Death in Summer

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After the funeral the hiatus that tragedy brought takes a different form. The suddenness of the death has gone, irrelevant now. Thaddeus has stood and knelt in the church of St. Nicholas, has heard his wife called good, the word he himself gave to a clergyman he has known all his life. People were present in the church who were strangers to him, who afterwards, in the house, introduced themselves as a few of Letitia’s friends from the time before he knew her. ‘And where is Letitia now?’ an undertaker a week ago inquired, confusing Thaddeus, who for a moment wondered if the man knew why he had been summoned. ‘It’s Letitia who has died,’ he said, and answered, when the man explained, that Letitia was in the mortuary, where she’d been taken.

All that is over now, and yet is coldly there in the first moment of waking every day: the coffin, the flowers laid out, the bright white surplice of the clergyman, dust to dust, and that seeming an insensitive expression at the time. There is Letitia’s mother in the graveyard, and some cousin, and a chubby woman whose bed was next but one to Letitia’s in a school dormitory more than twenty years ago. And there are all the others: local people, and colleagues from the music library, the postman who retired two years ago and was particularly fond of Letitia, the twins who come to clean the windows. There are the tears on Zenobia’s plump cheeks, and Maidment gaunt and appalled. The day the heatwave began it was, that funeral afternoon, the empty blue of the sky touched upon in the clergyman’s brief eulogy. For as long as he lives, Thaddeus Davenant believes those funeral images will be there in the first moment of his waking.

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