The Last Anniversary

‘Grace? He’s crying. Will I get him for you?’

‘Mmmmm. What? Oh. Yes. OK. Good.’

Grace feels her husband leave the bed. She squashes her fingers hard into the sockets of her closed eyes and pushes herself up into a sitting position.

Aunt Connie is dead, she remembers. She died yesterday.

She hears her son’s sharp wail and Callum’s voice. ‘You hungry, mate?’

She snaps on the lamp and winces at the yellow spotlight. Her arms in front of her, resting on the duvet, look strange in the light, as though they’re not hers. She thinks of that American rock climber who had to chop off his own arm after he was trapped by a boulder. She imagines sawing diligently away at her own flesh, snapping her own hard, white, bloody bone: escaping.

Callum appears with the baby in the crook of his arm.

Grace thinks, Please just go away, and says, ‘Come here, sweetie.’

7

‘I’m positive I remember her saying that she wanted to be buried in that lovely burgundy suit she wore to Grace’s wedding.’

‘Enigma, you are a terrible fibber.’

‘But I remember it quite clearly! It was that day we went to that Legacy luncheon. I complimented her on the suit and she said something about wearing it to her funeral.’

‘She said she was wearing it to Molly Trasker’s funeral, not her own! I can remember her saying that she didn’t see the point in wearing anything at all. She said it was a waste of good fabric. “I came into the world naked, I’ll leave it that way too.” That’s what she said.’

‘She was joking, Rose! You can’t bury your own sister in the nude!’

‘Why not? It would give her a good laugh.’

Margie Gordon listens to her mother and Aunt Rose bicker while she cuts almond cake to have with their cups of tea. She gives herself a small piece for comfort and motivation. It’s difficult sticking to a diet when you’ve got a big, complicated funeral to arrange. Margie feels quite overwhelmed when she thinks about everything she will have to do over the next few days. She needs a tiny sugar burst.

‘I expect Connie has it written down somewhere what she wants to wear,’ she says to them as she pours tea. ‘You know how organised she is.’

She was. Oh my goodness, fancy there being a world without Connie. It seems as though everything on the island will surely fall apart without Connie’s iron-hard certainty, her irrefutable opinions, her snap-fast decisions. Margie feels a sea-sick sensation at the thought. How will they cope without her?

It had been a nasty shock finding Connie’s body yesterday morning, her face sickly grey against the pillow, her eyes glassy slits, her forehead ice-cold under Margie’s palm. For a moment she’d had to fight a childish desire to run away and find a grown-up, but of course she was the grown-up, over fifty years old and a grandmother to boot, so she had to ‘bite the bullet’, as they say, and take care of things.

‘Pale blue always suits Connie.’ Rose’s age-spotted hand trembles badly as she lifts her teacup. ‘Not too pale, of course.’

Rose looks awfully frail today, worries Margie. Even her beautiful peach-coloured cardigan is buttoned up wrongly, which is unlike Rose.

‘You’d think Connie would have mentioned what she wanted to wear when she brought around all that minestrone soup,’ says Margie’s mother, Enigma. Her eyes are shiny with tears, but her grey hair is so bouncy, her cheeks so pink with good health, it seems almost disrespectful to Connie. ‘“Put it straight in the freezer, Enigma,” she said, and I said, “Goodness, Connie, what are we stocking up for? Are you going away?” I didn’t know we were stocking up for her blooming death, did I?’

The three women fall quiet, and Margie feels grief wrap its lethargic arms around them, making their shoulders slump.

‘Thomas is going to see Sophie tonight,’ she says.

‘That’s good,’ says Rose. ‘I wonder what she’ll say.’

‘Maybe they’ll get back together!’ says Enigma brightly, conveniently forgetting Thomas’s wife and new baby.

‘Oh Mum, don’t be so ridiculous,’ snaps Margie, because she wishes that too.

8

In fact, Thomas doesn’t seem in the least smug, and the first few minutes of their meeting at the Regent are surprisingly pleasant–considering that the last time Sophie had seen him he was handing her a laundry basket in which he’d collected every gift, letter and card she’d ever given him throughout their relationship.

Sophie asks him about his baby girl and Thomas speaks with quiet pride and joy. It is obvious that he is very happy. He is so happy he probably doesn’t need to be smug. He is beyond smug.

Listening to him talk, doing an imitation of the ‘grrr’ and ‘meow’ sounds that Lily brilliantly makes whenever she sees a dog or a cat (‘without any prompting whatsoever!’), Sophie realises that she will always love Thomas, a little.

But she also realises, as she observes the slight suggestion of a well-fed double chin, that breaking up with him is not, after all, the biggest mistake of her life. She doesn’t want to be Deborah at home with pretty, growling, meowing baby Lily. She really doesn’t. She would rather be single, desperate-for-a-man Sophie. This revelation makes her feel euphoric with relief and she takes a handful of peanuts and settles back in her chair, ready to enjoy all the things she used to like about Thomas.

Finally, he gets down to business.

‘So, as I said on the phone, Aunt Connie died yesterday.’

‘Yes, I’m very sorry,’ says Sophie. ‘She was such a sweet lady.’ She’d actually found Aunt Connie ever so slightly terrifying, but now she is dead ‘sweet’ seems an appropriate description.

Thomas clears his throat. ‘The reason I needed to see you is because I’ve been through her paperwork and it seems that Aunt Connie has left you something in her will.’

‘Oh! Gosh. That’s unexpected.’

Sophie feels awkward. Nobody has ever left her anything in a will before, and it seems to her that if someone is going to do something so thoughtful it is only courteous to be devastated by their death. Ideally she should be crushed, red-eyed and sniffly, clutching a soggy hanky. She should certainly be a few levels higher up the grieving stakes than ‘a little sad’. At the same time, she is flattered and even–she hates to admit it–a bit covetous, wondering if it is something nice, perhaps an antique plate, or a lovely old-fashioned piece of jewellery.