Rather than wooden pews, there were rows of coloured plastic chairs, the stackable kind that always reminded Laura of school assembly. About half the chairs were occupied.
His mother, hunched up in a warm coat, was standing alone near the front row and Laura went over to offer her condolences. She seemed literally to have shrunk since the last time Laura had seen her: Laura was not a tall person but when she put her arms around Jan, Adam’s mother barely came up to her chest. Jan then took a step back to look her up and down.
‘You look well, Laura,’ she informed her daughter-in-law, sounding thoughtful. ‘Really well.’
As ever with Jan, Laura immediately found herself wondering whether she was being paranoid, or if the slight hint of implied criticism she had detected in the other woman’s tone was deliberate. She couldn’t help it. There was just something about Adam’s mother that Laura had always found terrifying. The very first time she’d met her, the first time Adam had taken her home for the weekend, Jan had welcomed her at the front door, given her a stiff hug, held her at arm’s length, inspected with seeming admiration the brand-new Whistles coat Laura had bought for the occasion, and then told Adam brightly that if his girlfriend was planning to come along to church on Sunday morning, they would need to find her a Remembrance Day poppy. If Jan really was fond of her, as Adam had always claimed, Laura dreaded to think what Jan’s manner had been like with those girlfriends of Adam’s she hadn’t approved of. Even now, even here, the instant Laura started talking to Jan she could hear her voice becoming fake and overenthusiastic, feel her face arranging itself into a fixed, ingratiating grimace.
It reminded her of how she had so often felt around Ned. My God, how hard had she tried to get Ned to like her, when she and Adam had first got together? The amount of time she had spent trying to pretend she liked him. Ned, with his perpetual watchful smirk. Ned with those jokes of his, which always served the purpose of reminding someone of their place in the pecking order. Ned, who in every single conversation she had ever had with him, found a way of making it obvious how much more important what he did was than what she did; who, whenever she and he and Adam were talking, managed to slip in some in-joke she would not get, or launch – without explanation or apology – into a discussion of someone she didn’t know. And always afterwards if she brought it up, Adam would spring to his brother’s defence – so after a while she stopped bringing it up.
Something that had driven her wild, in her grief, was the way that people only ever talked about Adam in passing, that the newspapers and the magazine pieces always had Keith （‘What Drove an Artist to Murder?’） or Jackson Crane as the focus, or Ned and the clubs. What about Adam? she always wanted to ask them. What about Adam, her husband, with his little quirks, his little kindnesses? His attentiveness, when someone else was speaking. His ease, in talking to people, in finding a way of connecting with them, whatever the situation. His ability to see the funny side of things. To make her laugh, even when she hadn’t wanted to.
Keep it together, she told herself, her hands tightening in her lap. She sniffed hard, a sharp ache in her throat.
Of all the people he had worked with at Home, of all the members he had spent so much time with, it was only Nikki, Freddie Hunter and Annie Spark who had reached out to her after Adam’s death, done anything to acknowledge her loss. Nikki with a big bunch of lilies and a thoughtful card and a very touching long message this morning to apologize for not being there. Freddie Hunter with a lovely mention in his opening monologue, his first night back on TV several weeks after the incident. Annie with a kind offer to do what she could to keep the press away from Laura, and this funeral.
Freddie and Annie were both here today, sitting on opposite sides of the chapel, near the back. Freddie had nodded at her and smiled as she came in. Annie had given her a little wave.
At no point in the elegy was the precise manner of Adam’s death commented on. That was understandable. Instead, the vicar used vague, generic words like unexpected and tragic and heartbreaking. He might also have said unexplained and incomprehensible. The whole thing had been impossible for anyone to unpick. It had winded Laura, perhaps forever. There were experiences she and Adam had shared that she was now the only person to remember （that night in Rome, that terrible restaurant, the waiter with the dripping nose; that summer morning they had swum in the ocean, off Cape Cod; the first time they had made love）， private jokes to which only she knew the punchline. Now and then she still, after all these months, found herself making a mental note of something to tell Adam, found herself thinking of something she wanted to ask him, then realizing with a sudden jolt of the heart that she couldn’t. A couple of times she had come across a bookmark in a book or something in a drawer that he had been the last person to touch and use and it would feel as though her heart were breaking afresh all over again.