A sample from
A Grave Mistake
The thing nobody warns you about a cello is that it makes every disaster forty per cent larger.
Nell Ashworth discovered this again in the crematorium car park, wrestling the case out of the back of a Vauxhall Corsa that had been rented, she was fairly sure, specifically to punish her. The instrument came free all at once, the way it always did, so that she staggered back three steps into a puddle the exact temperature of grief and stood there, in the grey November drizzle, hugging four thousand pounds of maple to her chest — Viv's cello, very nearly the last of Viv left in the world — like it was the one thing that hadn't let her down.
Which, arguably, it was.
She was forty minutes late. She knew she was forty minutes late because she'd watched every one of those minutes happen — thirty of them queuing behind a bin lorry on the A34 while a bride in Wilmslow texted her increasingly deranged questions about whether the ceremony music could be both Pachelbel and, quote, "a bit more Coldplay," and the last ten of them circling a car park signposted by someone who plainly hated the recently bereaved. She had, that morning, half-abandoned a wedding gig. Not fully abandoned — she'd played the processional, watched the bride come in, and then handed her second cellist a look of such naked apology that the poor woman had mouthed go, GO over her bow like Nell was fleeing a burning building. Which, again. Arguably.
She should have left the cello in the car. Any sane person would have left the cello in the car. But leaving a cello in a rented Corsa in a car park in Greater Manchester was how you ended up doing weddings on a rented cello for the rest of your natural life, and anyway — and this was the truer thing, the thing she didn't examine — she didn't know how to walk into the hardest room of her year with her hands empty. The cello was armour. The cello was an excuse to be looking down at something. The cello meant that if it all got too much she could say sorry, the instrument, and slip out sideways, and no one would think anything of it, because no one ever did.
Nell was extremely good at slipping out of rooms. It was, if she was honest, the only thing she'd ever been reliably brilliant at.
She hurried up the path, the case banging her hip with every stride, drizzle beading in the mass of dark-auburn curls she had, that morning, genuinely attempted to tame, and which had responded to the attempt the way they always did — by staging a small riot. The building loomed ahead, low and municipal and beige, the kind of architecture that had been designed by someone determined that no one should ever feel anything in it. Automatic doors sighed open. Warm air, carpet tiles, the specific hush of a place that dealt in endings all day and had learned to keep its voice down.
And a corridor. An empty corridor.
Nell stopped.
She had her phone out before she'd finished stopping, thumbing through to the text, the text, the one from her cousin Dermot, who had been given precisely one job in the administration of their great-aunt's funeral, which was to tell Nell where to go, and who had discharged this duty at 8:52 that morning with the message: chaple 2 mate, small one, 10 sharp, park round back. No capital letters. No punctuation you could set your watch by. The word chapel misspelled in a way that suggested Dermot had never once in his life needed to write it down before, which — fair. None of them had. You didn't rehearse for Viv. Viv was the fixed point. Viv was the one who showed up.
Chaple 2. Chapel Two. Small one. The chapels went by name on the mourners' signs and by number on the little brass bay-plaques the staff used, and 2 was what Dermot had sent — the one concrete instruction in the whole grey day, and she meant to follow it to the letter.
Nell went looking for Chapel Two.
The corridor branched, the way these places always branched, into two identical arms lined with the same framed watercolours of the same non-committal landscapes — a lake that could have been anywhere, a hill that had never troubled anyone — and a laminated sign on a little chrome stand with an arrow, two names slotted into it in white plastic letters, and a bay-number screwed to the stand under each. She read it too fast. She always read everything too fast; it was the panic, the panic read ahead of her eyes and reported back nonsense. She caught CHAPEL and she caught the number and she caught the arrow and she went where the arrow said, the cello banging, her good funeral shoes — the only heels she owned, bought for a different funeral, three years ago, another loss she'd arrived punctually and uselessly for — clicking too loud on the too-hard floor.
