Borrowed Black
Vasey Green crematorium, the car park
Theo drove, because June had asked him to, because she had known she would not be able to.
“You can still not go in,” he said, in the car park. “I’ll say you were ill. I’m very good at saying people were ill.”
“I’m going in.”
“I know you are. I’m just putting it on the table.”
She looked at the building. It was a low grey place with a yard in front of it and a hedge that had been cut into a shape it didn’t want to be.
“Why are you here?” she said. “Actually.”
“He used to pick me up from school when your dad’s car was closer than my dad’s car.” Theo pulled the key out. “He kept a tin of those terrible mints in the door. He gave me one every time and I ate it every time and I never once liked them.”
June sat with that.
“You could have led with that,” she said.
“You’d have cried in the car and then had to go in with your face done. I know how you work.”
The yard
The crematorium was out past the ring, where the city stops and the polder starts and there is nothing to break the wind. The yard in front of the building was gravel, with a strip of grass along one side and a bench nobody was sitting on. Cars came in slowly because of the stones. The hedge had been cut square, and the wind came in off the flat land behind it with nothing at all to stop it.
There were more people than she’d expected.
That was the thing about drivers: they knew everybody, and everybody knew them, and half of that yard had been in the back of Milan Kovač’s car at some point. Men from the depot. A couple of her father’s old assistants. A woman who used to do the flowers at the house and hugged June for slightly too long.
They all knew who June was. And they were all, without exception, glad she’d come.
Of course you came, said their faces. You were like family.
She stood in it and let it happen and said thank you a great many times, and she had prepared for nearly everything about this day except being welcomed.
Wren was on the far side of the yard, on her own.
She was wearing a black jacket that didn’t belong to her. It was too wide at the shoulder and too long in the arm, somebody’s, from somewhere, and every so often her right hand came up and started to turn the cuff back and then stopped.
June watched her do it, and stop, and do it again.
Milan found her before she found him.
“June.”
He had a paper cup of tea and his good coat on and he looked like a photograph of himself from a few years ago that had been left in the sun.
“Mr Kovač.”
“Ah.” He waved the cup slightly, and something that was nearly a smile went over his face and gave up. “Come on.”
“Milan.”
“Better.” He drank some tea. “You came a long way.”
“It isn’t far.”
“It’s far when you don’t want to.” He said it kindly, and she understood that he meant her mother, and her father, and this building, and all of it. “Sit down when they let you. You look like your mother.”
The yard kept moving around them.
June had built this moment several different ways in the car and none of them had involved him being decent to her.
She had a sentence. She had been carrying it for weeks and it was very short. Where were you on the Saturday before the article? She could put it in the air right now, at his wife’s funeral, in front of the depot men.
She could also do the other thing, which was ask nothing and go on standing here being like family.
“Milan,” she said.
“Mm.”
There was a moment. She was aware of it while it was happening, which almost never happens.
“Wren’s been very good,” June said. “About all of it. I don’t know if people are telling you that.”
Something went across his face. He looked past her at his daughter, on the other side of the yard, and he looked at her for a long moment, and it was not a look June could read.
“She’s better than the both of us,” Milan said, and went to shake somebody’s hand.
Afterwards, in the slow shuffle of people who don’t know when they’re allowed to leave, June crossed the gravel.
Wren saw her coming and something in her shoulders changed. Then Theo came up on June’s left with tea in both hands, and offered one to Wren, and said something about the mints in the car door, and Wren said the right things back.
She said the right things back and none of the rest of her joined in.
June had seen her do that when they were younger and had never once wondered what it was.
Theo went to talk to the men from the depot, and then it was just the two of them, at the edge of the gravel, with the hedge behind them.
“You don’t have to stay for the food,” Wren said. She was looking at the hedge.
“I’m staying for the food.”
“It’s sandwiches.”
June said the next bit without any weight on it at all, which was a skill.
“I’m extremely fond of sandwiches.”
Something went across Wren’s face that would have been a laugh on a different day. Her hand came up to her cuff again and stopped again.
“It’s my aunt’s,” she said. “The jacket. Mine’s — I don’t have one.”
“It’s fine.”
Wren tugged the front of it straight, which did nothing.
“It isn’t.”
“No,” June agreed. “It isn’t. Hold still.”
She reached up and turned the collar down at the back, where it had been folded under since God knows when, and smoothed it flat, and stepped back.
It took no time at all.
Wren didn’t move the whole time.
“There,” June said.
And that was when it went wrong.
Not visibly. Nothing happened that anybody in that yard could have seen. June simply stood there with her hand back at her side and understood, completely and all at once, that she had not come here for the drive books.
She had come because Wren’s mother had died.
She had come because she couldn’t stand the idea of Wren standing in a yard in a borrowed jacket with nobody next to her.
Both of those things were true. The other thing was also true, and the other thing was still going to happen.
There was no arrangement of any of it in which June came out a good person.
Say it. Say it now. Say — I think your father knows something. I’ve thought it for months. I should have said it in your kitchen.
The words got as far as her mouth.
Then Wren said, “They’re going in,” and the crowd started to move, and the moment closed like a door in a draught.
Inside
They went in with everybody else.
At the top of the aisle there was a bottleneck, the way there always is, and somebody’s grandmother stopped dead, and the whole line concertinaed.
June was pushed lightly against Wren’s shoulder.
She should have said sorry and stepped back. Instead she put her hand around Wren’s wrist — under the too-long sleeve, on the bare skin, her thumb over the small bones on the inside — and held on.
Wren went completely still.
The line moved. It kept moving. June did not let go — not when the pressure eased, not when the aisle opened up, not for a good while after there was any reason to hold on.
Then she let go and looked straight ahead.
“Mind the step,” Wren said.
Ahead of them, at the door, Milan turned round to find his daughter in the crowd. He found her. Then he found June, half a step behind her, with her hand still not quite closed.
He looked at the two of them for a moment longer than a man looks at a queue.
Then he went in.