Page 99 of Husband Material
“So,” said Oliver, “in my case not at all until the guidelines changed?”
“Okay, leaving aside homophobic medical policies and my failure to rhetoric properly, tell me honestly and tell yourself honestly how doing this speech will make you feel.”
There was a long silence. Then Oliver came and sat next to me. “Frankly, Lucien, it will make me feel miserable. I’m still very much working through what my relationship with my father was or meant, and so putting it into a neat little box and tying that box with a neat little bow and attaching a neat little label that says ‘Beloved husband, devoted father’ is…” He broke off and then finished in a resentful rush. “Fucking with my head.”
“It would,” I told him. “It’s a heady-fucky thing to have to do. Which is why I’m telling you, one last time, if you want to nope out, you can.”
“But—”
“No buts.” I produced the assertive finger and waved it in the air. “Blah blah family blah blah expectation. Even with all that, if this is bad for you, that’s the most important thing.”
Oliver heaved a sigh packed with so many different emotions that if I’d wanted to, I could have sorted them alphabetically,starting withangryand ending withwoeful. “I’m sorry, Lucien. I wish I could be that brave or that selfish but, ironically, it’s not how I was raised. And I’m working on that, but my father was inconsiderate enough to die in the middle of the process rather than at the end of it. So here I am, doing what is expected of me, because right here and now right, I cannot imagine doing anything else.”
“And,” I said, squeezing his hand tightly, “I support you a hundred percent.” I didn’t say,even if you don’t support yourselfbecause that wasn’t what he needed to hear. Besides, coming from me, it would have been kind of hypocritical.
“If you supported me a hundred percent”—Oliver’s lips twitched—“you wouldn’t be wearing the same suit to my father’s funeral that you wore to your coworker’s wedding.”
I did, in fact, have exactly one suit, not counting the blue one I’d rented for Bridge’s blue-and-rose-gold marital extravaganza. “It’s a multipurpose item. It’s both frugal and ethical.” Standing, I gave Oliver my most morally superior face. “Do you know how many litres of drinkable water go into producing a pair of formal trousers?”
“No,” said Oliver, looking—as I should have predicted—genuinely curious. “How many?”
“Well, I don’t know either. But I bet it’s a lot.” And that was about as far as my cheer-up-Oliver routine could run because if we didn’t leave soon, we’d be late.
Or at least not early enough to satisfy the ghost of David Blackwood.
Even if I said so myself, we’d done a good job organisation-wise. Maybe because it had been clear from the outset how many rainbow balloon arches there should be, i.e. zero. Weirdly enough, this wasactually going to be my first funeral. My dad’s parents hadn’t been in the picture, which was fitting since neither was he; my mum’s dad likewise; and my mum’s mum was still very much alive in the south of France, preserved into her nineties by a diet of olive oil and red wine. In some ways, given how few shits I gave about David Blackwood, it was the least traumatic first funeral I could have been to. Apart from the tiny, tiny detail that there was a good chance it would utterly destroy my boyfriend’s mental health.
It was one of those sullen wintery days where it felt like the sky was scowling, too pissed off to even do the decent thing and rain. Various mourners were milling around the gardens and outside the main building, looking like mildly irritable shadow puppets. That was the thing about funerals: you were either distraught because the deceased was someone you were incredibly close to, or you were bored and awkward because they weren’t but some indirect tie of blood or friendship meant you were obligated to be there.
Also, crematoria were fucking weird. They were basically a quite nice garden outside a factory for disposing of corpses, with a friendly nondenominational chapel bolted onto the front. And to give them credit, they went to a lot of trouble to disguise the whole corpse-disposal aspect of their business, but the honking great industrial chimney was a giveaway that my eyes kept drifting back to. The other eerily industrial thing about the crematorium experience was that—and I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way—they didn’t half pack them in. Which meant there was a five-minute window between the last service ending and ours beginning. So while Oliver went inside to, I don’t know, greet the vicar, hug his mum, have his shirt criticised for old time’s sake, I was left trying to herd a bunch of people who didn’t know who I was, or have reason to listen to me, into a building they didn’t want to be in for a very tight turnaround.
I didn’t think I made any friends, but it would have been weirdif I had. And, after a little while, Mia was there to help because this was apparently the partner’s job. Or maybe she just wanted to get away from the rest of her husband’s family.
On the whole, I was proud that we managed to get everyone in and ourselves into our embarrassingly front-row seats bang on the dot of eleven. One of the artfully reassuring people who worked at the crematorium closed the doors behind us and then… Well. That was showtime.
There was something about the chapel itself that I found oddly calming, probably because it had been designed to oddly calm people. The chairs were relatively comfortable and upholstered in a neutral shade of blue, and everything around us was soothing pine and soft uplighting, making it almost possible to ignore the little curtained door with the coffin in front of it.
Much like a wedding, the vicar kicked us off, although out of deference to the Blackwoods’ fairly common brand of C of E secularism, he’d agreed to keep the God stuff to a minimum and focus instead on remembering the life of David Blackwood. Which mostly meant his work, his family, golf, and tireless support of the local Conservative party.
My brain really wanted to maintain a running commentary as a kind of defence mechanism, but given I was sitting one space away from Miriam, who was crying softly and, I thought, sincerely, I wasn’t quite that much of a prick.
Beside me, Oliver was growing increasingly tense, his hands white-knuckled against his knees.
“You still don’t have to do this,” I whispered. “Just tell the vicar you’re too upset. He must get that all the time.”
Oliver bent his head close to mine. “I–I can’t.”
“And now,” said the vicar in what I’m sure must have been his trained funeral voice, “we hand over to David’s eldest son, Oliver, who’s going to say a few words.”
I made a weird grab for Oliver’s hand, like he’d just slipped over a cliff and it was my last chance to catch him. But since this was a funeral, and therefore the force pulling him forward was social convention and not gravity, it didn’t.
Taking the vicar’s place at the lectern, Oliver took a stack of cue cards from his inside pocket and cleared his throat.
I tried to shoot I-love-you-and-I’m-here-for-you lasers out of my eyes, already terrified of how much this was going to hurt him.
The silence somehow got deeper as it lengthened.
The vicar patted him reassuringly on the arm.