She reached the door. Frosted glass, a discreet brass handle worn pale by other people's worst days. Behind it: nothing. Silence. She eased it open on a room that held perhaps forty empty chairs, a lectern, a curtain, and the profound, ringing quiet of a space where a thing has either not yet happened or has already, terribly, finished.
Empty.
Nell's stomach did something complicated and cold.
She backed out. Checked the sign again — really checked it, this time, made her galloping eyes walk each letter — and understood, with the specific vertigo of a person who has been getting it wrong for some time before noticing, that she had gone left when the arrow, the actual arrow, the arrow she had not so much read as invented, had pointed the other way. Or the sign had changed. Or Dermot had. Or God had simply decided that today, of all days, Nell Ashworth would be given no quarter.
She went back down the corridor the other way, fast now, not-quite-running, which is its own particular art form — the funeral not-quite-run, the shame-jog, the I'm coming, I'm so sorry, I'm coming of a body that desperately wants to arrive without ever having been seen to hurry — and the case swung out and clipped the corner of a framed lake and set it swinging and she caught it, one-handed, heart slamming, and steadied it, and mouthed sorry to a watercolour, and hated herself with a completeness that felt almost restful.
Around the corner: another door. And through the frosted glass of this one, movement. Shapes. The blurred grey-and-black of people, a lot of people, standing and sitting and being, mercifully, somewhere. Music, low and organ-thick, leaking under the door. A service. A full one. In progress.
Nell's whole body sagged with relief, and then immediately un-sagged, because a full service in progress was exactly, precisely, the worst possible thing to be forty minutes late for. She could not walk in there. She physically could not. To open that door was to make every single head turn, to be the woman with the enormous instrument and the rioting hair and the wrong shoes clacking up the aisle to say goodbye to the one person who had never once made her feel late — and to do it late, publicly, catastrophically, in front of a family already hollowed out and only just holding.
She stood with her hand on the brass, drizzle drying cold at her collar, and she did the sums that terror does. If she went in now, everyone would see. If she waited, she'd miss more. If she left — and here her traitor heart leaned toward the exit sign like a plant toward a window, there it is, there's the door, you could be in the car in ninety seconds and text an apology from the ring road, you've done it before, you're so good at it — if she left, she would spend the rest of her life having not said goodbye to Viv, and even Nell, even chronically-fleeing Nell, could feel the size of that particular door, and could not make herself open it.
So she chose the third thing. The Nell thing. The thing she'd been doing since she was six years old and learned that the safest place in any room was the edge of it.
She eased the door open — just enough — and slipped in at the back.
The room was fuller than she'd braced for and emptier than a life deserved. A handful of dark coats near the front. A scatter of others further back, the way mourners scatter, each little cluster leaving a moat of empty chairs around itself as though grief were catching. The organ music was winding down. There was a coffin at the front, pale wood, a single spray of white flowers, and above it a photograph she didn't look at because looking at it would make it real. She found the last chair in the last row, on the aisle, nearest the exit — of course nearest the exit, she'd have chosen it in a cinema, a classroom, a wedding, a war — and she lowered herself onto it and drew the cello in against her knees and made herself small, so small, the smallest she knew how to be, and concentrated, with everything she had, on the single achievable task of not shaking.
She was here. That was the thing. She'd got here. Late and wrong-footed and soaked and clutching a cello like a life-raft, but here, in the room, for Viv, at last, and if she could just sit very still at the back and breathe and not draw a single eye, she could give her aunt this one small silent thing.
At the front, a woman in a soft grey cardigan — not a vicar, something gentler, a celebrant — stepped forward and let the last of the organ dissolve into quiet. She had a kind, unhurried face, the face of someone who did this every day and had never once let it become ordinary. She looked out at the sparse, frozen room, at all those little marooned islands of people who had not, Nell registered dimly, made a single sound the whole time she'd been sitting there.
"Thank you," the celebrant said gently, "for coming to remember him."
And then she folded her hands, and she smiled the softest, most terrible smile, and she said the words that would take Nell Ashworth's entire life and turn it, quietly, inside out.
"Now — would anyone like to say a few words?"
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.