The last time Mabel went to a funeral she sat with her husband. Now she was alone and Walter lay inside the coffin, forever prostrate. Father Kane conducted the service at Saint Kolbe’s chapel, picking words like fruit from a tree, his measured gait and supporting stick told the congregation that he would soon join Walter in that other green world.

Walter’s popularity in life meant that all the pews were filled and Father Kane wasted no time welcoming new faces to the parish despite the regrettable circumstances. Walter’s family sat on one side of the chapel with Mabel’s on the other. His friends and work colleagues gathered behind and on the last bench sat a woman that Mabel couldn’t place.

A white linen pall covered the casket and Mabel recalled the past week when it had lain open in the bedroom she shared with her husband for thirty-three years. Visitors came to pay their respects: he had been a good man; a good husband. Everybody said so. They stroked his rigid hand, kissed his cold forehead, complimented his appearance, said they half expected him to wake up: It’s all so surreal; we can’t believe he’s gone.

Mabel believed.

His hair, so preciously maintained in life, seemed wax like, almost a wig. His skin, once boy like soft and flushed pink now thin and hard as a pig’s. His face (esteemed, handsome) had been embalmed to the point where his glands looked swollen, giving his face a square look, not at all natural. Mabel had replaced the coffin lid when everyone had gone and never again entered the room whilst the body remained.

Father Kane began a hymn and was joined in song by some of the regulars. Along the cold stone walls hung paintings of the stations of the cross. Mabel sat under Jesus falls for the first time– Jesus buckling under the weight of his cross, a Roman soldier shielding him from a mace-wielding mob.

Mabel closed her eyes and imagined herself at home in her own bed. Walter reaching across to turn off the bedside lamp. Walter sliding his fingertips under her body as he lay on his stomach. Walter gently snoring as sleep took him. For a moment she could feel the house as it was when they first moved in, before it became familiar. Often, she’d have these sensations; a certain chapter of her life brought to sudden focus by the note of a song or a forgotten smell. Each time she longed to dwell on these feelings, finding that she could not, that she might have better luck throwing a stone at the moon or piecing together the fragments of a dream from last week.

Against eyelids closed a dark crimson, blurred ghosts fought for attention. A woman began to emerge, her face appearing gradually until Mabel was able to recognise her as the woman seated on the last pew.

Father Kane read aloud from the Gospel. Mabel opened her eyes and turned around, beyond the rows of sympathetic smiles, toward the back of the church, but the woman had gone.

Mabel wiped her palms against her skirt and loosened a button on her blouse. The congregation knelt in unison on padded stools for the purpose. She tried to recall the woman; her hands clasped tightly as though in prayer. Soon she saw herself as if from above. Returning home from work promptly to prepare for a doctor’s appointment. Seeing this woman leave their house. Waiting over the road until the woman drove off in her Peugeot. Surprised to find Walter at home when he should have been working. And in her haste and confusion, shelving the whole affair until Walter coughed it up over dinner that night. An old friend, Walter explained, from his university days.

A passing cloud allowed sun through the stained glass, falling rubicund on her son David, marmalade on Walter’s brother Tom and bathing Nancy, Mabel’s sister, in emerald light, as though underwater. Some years ago, they had quarrelled in a row over Walter’s integrity. Nancy in private had come to her with gossip, dancing around the truth like a horse on a cattle grid, causing Mabel to explode: I won’t hear it, never mention this again to me or to anyone else for that matter. Not ever. Is that clear? she said, causing Nancy to run off in tears. It was months before they again spoke, much to Walter’s bemusement.

David shambled up to the marble pulpit and began a eulogy to his father, speaking into the microphone. Mabel could not focus on her son’s voice, catching only the odd word bounced from the chapel walls – loyal, father, husband, wit, charm – a panic was taking root; a nausea deep in her stomach, spreading to arms that felt overly sensitive, her blood running sharp.

Years ago, David brought home his first girlfriend Polly, a seventeen-year old he’d met at university. Mabel made spaghetti Bolognese. Walter, emboldened by wine and the spirit of this girl, exuded an energy that for too long lay dormant, recognising his zest from when they were courting. He plonked himself on the dining chair beside Polly and for an interminable age they drank together, she laughing too loud at his terrible jokes as David sat in mortified silence. By the time Mabel finished the dishes, Walter and Polly were on the settee, his boasts growing more outlandish with each glass of wine.

Mabel called a taxi and whispered to David that it was about time Polly went home.

Walter woke with a hangover and failed to surface until midday. Mabel made him tea and brought him breakfast in bed. All day she tried to find words to broach the episode, deciding she couldn’t, that she was being silly and wasn’t worth the bother.

Father Kane finished an Our Father and bent down on one knee, using the marble altar to support his weight.  Then he rose again, the Eucharist aloft in quivering fingers. Mabel mouthed her response to the priest’s familiar blessing but she was thinking of a telephone conversation overhead on the extension – Father Kane drank from the chalice and wiped the rim with a white cloth – a hotel receipt inside a pocket – and emptied bread crumbs from a golden plate into the wine – an invented conference.

The church organ startled her. In the corner a stone Mary strangled an apple-eating snake with her foot.

Sunlight flooded the chapel, kindling falling dust: the white of the orchids; the gold-plated tabernacle. The congregation filed out of their seats row by row to “eat the body and drink the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Incense burned in a censer swung by an altar boy, sending plumes of velvet smog into the chapel. A wet, wooden, earthy, smell that cloyed and lingered. A silence hung in heavy blue webs among the stone walls of St Kolbe’s. A child coughed.

Left right left right the smoking pendulum.

Father Kane sprinkled holy water on the coffin with long leisurely flicks of the wrist. Then those men that had been closest to Walter bore his coffin aloft on their shoulders, some steadying the weight with their hands, some sobbing gently.

Only now, as the coffin inched the wrong way up the aisle, was Mabel reminded of their wedding day.

*

Clouds chased their cars to the graveyard. It rained as Walter’s cadaver was lowered into the earth. Mabel wept for the first time since his death. He was gone, she knew; he left her long ago.

February 2020