With Connie gone she’ll have a bit more time to herself. That’s horribly disloyal to think but it’s true. People were always going on about how remarkable it was that both Connie and Rose managed to look after themselves at their ages. ‘Tough old biddies!’ they’d say admiringly. It’s true that Connie and Rose were remarkable for their ages, and Margie was so proud of them: their minds were as sharp as tacks! But a fair amount of ‘behind the scenes’ work had gone into ensuring they thought that they’d been managing just as well as they had ten years ago. Not that she begrudged the extra washing or ironing or cleaning or shopping.

‘Don’t do so much for them,’ her sister Laura was always saying, ‘then they might realise they need to go into a retirement home.’

‘They’ll go into a retirement home over my dead body,’ Margie had retorted.

‘It probably will be your dead body,’ Laura had told her very unsympathetically, before she jetted off to Europe, leaving her daughter with a brand-new baby! (Fancy deliberately choosing to take yourself to the other side of the world when your first grandchild was about to be born. Still, ‘each to their own’, as they say.)

Next to her, Ron shifts slightly and sighs. She can smell the contemptuously classy smell of the aftershave he buys at the airport when he travels away on business. His legs next to hers, encased in newly dry-cleaned Armani suit trousers, with sharp straight creases down the centre, are masculine and controlled.

Margie is nothing but soft, oozing, spreading thighs and br**sts and bottom.

I’ll show all of you, thinks Margie with sudden determination. I’ll lose weight. I’ll lose kilo after kilo after kilo and then I’ll emerge from all this flesh, skinny and hard and light and free.

The priest seems to think he is a f**king talk-show host. Ron looks at his watch. He has a meeting in the city at two. Margie promised him the service would go on for no more than an hour, but Margie just says whatever it is she thinks you want to hear, with no particular regard for the facts. If this goes on for much longer, he’ll just get up and walk out.

For some reason his eyes keep returning to that shiny, expensive-looking coffin. He wonders how much it cost and considers leaning over to ask Margie, just to see her panicky mortification. He doesn’t know much about the funeral industry but he suspects the margins are excellent.

So, you carked it, Connie. He feels a flicker of triumph, as if he has won something. He does not bother to analyse this feeling. He is not into naval-gazing.

Ding dong, the witch is dead.

He did respect the old bird. She never fussed. Generally women waste a lot of time fussing. Fuss, fuss, chat, chat. Never get to the point. Whereas Connie said exactly what she meant. When he’d first met her, over thirty years ago now, she could throw a frisbee like no woman he’d ever seen. A good straight pass that sliced the air. Margie always did these feeble, pathetic tosses, as if her arm was made of plasticine. Back then he thought that was cute. Back then he was thinking with his dick.

Yes, Ron had always respected Connie, even though he suspected the feeling was not mutual. That doesn’t concern him especially. He doesn’t need to be liked. A lot of people don’t like him. It is their problem. Not his.

‘Connie was a woman of strong Christian ideals,’ says the priest.

What a load of crap. Connie was a hard-nosed manipulator who conned the whole bloody country. The island has lost its dictator. Now who will tell them all what to eat for f**king breakfast?

Ron stops listening to the priest and lets his eyes glaze over.

It doesn’t bother him that Connie, or any of the women, have never once asked him for his advice about the business. He just finds it ironic. He is, after all, a Business Consultant. Quite a successful one. Executives with MBAs who are running multi-million-dollar corporations come to him for advice, but not the old women in his own family. It doesn’t seem to have ever occurred to any of them, not even his wife. They ask him to open jar lids and change light globes. They don’t ask him to look at their financial statements. In fact, he has never even seen the financial statements for Scribbly Gum Enterprises, although he has often idly attempted to calculate its net worth. As a shareholder, Margie would have access to the figures, but she has never asked for his help interpreting them. It wouldn’t surprise him if she didn’t even know the difference between a balance sheet and a profit and loss.

They don’t invest much, but then Connie and Rose have always been so careful with their money. It’s a legacy of growing up during the Depression. Ron has an uncle who is incapable of putting more than a speck of butter on his toast.

He would quite like to see the Scribbly Gum figures. He is ready to be impressed by the capabilities of a trio of old women.

He is no misogynist, in spite of what his daughter Veronika might think.

Thank Christ. The priest seems to have finally wrapped up the eulogy and is moving on to the procedural part of the day. Move it along, mate. A fast funeral is a good funeral.

Ron is not completely sure what the word ‘misogynist’ means. He keeps forgetting to look it up in the dictionary because he doesn’t have a dictionary. Proof that he is not a misogynist is that when his son Thomas was growing up, Ron fully expected him to turn out to be g*y and he was fine with this. He would have said, ‘No problem, mate.’ That’s how open-minded he is. He’s almost disappointed that Thomas ended up so bloody conventional. Look at him, sitting there holding hands with his bland sex-less wife. He should have held on to that Sophie. Now she was a sexy little thing.

Someone is opening the double doors at the back of the church. Daylight spills in and people turn, disapproving and interested, to see who is so late.

Speak of the devil. Here she is.

Yes.

Far too sexy for poor old Tom.

22

Grace turns around and sees Callum at the back of the church, holding the door for a girl with a wedge of honey-brown hair falling over one eye. Even from this far away, she can see the girl’s face is aflame with colour.

Veronika, who is next to Grace, holding the baby, makes a disgusted sound and mutters something under her breath, nostrils twitching and eyes darting like a mad person.

It’s that Sophie Honeywell, Grace realises. She recognises her from when she was bridesmaid at Veronika’s wedding. She remembers now feeling charmed by some funny, self-deprecating story Sophie had told her about the stupid things the wedding photographer had made them do between the church and the reception. She’d pulled faces and mimicked the photographer.