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afterward. Her pushing her way into the front pews suggested she was going to assert her status as “family.”
    The coffin began its journey to the front of the church, and everyone stood. Then the vicar took charge, an unusually precise yet commanding figure. They prayed, they sang “Guide Me, Oh Thou Great Jehovah,” then George Wilson, May’s deputy at Blackfield Road Primary for many years, read a poem. Eve had wavered between “No Coward Soul” and a Sylvia Plath, but she thought the Emily Brontë too metaphysical for her mother’s down-to-earth tastes and habits, and she then remembered May’s disapproval of a mother whose suicide appeared to her a dereliction of duty. She definitely would not have wanted Sylvia Plath. Finally Eve had decided—this was before the arrival of The Letter—that there was no earthly reason why the poem should be by a woman, and she had chosen “When the Present Has Latched Its Postern Behind My Tremulous Stay,” and Hardy’s view of the afterlife still seemed to her not unlike May’s, though her life had been very much more than a tremulous stay. The reading, very well prepared, as May would have expected, cheered her up, and she listened with good grace to the vicar’s not entirely accurate rehearsal of the facts she had givenhim about May’s life. There was no mention of a husband, but then she had not mentioned him to the vicar. Next there was a lesson, they sang “Love Divine, All Love Excelling” and via the vicar Eve invited all friends of her mother to refreshments (she couldn’t think of anything else to call them), and then slowly the coffin was taken out into the churchyard and toward the dug grave. Eve followed slowly after it.
    Now she was out in the open air she could assess the congregation. There were all the teachers at Blackfield Road Primary, and many older ones now retired. There were teachers from the local comprehensive, and above all there were ordinary Crossley people from all walks and classes of life, people who wanted to pay tribute to a local institution, someone who they felt had been a good influence on their lives. Eve was marking down people it might be interesting to talk to and went through the ceremonies at the graveside in a dream, vaguely wondering what the scattering of earth was meant to symbolize.
    Suddenly she was seized upon by a trio of women, one of them her mother’s age, the other two probably in their forties.
    â€œWe just wanted to say,” said the senior of them, “how sad your mother’s death made us, and how much we owed her.”
    â€œWe went to school under your mother,” said one of the middle-aged ones, “that’s the only way I can put it, and then our sons and daughter did, and in a couple of years’ time two grandchildren will start at the same school.”
    â€œI cried when I thought my grandchildren would nothave the experience,” said the other woman. “But then your mother retired, so they would have missed her anyway. Such a shame she didn’t have a long retirement.”
    â€œI’ve been thinking the same,” said Eve. “We had planned to do so many things together.”
    â€œShe might even have married again,” said the oldest of them. “But of course she could have done that earlier if she’d wanted to.”
    â€œShe was so busy,” said Eve, almost apologetically. “She never had time, it seems. Did you know my father?”
    â€œOh no. I was newly married when your mother and father came here, and had no children. The only thing I’ve heard was that he was likable. Very approachable, people said.”
    â€œWell, that’s nice to hear.”
    â€œBut did your mother never—?”
    â€œShe didn’t talk about him much. I suppose she must have found the subject painful.”
    Then she turned, seized the arm of George Wilson to thank him