Free Under the Harrow: by Flynn Berry Page A

ice and firewood. All the grocer’s shops in Cornwall sold ice and firewood.
    The bottles of tonic knocked against my knees. Below the cliff, a fishing boat motored through a cloud of seagulls. It looked talismanic, with the birds whirling around it, but, then, so did a lot of things here, like the pointed white caps on the dock pilings, and the anchor ropes disappearing under water.
    We ate dinner together every night in Cornwall and had an endless number of things to say. She was my favorite person to talk with, because what caught her attention caught mine too. Rachel cooked and I did the shopping, which I didn’t mind. I liked seeing all the boats straining in the same direction in the harbor and the traps stacked on the quay.
    I was starving. We both were, all the time. “Sea air,” said Rachel. I went to the grocer’s nearly every day to replenish our stocks. I wanted salt and vinegar crisps, which tasted like seawater, and Rachel wanted pots of toffee. “What has toffee got to do with the ocean?” I asked, and she said, “It’s delicious.”
    I carried the groceries down the path. The beach roses were pink and the Kilburn high street was hundreds of miles away. Later, after I unpacked the groceries, the sun sank through bars of gray cloud, lighting a red path on the water. “The sun road,” said Rachel.

18
    O N MY WAY BACK from her house, the priest stops me and introduces himself. He is only in his thirties and reminds me of the boys I went to school with at St. Andrews. Who knows how he ended up here. He should be banking.
    He asks about arrangements for the funeral. “They won’t let me bury her,” I say. We stand by the rill, a thin, decorative stream that runs down Boar Lane between the houses and the road. He tells me we can still hold a funeral and offers to perform the service.
    “She wasn’t religious. She thought all religions are cults and some, like yours, are just better at distracting people from the fact that they’re cults.”
    “I can lead a secular service,” he says. His willingness to please unnerves me. It isn’t what I expect from a priest. “Has it come to that, then?” I ask, and he toes a pebble into the rill. We both watch it sink. He says, “I want to help, and I think a funeral is necessary. To honor her. We have room for one hundred people. Do you want to come inside and see?”
    Dust, wood, winter sunlight, black-mullioned windows, the smell of candles like the wax my flatmate in Edinburgh melted down to make encaustic for paintings. An Anglican church. We never had to go when we were children, so it only reminds me of weddings, and Anne Boleyn.
    “This would be fine,” I say.
     • • • 
    As we sit in the front pew of the empty church, planning the service, he says, “I did know her.”
    “Did you?”
    “She sometimes dropped Fenno with me.”
    I realize he must not have much to do, that he must be lonely. I picture him chattering to Fenno while they walk and think my heart will break.
    We place phone calls. Before calling Helen, I go into the garden and pace along the church wall. Rachel was her best friend and her daughter’s godmother.
    Helen has always made me nervous. She moved from Melbourne to Oxford when her daughter, Daisy, was an infant, and raised her on her own while training and then working as a nurse. The thought of Helen maintaining a household, heating infant formula after a shift, dropping her daughter at nursery and picking her up, always made me feel useless. I don’t think I would be able to manage either one, let alone both, and Helen seems to agree.
    When she answers, her voice sounds stiff. We discuss the police inquiry, and she agrees to do the eulogy. After a pause, I say, “How did Rachel seem last week?”
    “Fine, a little withdrawn. She said work was trying.”
    “Why was she staying with you?”
    “Her boiler was broken,” she says. “She had no heat.”
    Rachel lied to her. I would have noticed if the house were