Funeral Music by Morag Joss

Author:Morag Joss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307422934
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

BY THE FLACCID whump of the door closing and the sigh of the bag dropping on the hall floor, Cecily got an inkling that Sue was depressed. Or perhaps, being depressed herself, she was simply more attuned to other people’s misery.

‘In here,’ she called, and went to put on the kettle. Sue dripped into sight and slumped in the doorway of the kitchen, seeping deprivation. Cecily took one look at her, put back the coffee jar and took down the instant chocolate, leaving the painted tin of Charbonnel et Walker, Derek’s ‘proper cocoa’, which she happened not to like, untouched. She made two large mugs of chocolate with extra powder and, sighing, stirred some gold top milk and two sugar lumps into each one.

‘Bring those,’ she said, pointing with her nose at a packet of chocolate digestives, and carried their mugs through into the sitting room. Sue obeyed and followed, her feet performing a little collapse with every step, and fell into an armchair. They sipped in tandem, each staring into the cold fireplace.

‘Oh, God,’ whispered Sue, rubbing her eyes so hard she seemed to be mashing them. It was the first words she had spoken since she arrived. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I wish I wasn’t.’

‘Oh, now, Sue, don’t,’ Cecily protested. ‘Don’t say an awful thing like that. You’re young and beautiful. Have a biscuit. What you’re feeling now will pass, you know. It will,’ she said, silently hoping that what she was feeling would too, despite being no longer young nor ever exactly beautiful herself. Attractive, maybe. Once. Sue stared at her.

‘I meant here. Here. In the house. It’s the weekend. You know – your boyfriend, the arrangement?’

‘Oh, I see. Oh, well, that’s a relief. I don’t have to lock up the aspirin then.’ She tried a bright smile, then sipped miserably at her chocolate. She took another biscuit.

‘It doesn’t matter, not this weekend. He’s with his wife.’ She said ‘wife’ in a voice like a swishing blade.

‘Oh, God,’ said Sue. ‘And Paul’s in Bristol, with God knows who.’

It was twenty past three on Saturday afternoon. It is a depressing time in itself, twenty past three. Twenty past three is about the time, Cecily reflected, when it dawns on you that all those useful things that you vowed to achieve when you woke up determined to be brave about being dumped for the weekend will not be achieved, because you have dithered sluttishly through the day. The oven is still black and sticky, the kettle is still encrusted with limescale, the bed lies unmade, you still have not flossed, and your eyebrows, because you have still not had a proper look for the tweezers, still look like two brown caterpillars about to mate on your forehead. Yes, it is around twenty past three that you find yourself staring hard into the truth that you are such a slattern it can hardly come as a surprise that you have been dumped in favour of a bright, groomed, smiling, competent wife.

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