Read Online Wakening the Crow by Stephen Gregory - Free Book Online Page B

the heaters on, and a shimmering white fume arose from the exhaust pipes. We heard the music from the chapel – The Lord’s my Shepherd – the tremulous voices of grieving women and the growling of bereaved men.
    Not long. I could feel Chloe starting to shiver, her hand gripping mine more and more tightly inside her woolly glove. I hugged her close, pulling her body against my legs so she could press her face into my coat, and I inwardly groaned at the prospect of Rosie’s interrogation if she came home this evening and found Chloe feverish with a cold... so where did you go today? On the park with the ducks and the swans? No? Did you go into town, to have a look around the nice warm shops and have a nice hot chocolate or something? No? You went where? The crematorium? What do you mean, the crematorium? For heaven’s sake Oliver, you took Chloe for a nice afternoon at the crematorium?
    Four o’clock. Getting dark. The afternoon was closing around us, the grip of the frost was tighter as the sun dipped away and the evening sky was darker and lower. Darker, so that the glow from inside the chapel and the lights of the cars were suddenly bright. The exhaust smoke was whiter, billowing like steam. And as the music of an organ rose and fell with its pitiless poignancy, the family of Mr. Heap, deceased, started to come outside. Grey smoke plumed from the chimney of the incinerator.
    The family processed across the car park, escorted by the minister, who was going to show them where the ashes would eventually be placed. He took them to the garden of remembrance, where the yews and the privet were meticulously cut into deferential, unassuming shapes, where there were already hundreds of crosses and plaques on the grass. We followed at a discreet distance. If anyone had asked me why we were there or who we were, I was ready to say that I’d been a regular visitor to Mr. Heap’s marvellous little shop and wanted to pay my respects. But no one asked me, no one glanced at us. The faces of the middle-aged sons with their wives, the grandchildren in their twenties, were lit only by the last rays of the midwinter sun and the glow from inside the hearse. A few tears, yes, but not of sadness as much as resignation, that a very old man who’d been loved and respected had passed away, after a long and honourable life... tears shining in nostalgic eyes, on cold white cheeks, a tear glistening on the tip of a reddened nose.
    They stood and stared at the ground. What else could they do, where else could they look? One by one, they bent and placed a flower or a card, a memento or token.
    Not many tears, until...
    When one of the middle-aged sons and his wife turned to the next plot, where there was already a plaque in the grass, and they pressed their palms onto it, I could see how their shoulders began shuddering with grief. Not for the old man, whom they’d loved so much and would dearly miss, but for someone else, who’d been untimely and cruelly taken away.
    Sobbing, the couple were helped to their feet. It was suddenly terrible. It had been reverent and calm. Now it was terrible. More than sadness: sorrow. More than sorrow: despair. And more than that: pain and anger. The family limped and stumbled back to the cars, they made strange mumbling, mewing noises into their handkerchiefs, and they were driven away.
    A long silence. Darkness, and an overwhelming sense of the cold. When the family had gone, the place where we found ourselves standing was devoid of any life or warmth. Only a vacuum, which the bitterness of a January night hurried to fill up.
    It was too dark to read the plaques on the lawn. Next to the new plot, the plaque which had provoked such an outburst of grieving was still warm, from the hands which had pressed on it. Chloe knelt and touched it too. I searched her face for a reaction. She was smiling. She had no inkling, of course. For her, as the old man himself had remarked, life and death were equally