Chapter One

At his wife's funeral, Robin Meredith was asked by a woman in a paisley headscarf, whom he didn't immediately recognize, if he wasn't thankful to know that Caro was now safe with Jesus. He, summoning all the courtesy he could manage at such a moment, said no, he didn't think so. He then went out of the church into the rain and looked at the black hole into which Caro was to be lowered.

"No cremation," she'd said. "I want it done properly. Brass handles. Full-length. In the churchyard."

It was about the only instruction she had given as well as the only acknowledgment she had made that she was dying. There were planks on top of the hole, and long tapes of black webbing had been laid across them with which to lower the coffin.

"You okay?" Robin's daughter said, standing close to him, but not touching.

"Better out of there," he said, meaning the church.

"Me too."

There was a pause, and then Judy said, "Mum liked it, though." Her voice shook.

"Yes," Robin said. He put a hand out to take Judy's, but both hers were deep in her coat pockets, her long, black, Londony coat which proclaimed, as did all her clothes, how far she had deliberately come from the land on which she grew up.

"You never-" Judy hissed suddenly.

© Joanna Trollope