Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [4]
Charis was looking too, in a less obtrusive way; but if any of these men was Billy, Tony wouldn’t have been able to tell, because she’d never met Billy. He’d arrived, then vanished, during the interval when she hadn’t been in touch with Charis. True, Charis had shown her a photo, but the focus was bad and the top of Billy’s head was cut off, and he’d had a beard then. Men’s faces changed more than women’s did, over time. Or they could change them more, at will. Add facial hair and subtract it.
There was no one at all that Tony knew; except Roz and Charis, of course. They wouldn’t have missed it for anything, said Roz. They wanted to see the end of Zenia, make sure she was now fully (Tony’s word) inoperational. Charis’s word was peaceful. Roz’s was kaput.
The service was unsettling. It seemed a patched-up affair, held at a funeral parlour chapel of a lumpy, magenta clumsiness that would have filled Zenia with scorn. There were several bunches of flowers, white chrysanthemums. Tony wondered who could have sent them. She hadn’t sent any flowers herself.
A blue-suited man who identified himself as Zenia’s lawyer – the same man, therefore, who had called Tony to tell her about the service – read out a short tribute to Zenia’s good qualities, among which courage was listed foremost, though Tony didn’t think the manner of Zenia’s death had been particularly courageous. Zenia had been blown up during some terrorist rampage or other, in Lebanon; she hadn’t been a target, she’d just been in the way. An innocent bystander, said the lawyer. Tony was sceptical about both words: innocent was never Zenia’s favourite adjective for herself, and bystanding was not her typical activity. But the lawyer did not say what she’d really been doing there, on that unnamed street in Beirut. Instead he said she would be long remembered.
“Damn right she will be,” Roz whispered to Tony. “And by courage he meant big tits.” Tony felt this was tasteless, as the size of Zenia’s tits was surely no longer an issue. In her opinion Roz sometimes went too far.
Zenia herself was present only in spirit, said the lawyer, and also in the form of her ashes, which they would now proceed to the Mount Pleasant Cemetery to inter. He actually said inter. It had been Zenia’s wish, as stated in her will, that the ashes should be interred under a tree.
Interred was very unlike Zenia. So was the tree. In fact, it seemed unlike Zenia to have made a will, or to have had a lawyer at all. But you never knew, people changed. Why, for instance, had Zenia put the three of them on the list of people to be informed in the event of her death? Was it remorse? Or was it some kind of last laugh? If so, Tony failed to get the point.
The lawyer had been no help: all he had was the list of names, or so he’d claimed. Tony could hardly expect him to explain Zenia to her. If anything it should be the other way around. “Weren’t you her friend?” he’d said, accusingly.
“Yes,” said Tony. “But that was so long ago.”
“Zenia had an excellent memory,” said the lawyer, and sighed. Tony had heard sighs like that before.
It was Roz who insisted they go on to the cemetery after the service. She drove them in her car, her large one. “I want to see where they’re putting her, so I can walk the dogs there,” she said. “I’ll train them to widdle on the tree.”
“It’s not the tree’s fault,” said Charis indignantly. “You’re being uncharitable.”
Roz laughed. “Right, sweetie! I’m doing it for you!”
“Roz, you don’t have any dogs,” said Tony. “I wonder what kind of a tree it is.”
“I’ll get some, just for this,” said Roz.
“Mulberry,” said Charis. “It was in the vestibule, with a label on.”
“I don’t see how it can possibly grow,” said Tony. “It’s too cold.”
“It’ll grow,” said Charis, “as long as the buds aren’t out yet.”
“I hope it gets blight,” said Roz. “No, really! She doesn’t deserve a tree.