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He’s free of you. He never needed you. Stop it. Stop. You’re making it up.
His heart was beating in his temples, and his legs were about to buckle beneath him. He felt his face heat up, and very quickly he shed his coat. He could see Ada talking, her mouth forming the shape of words, but he couldn’t make sense of their meaning. The pain at his side and the clenching of his stomach made him think suddenly that he would faint. His eyes stung chlorine sharp, and he held onto the wall to steady himself.Why can’t I let it go?he thought.Why can’t I let him go?
One man crossed the trafficked road, the other mounted his bike. Cycled away. He could hardly believe himself anymore—his heart that was telling him that the man across from him was Harry, his eyes that were telling him it was not.
He looked at the pavement with its cobbles, and the many feet that trudged past. His mind spun, playing tricks on him, made him think he could see only what he wanted to see. Over there, at the corner of the clock, where time was meaningless.
14
IT HAD ALL BEENtaken care of. The Edwards family owned a large plot of consecrated ground for Mr. Edward’s burial, and a down payment for the selected headstone had already been arranged prior to his death.
The sky was a clear and azure blue, the late spring sun beating down and the smell of green hanging in the air. The party curved along the winding path toward the quaint, gothic mortuary chapel, the headstones and monuments encircling them as they walked. Bron advanced slowly behind, looking at his feet. The shoes had never been worn and pinched. His suit was one of Darcy’s many hand-me-downs that hung in his closet, the one Mr. Edwards had professed to be his favorite. Despite his own wants and discomforts, he thought it appropriate to wear for the occasion.
Ada went ahead of him in a neat black dress, arm in arm with Clarence, who was fussing with her purse like a bouquet and whose sunglasses masked her face almost completely. They followed behind the pallbearers, one step at a time. Darcy carried the casket alongside the others—Mr. Edwards’s brothers who’d come down from Cumbria and Aberdeen, and some other friends of the family. Bron focused on the strain of Darcy’s neck muscles, his head dipped to the ground. He wished he could carry some of the burden.
Inside, the chapel was cramped and echoed with their footsteps, but the air felt still, the space vacuous. The pillars stood so close together he feared the aisle too narrow for the coffin to pass through, but onward toward the dais, alit with hundreds of candles, they laid it to rest. They searched for a seat at the front beside the dark-wooded confession boxes, with its heavy red drapes and intricately detailed fretwork. Ada latched onto Bron’s hand before he could move to one of the back rows, and brought him to sit on the pew between her and Darcy. Slowly the chapel filled with faces he recognized and faces he didn’t, who dropped flowers at the altar and murmured words to the Edwards children. Ada suppressed her little weeps, and Darcy thanked them for their presence.
Mrs. Flanders, true to her promise, made her way toward him with the aid of her stick, and brushed a light hand under his chin. A stranger to Darcy, she patted him too, and finally the little girl, before moving to take a seat at the back. Bron bowed his head in silence, longing for the service to be over before it had even began. The club-shaped windows cast blues and reds upon them all, and through the priest’s sermon, Bron was transfixed by the imposing crucifix, the pained Christ, and the four letters above him:INRI. He’d never learned their meaning, and suddenly he needed to know.
The crowd was asked to rise. This, so far, had been the only time Darcy looked up from the floor, and slowly he also stood. When they again sat down, Bron felt Darcy grip his thigh, a piercing sting that made his leg go numb. Carefully, he reached out to hold his hand, but Darcy snatched it away and instead reached into his blazer pocket to take a swig from the flask he’d hidden there, using Bron’s body to conceal the action. Someone rose to the pulpit and offered their Biblical reading. When it was Darcy’s turn to participate in the Liturgy of the Word, he stood mightily, the strain gone from his face. He delivered a short reading, introducing it as from the letter of St. Paul to the Romans:
“It is not easy to die, even for a good man—though of course for someone really worthy, a man might be prepared to die—but what proves that God loves us is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners.”
Afterward, the celebrant explored the ways in which Mr. Edwards lived his life as a good, dedicated Christian man, and opened up the floor to allow for the mourners to share their own memories of the departed. These were mostly stories they’d already heard from visitors to the house that week, their practice run. A couple were refreshing anecdotes that brought further tears to his and Ada’s eyes; even Darcy peaked his head, just a little, to listen.
The gifts were taken to the altar through a hymn played in a low key: Ada offered the water, Bron declined the invitation to carry the wine. And after the transubstantiation, the taking of communion and the closing prayer, there developed a muted chatter below the sound of the organ. Darcy returned to his position as pallbearer, this time leading ahead.
The sun was blinding as they emerged to the fresh and pollinated air. The walk to the grave wasn’t far, the flowers growing wilder and the ground less flat as they passed the churchyard and moved farther into the cemetery. He saw the mound, a pile of heaped dirt masked by a green blanket like a little hill, before he saw the hole in the ground. They stopped in little clusters at the opening. He struggled to look, feeling the emptiness of his stomach, as they lowered the coffin down with rope. He averted his gaze, instead stared emptily at the inscription on the back of an old white gravestone, reading but not reading it as people shuffled him toward the coffin. Blessed with holy water, the first handful of earth was thrown. Then the next and the next. On his turn, he scooped the soil, less like grains of sand and more like a lump of dirt, feeling its moistness. Thud. A splatter of paint on canvas, a spreading that bid a final goodbye.
The walk to the grave wasn’t far, the flowers growing wilder and the ground less flat as they passed the churchyard.
When he looked up from the coffin, Darcy nodded his head in a trance, chewing on his lip. Behind him and the mass ofpeople, Bron saw two figures, hand in hand, rushing up the cobbled lane. He stepped forward, forgetting to say amen, and went quickly to Darcy’s side. Ada, following his line of vision, and hearing the click-clack of the woman’s heels, turned around too.
“Listen to me,” Bron said, forgetting himself, where they were, and the people around him. He touched Darcy’s shirt.
“Hmm?”
When he pulled his hand away, it left a smear of mud on his chest. “Behind you, coming up the lane.” Darcy remained puzzled, still, a statue with ferocity in the brows. He didn’t turn at the warning, and Bron explained further. “Giovanni.”
He stepped aside, the service continued.
Giovanni and his sister—Toni, he remembered—stopped at the edge of the party, to face them. Neat and primed, Giovanni gave a little nod, acknowledging them both. Bron dipped his head in return. Giovanni offered his arm to his sister, whose gloved hand slipped through the crook of his elbow. She stood taller, cinched in a tailored black dress, with heels glinting in the sun and her hair cascading down her back like a horse’s tail. If he didn’t know any better, Bron would’ve mistaken them for the most beautiful couple in the world, and she a Hollywood star. Toni was looking at him too.
The crowd started to disperse, departing down the lane and back toward the church and the row of taxis that could be seen on the periphery, behind the gates and trees. Darcy twisted in the other direction, toward the late arrivals.
Bron followed alongside him, spotted the fists that balled at his waist, and quickly whispered at him to calm down. Darcy stopped about a meter away, facing Giovanni and Toni.
“The nerve you have, showing your faces here.”
Giovanni immediately raised his hands. “Come on, Theo. We’re only here to pay our respects.”
“And what respect is this toward me? Toward my family?”
“Dickie would have wanted us to be present.”
“I deign to think it. And here you both are, late as ever.”
“Boys, vi prego, non fare scenate.” Toni stepped forward and lowered Giovanni’s hands. “Come on? Not today. Let’s forget, today.”
