Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi Read Online Free Page B

hypocrisy.
    There was a scattering of other mourners. Jas had shut the Blue Horse for the occasion, and he was standing opposite her, his eyes downcast. Out from behind the shield of his bar, he looked even less substantial than he had the other day. She willed him to look up at her, but he obstinately refused. Rupert was there, too, his eyes betraying whatever private wake he'd held for himself the night before. He, too, didn't seem to want to look at her. And there was Greta, and the woman from the post office, and even the chap who organized the Bloody Bell-ringing sessions – probably telling himself that the Christian humility he was showing in coming to the funeral of his old enemy would serve him well in the life to come, or maybe he was just here to gloat – and a dozen or so others. All of them elderly people, around Aunt Jill's kind of age or older; Joanna was the only person there under fifty.
    The fresh spring wind made their clothes flap. Joanna was reminded of a different season – of autumn trees. Come winter, would this leaping breeze be a gale, and would all of the trees be able to withstand it?
    She straightened her shoulders and told herself to stop being morbid. The Reverend Daker seemed to be coming to the end of his oration – or, at least, he was pausing for breath – and she must brace herself to receive the sympathies of the others. On second thoughts, cemeteries were about the one place in the world it was perfectly permissible to be morbid. And why should she don a cloak of false happiness?
    They took turns tossing earth down onto the coffin-lid. Joanna wiped off her hands on the sides of her skirt. Surely that was about all they had to do; surely they could all pack off home now, herself included. She'd decided against holding one of those glacial funeral teas people seemed to go in for; there weren't any relations, and the only residents of Ashburton whom Aunt Jill had known at all well were gathered here and looking about as uninterested in protracting proceedings as Joanna herself. She had a bottle of scotch back at the flat – her flat, now – and proposed to spend the rest of the afternoon getting as much of it into herself as possible before she passed out. From the look of Rupert, his intentions were very similar.
    As if at a signal, the rest of the party moved off, leaving her alone at the graveside for a moment with the sexton.
    "She was a nice woman, your aunt," he said, bending to pick up the first spadeful of earth. "She'll be missed around here."
    It was a better funeral oration than the Reverend Daker had been able to compose.
    ~
    The level of whisky in the bottle had gone down by about a third, and she'd given up bothering to mix it with water. The light coming in through the drawing-room window was a golden mellow colour, a paler variation on the liquid in the bottle: in an hour or so it would be sunset. She knew she was really quite a lot drunk, although still not drunk enough.
    Something had wasted Aunt Jill away, something that had grown inside her, devouring her. In other circumstances Joanna might have guessed cancer, but there hadn't been that funny smell cancer victims usually give off, and Dr Grasmere had sworn to her that her aunt had been in perfect health.
    "She just died," he'd said. "She was old, you know."
    "She wasn't yet sixty-five," Joanna had said, and she said it again now, raising her tumbler to the whisky bottle in some sort of tribute. "She shouldn't have died. She wasn't old enough to die. She didn't ..." No: saying that people didn't deserve to die was stupid, and somehow uncharitable. No one deserved to die except those who wanted to, and Aunt Jill hadn't wanted to.
    Well. Maybe not. It was hard to tell what the frail old grandmother who called herself Aunt Jill had actually wanted, or not wanted. Joanna wished she'd come down here to Ashburton more often, or at least more recently. She wished she hadn't spent part of that last evening down in the Blue