Free Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale Page B

small as a white rat’s. ‘I know.’
    ‘You take your dad and Hedley,’ Oliver said as they neared the cars. ‘Lizzy can come with me.’
    ‘Do you know the way?’ Hedley asked him, blowing his nose.
    ‘I do,’ Lizzy said.
    Garfield couldn’t bear to look at her so stepped forward to hold open the passenger door for his father. Antony seemed to have shrunk and Garfield found himself instinctively reaching out in that policeman’s gesture to prevent his father thumping his head on the door opening as he lowered himself in. He walked around, sat in the driver’s seat and waited until Hedley had slipped into the rear.
    ‘Could I have one of these?’ Antony asked, holding up a tin of fruit-flavoured car sweets.
    ‘Sure,’ Garfield croaked. ‘Good idea.’
    They each took one. They were the old-fashioned kind, bathed in tangy icing sugar, and suddenly seemed the most refreshing thing in the world.
    ‘I don’t suppose many people are coming back afterwards,’ Hedley said as they pulled out, ‘but I put out cake and tea things and whisky and sherry in case and boiled a couple of kettles so they won’t take too long to boil again.’
    This was nervous chat but Garfield could think of nothing reassuring to say back so let it hang between them.
    As they followed the hearse down Clarence Street, he saw how Hedley reached out to give their father’s shoulder a little squeeze.
    In keeping with her eco-friendly coffin, Rachel had opted not for cremation, as had become the local norm, but for non-denominational burial. A farmer a few miles towards Land’s End had used diversification grants to set up both a pet crematorium and funeral service and a multi-species burial ground so that humans might be buried alongside their pets. His brochure boasted that they had facilities to cremate any animal up to the size of a carthorse and several horses had already been laid to rest there with space reserved alongside them for their erstwhile riders. There were no headstones in the burial ground. Instead each body or casket of ashes was laid to rest beneath one’s sapling of choice with no more permanent marker than a cardboard label tied to its trunk. The idea was to found a new, organically spreading wood instead of the inert space and straight lines of a traditional cemetery. Because so few mourners could bear to settle for a quiet English native as their marker tree however, the result was unlikely ever to seem natural in the Penwith landscape. On their way from the parking area to Rachel’s grave they passed a few beeches and hollytrees but also flame-red acers and ironwoods, magnolias and sad, short monkey puzzles.
    As Rachel’s neighbour was to be an Irish Water Spaniel’s swamp cypress, likely to spread with time, they had opted for something deciduous and columnar, a fastigiate English oak. It stood to one side of the waiting pit in the plastic pot which still bore the price tag and care label from the nursery that had raised it. Its long leaves had turned brown but showed no signs of falling yet. Apparently they would hold on, like a beech’s, until the spring and only drop as their replacements came through. Garfield liked this idea and the way they would rustle together in the winter winds. Rachel liked a bit of noise.
    Copying something he and Oliver had experienced at some friend’s funeral, Hedley handed out large springs of rosemary or lavender from a basket as everyone arrived. The undertakers lowered the coffin into its hole then stood back as, following Antony’s lead, they tossed their fragrant sprigs in on top of it. It was less brutal than throwing handfuls of earth, Oliver had explained, made nobody muddy and left a nicely evocative scent on the hands for hours afterwards. It still felt as if they were starting the burial process though. And they were scarcely spared because they then had to stand about while a woman on a small mechanical digger pushed a mound of earth back over coffin and herbs