Chapter 24
For the second time that week, Marnie stood in front of the mirror checking her reflection, dressed in black. But on the first occasion she hadn’t considered wearing a white suit and kicking against convention. A white suit and long black hair, a two-fingered statement against all those blondes in black suits that she would encounter today. A white bullet-proof vest might have been a good idea too. Her mother’s funeral congregation would be full of poison-leakers hissing behind Marnie’s back like the nest of vipers they were. What poor Judith had to put up with. Thank goodness she had St Gabrielle the Immaculate Contagion in her corner. Today of all days, Marnie had to keep her dignity intact, her head held high, her trap well and truly shut. They would be waiting en masse for the black sheep of the Salt family to ruin her mother’s interment and she would not give them the satisfaction.
Marnie had dressed carefully: mid-calf plain dress, long jacket – also plain. Shoes: demure heel, hair pinned up in an artful but not too showy bun, no hat. Make up, subtle. No bright red lips that a wayward daughter might choose to hint at subversion, but rose pink. Never had it been so important to strike the right balance between respectful and classy.
She arrived at the funeral parlour at ten-thirty. Gabrielle was already there, along with a man Marnie didn’t recognise. Her sister’s usual type: older and no Prince Charming, smart clothes, moneyed, if the penis-extension convertible in the car park was anything to go by. He introduced himself as Duncan, Gabrielle’s fiancé, which came as a surprise but Marnie didn’t bother to ask how long they’d been affianced. His handshake was limply polite, indicating that he already knew her by reputation.
Judith’s coffin was in position in the back of the hearse with a modest cross of white flowers on it, as befitted someone who went to church every Sunday and paraded herself as the good Christian, charitable woman she was. ‘Her organs might not have been worth donating but people would have benefitted from her quality clothes and white goods.’ She’d have enjoyed the congregation talking about her like that in absentia.
Gabrielle made sure she herself occupied the middle back seat in the limousine. Marnie wondered if that was to keep her away from Duncan; her sister needn’t have worried on that score.
Marnie felt her nervous levels ratchet up when the car reached the crematorium. There were a lot of people clustered outside the doors. She spotted Uncle Barry – her mother’s brother – and his wife, Auntie Diana, in the midst of them and she felt her jaw tighten with tension. Towards the end of the 1990s, Judith hadn’t spoken to them for two full years. Marnie’s fault again, obviously. Marnie had hoped she would never see either of them again. On the lists of people for whom she was persona non grata, she was in indisputable first place on theirs.
Marnie kept her head up and her eyes resting on no one as she followed the coffin down the central aisle of the crematorium chapel. A CD was playing classical music as people filed to their seats. It would have been chosen to impress rather than it being meaningful. Something like ‘Bring Me Sunshine’.
The young smooth-faced vicar gave a resumé of Judith’s life. He filled everyone in on where she was born and went to school and how she liked to knit squares for blankets to be shipped out to Africa even as a child. He said that she had an older brother called Barry; he didn’t mention that he was a twat. He said that Judith was very much in love with her husband Tony and that marriage was blessed with a daughter and an adopted daughter but sadly it was not to last. He didn’t say that Tony ran off to shag half of Thailand and that he’d never laid eyes on his real child. They sang ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ and Gabrielle folded, turning to Duncan for comfort as she dabbed at her eye with a delicate handkerchief so she wouldn’t smudge her eyeliner. Marnie’s composure slipped on the second verse and she didn’t know if it was because she was genuinely emotional or because it was a sad hymn with beautiful words which were renowned for making people cry.
When the vicar asked them all to sit and think of their fondest memory of Judith Salt, Marnie tried her best to conjure up a time when she had felt like the true daughter of a mother. In thirty-two years there had to be something. She raked desperately through her memory banks and came up with nothing but that perpetual feeling of being on the cold outside of a family she should have been part of, of her Christmas presents being a much smaller pile next to Gabrielle’s. Of being told that no she couldn’t have a birthday party like her sister because no one would come. She had no recollection of being cuddled when she fell, of her mother’s joy when she had achieved something: her gold survival badge in swimming, a certificate for the perfect mark in a French exam, first place in a teenage cake-baking competition. Not one.
When the curtains closed and ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ started up, Gabrielle began to wail. Marnie wanted to wail, she wanted to feel so much emotion that she out-wailed her sister. But if she had, she would have been accused of attention-seeking, so she could only sit and murmur a message in silence. Rest in peace, Judith. I wish you could have loved me. I wanted you to so much.