Last Respects by Catherine Aird Page A

understood the tears too—there was a marvellous release to be had in tears. And Collerton graveyard was certainly quiet enough—it was a fine and private place for tears, in fact.
    True, Horace Boller from Edsway had rowed past on his way upstream but he hadn’t disturbed her thoughts at all. Perhaps this was because those thoughts were still too inchoate and unformed to admit intrusion from an outside source. Perhaps it was only because—more mundanely—she hadn’t liked to lift a tear-stained face for it to be seen by the man who had been going by.
    She felt much better in the open air: she was sure about that. Collerton House had begun to oppress her since Celia Mundill had died—it wasn’t the same without her warm presence, ill as she had been. It wasn’t the same either—subconsciously she stiffened her shoulders—since Peter Hinton had so precipitately taken his departure. There was no use balking at the fact—no matter how hard she tried to think of other things in the end her thoughts always came back to Peter Hinton.
    She had felt at the time and she still felt now that a note left on the table in the hall was no way for a real man to break with his affianced. If he had felt the way he said he did, then the very least he could have done was to have told her so—face to face. A note left behind on the hall table beside the signet ring she had given him was the coward’s way.
    For the thousandth time she took the folded paper which Peter Hinton had written out of her pocket and—for the thousandth time—considered it. Its message was loud and clear. It could scarcely have been shorter or balder either.
    â€˜It’s no go. Forgive me. P.’
    There was not a word of explanation as to why a man who had quite unequivocally declared that he wanted to marry her should suddenly leave a note like that. Time and time again she had turned it over to see if there had been more—anything—written on the back but there wasn’t.
    There still wasn’t.
    She had resolved not to keep on and on reading the note—and forgotten how many times she had made the resolution. She’d broken it every day. She didn’t know why she needed to look at it anyway. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know what it said. Sadly she folded it up again and put it away.
    She sat back on her heels then, more at peace with herself than she’d been all day. There was something very peaceful about the churchyard—you could begin to see what it was about a churchyard that had moved Thomas Gray to write his elegy and why her aunt hadn’t wanted to be cremated. There was something very soothing, too, about the sound of the water lapping away at the edge of the churchyard grass. Gray hadn’t had that at—where was it? Stoke Poges.
    Elizabeth reached over and picked out the flowers that she had brought with her on her last visit. They were fading now. That gave her something to do with her hands and that was soothing too. As she carefully started to arrange the roses in a vase she began to understand why it was that her aunt’s husband had been so insistent about his wife’s grave being within the sound of the water.
    â€˜She’d spent all her life by the river,’ he’d said, immediately selecting the plot that was closest to the river’s edge.
    The sexton had murmured something about flooding.
    â€˜But she loved the sound of the river,’ Frank Mundill had insisted.
    The sexton had hitched his shoulder. ‘You won’t like it in winter, Mr Mundill.’
    Architects spend at least half their working lives persuading recalcitrant builders to do what architect and client want and Frank Mundill had had to prove his skill in this field in the five minutes that followed.
    â€˜It couldn’t be too near the river for her,’ he had said.
    â€˜The first time the Calle comes up,’ sniffed the sexton