Laura took this in and seemed to understand what Catherine was trying to say, but she didn’t look entirely satisfied. Nor did she look any longer like someone who was going to keep her thoughts to herself.

‘But does he not also represent the possibility that we don’t have to be defined by the worst things that happened to us?’ she asked, sounding like she needed to believe this was true. ‘Does he not represent the chance that we can change?’

Family (ii)

By the time of Jim’s funeral, the weather had turned, heavy squalls of rain soaking people who had left for the outdoors unprepared due to the periods of watery sunshine in between. For the first time in months, the rain felt cold, and there was a bite in the wind that warned Jasmine that summer was quite definitely at an end.

She didn’t fear the winter. It couldn’t bring anything worse than what she had endured last year, the least of whose depredations had been the coldest weather in four decades.

They’d had to wait for the post-mortem and all the attendant investigations to be completed – for Jim’s body to finally cease being an instrument of the law, even after death – before they could bury him. Or rebury him, rather, somewhere fitting, the sod cast this time by those who loved him and mourned him.

Jasmine had stood among them, missing him, remembering him, loving him, though she thought that this time tears would not come. She had cried already, she thought, cried enough; known Jim was dead long before anyone else here, and forced herself to confront that as a reality.

She was wrong, however: as she saw the grief on her cousins’ faces, she saw reflected back the grief she had suffered this past year, and cried once more. She was mourning Jim, and still mourning Mum, but would admit that she was crying just a little for herself. She was allowed to do that now: she didn’t need to worry that it meant she was crumbling, that she wouldn’t cope.

While the rest of Jim’s immediate family began drifting away towards the warmth and shelter of the waiting car, his eldest daughter Angela came over to Jasmine and they stood by the grave, the rain pitter-pattering on their umbrellas like the departing susurrus of quiet, respectful voices.

‘I wanted to say thank you,’ Angela said. ‘On behalf of … I mean, my mum as well, and everybody.’

Jasmine felt a little confused as to what she might be being thanked for, and it must have registered on her face.

‘Without you, we wouldn’t have had this. A chance to say goodbye, to all come together. To know. God knows the Ramsays never got that.’