So where are the compensations, you might be asking?
Everyone thought it a great scandal when one of the paternal uncles went to the cinema on the afternoon of his father's azzah. I don't quite know what they would have made of our family outing to see Shrek on the eve of my own father's funeral or, coincidentally, Shrek 2 after we had the service for my mother (you can see we were fairly worried when Shrek 3 was released, but luckily, that time nobody died...) In Beirut, after we spend the day mournfully dressed in black, we went back to the hotel, re-dressed in black and the went to the Buddha Bar, had dinner in a sushi restaurant and then stood in the aisles or The Music Hall and danced until four in the morning, then got up the next day and did it all again. This time with a hangover.
It doesn't sound very respectful to the dead, admittedly, but this all took place some months after the actual death, and had my mother-in-law had the choice of which occasion she attended, she would unhesitatingly have chosen the night club.
I'm thinking about all this in a coffee shop in Notting Hill Gate with my husband who has just bought me the first carbohydrate I've eaten in several weeks. We've just come back from my neighbour's funeral in the Methodist church where her husband was once a vicar. The biodegradable coffin looked like a large laundry basket and was decorated with spring flowers and ivy picked from her garden and we sang a few recognisable hymns. As British funerals go, it was fairly bearable, but still I would rather have had a double vodka and jumped up and down to a dubke band (which, apart from running away from them, is the only other option) than a cheese and ham baquette and a decaf skinny latte.
My neighbour, though once a missionary in India and married to a vicar, was also divorced when I first met her. She was in her early sixties when we moved into the house next door. I was a young bride with a toddler and a three month old baby and she was retired, learning Bengali so she could go back to India and work as a volunteer. To my shame I thought she was old. Now there's only about ten years between the age she was then and the age I am now now. I can't quite shake off the sadness at the contrast between the young, optimistic girl I was then, with two of my children as yet unborn and my life containable in a double pushchair and a couple of trips in my father's Ford Siesta, and failed spectre of it all now . My children are mostly grown and the marriage is over and when her house is sold and the inevitable new family move in, I'll be the old dear next door. It's like a part of my life is over too. However, I take heart in how well she and her husband seemed to have negotiated their divorce and maintained an amicable relationship afterwards.
So, with my usual genius at picking exactly the right moment to broach these subjects, I turn to my mute husband who has been sitting beside me silently for the past hour of hymn singing and reminiscences, resolutely not joining in with my walk down Nostalgia Lane, and say: Don't you think it's time that we made some sort of decision about what we are going to do?
What do you mean? He asked. I need to get back to work after this...
So do I, but I'm not talking about now, I'm talking about 'us'. Shouldn't we decide what we're doing. It's been two years now and it's not like you are planning on coming back home, so ...
He interrupts me: I don't know, he says, and he looks pitifully at me, as though I'm the one who has just had a terrible bereavement needs to be consoled. I don't know what I'm doing. He repeats.
Damn it, of course you know what you're doing - you're not coming back because otherwise you would be back. I refrain from mentioning that I don't necessarily want him to come back, but the fiction that he might return is one that he's been maintaining, as much for his benefit as mine. I mean, it would get a bit crowded with the new, new man hanging around the house at the weekends.
He gives me that look again, the really, really sorry to hear you have a terminal illness, expression, shrugs, and says: I'm content as I am.
Content?
He smiles ruefully. Yes, I'm content.
Content? I'm somewhat taken aback by the choice of words. Happy, I could have dealt with - at least it's a positive statement. Confused - yes, I feel that too. Upset, depressed, regretful - bring it on, I know those words, but I'm sitting here mourning the death of our marriage and our grown up kids and my lost youth and my lost husband and he's 'content'?
All my mature , let's settle this reasonably and equably goes straight out the window of Paul's and blows off down Holland Park Avenue. There's something about the bland, smugness of the word 'content' that drags my heart out of my chest on to the plate in front of me and saws it into two ragged pieces like the baguette I no longer feel like eating. How can he be content, I think?
Because he isn't living with you, I tell myself.. Unnecessarily brutally, I thought - even for me.
I've lost my appetite. No bread since December, and I cant face it. What a waste of a bloody good baguette.
