Page 34 of The Art of Loving You

Elaine patted my knee in response. ‘I’ve heard worse.’

There were a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, everyone intently stirring their tea. Bryan reached across and took three biscuits,placing them on the arm of the chair. Rhonda glared at him.

‘Tell me about Jack.’ Elaine looked to Rhonda.

‘We’ve chosen the passages we’d like read from the Bible. There’s a particular prayer—’

‘Don’t worry about that just yet. Tell me about your son.’

‘Well …’ Rhonda hesitated. ‘He was always a dreamer. Head in the clouds. He … he wasn’t naughty but he drew on the walls once, a picture of a cat sitting on a wall, facing the moon. I don’t think he’d realised he’d done anything wrong.’

‘We wallpapered over it,’ Bryan added.

‘Do you think it’s still there, Bryan? Underneath the paper?’ Rhonda’s voice cracked and she dabbed her eyes with a tissue. ‘He liked nature. Flowers. We’ve arranged for “SON” in white carnations to go on top of his coffin in the hearse.’

‘That will look beautiful,’ Alice said but heat rushed over me. I couldn’t bear it.

Those three letters shouting to the world that they had more claim on him than I did.

It’s not as though you were married.

‘We’d like three hymns.’

‘Can’t we havenormalmusic?’ I asked. ‘Sorry,’ I added to Elaine. I was being rude I knew, but everything had spun out of my control. From the moment Maggie had arrived at that house on that fateful morning I hadn’t had a say in anything. Jack’s body had been removed while Alice had held me back, held me up as I screamed his name over and over. Jack’s parents making choices he’d have loathed.

‘Hymnsarenormal to us,’ Bryan said.

‘When was the last time you went to church?’ My gaze was challenging,flitting between Jack’s mum and dad. ‘I didn’t think so.’

‘I went at—’

‘And Christmas or Easter doesn’t count either.’ I cut Rhonda off.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alice apologised for me and I resented her for it. ‘Obviously Libby is upset, we’reallupset, but Jack loved music. It was a big part of his adult life.’

‘We know our own son.’ Bryan snapped a biscuit in two.

How could he eat? Didn’t he care? Rhonda, at least, was showing some emotion.

Elaine soothed, ‘Of course you do, but Libby knew another side of him. I’d like to hear from all of you today. The memory you shared of Jack drawing the cat was lovely. Now, Libby, do you want to tell me about your Jack?’

She smiled as she handed me my tea. I wrapped my hands around the warmth of the mug and thought carefully about how to reply. I could tell her Jack was kind, loving, generous. Words she could use in her eulogy but it wouldn’t tell her who he was to me. Who he was to the world.

‘He wasn’t materialistic but his prized possession was a vintage Gibson guitar,’ I began falteringly not sure where I was going.

‘He was a musician?’

‘No. He had it hanging on the wall of his flat when we met.’ My hands began to shake and I set my mug back on the table. I closed my eyes, remembering our first date, after we’d eaten crackers by candlelight.

‘Play me a song,’ I had said.

‘I …’ He had run his fingers through his hair. Later I would learn that he’d do that when he was unsure. Embarrassed. ‘I can’t actually play.’

‘You have a guitar on display and you can’t play?’

‘I’ll try and explain. Songs mean so much to me.’ He gestured to his record player. The vinyl LPs stacked everywhere. ‘My granddad passed away when I was eleven and it was around the time I discovered music. Grandad left me some money and I wanted to be Bob Dylan so I spent it on a turntable, hisSlow Train Comingalbum and the Gibson. But …’ He pushed up the sleeves of his black jumper and sat cross-legged in the armchair opposite me. ‘A funny thing happened. Each time I picked it up to play along I … felt the lyrics, the melodies. I saw them all in my mind and started trying to imitate what I was hearing but … I felt …’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t think I’m mad, but I felt … compelled, I guess is the best word, to get all the emotions music made me feel out of my head in a visual and not an auditory way and so I began to draw them. Paint them. That probably doesn’t make sense.’

‘It does. I’m not the same with music but when I hear a news story, see the way a couple look at each other in the street, I interpret the feeling and put it into a photograph.’

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