing they’d all agreed on when they’d met to organise the wake. It was at Dad and Heather’s house, and there were plenty of capable people, like Mary and Elsa and a swarm of Mum’s friends who’d offered to order the canapés, the flowers, even clean the house for the occasion. They’d taken the ladies up on all their offers, but Tully, Heather and Rachel insisted on purchasing the alcohol themselves. It had been a surreal experience, the three of them wandering around the bottle shop, each with a shopping cart, tossing bottles of booze in without thought or hesitation. Every now and again one of them looked at their cart, and then the other two, and decided they didn’t have enough and went back for more.

Eventually, when the wake was over and the guests had departed, Tully sat in the living room with Rachel and Heather and the gigantean pile of booze and they had to concede that they might have gone a little over the top.