The Wrong Funeral

Colin only stepped into the church to escape the rain. He had ten minutes before his dentist appointment, no umbrella, and a downpour that showed no sign of stopping. The heavy door was open, so he slipped inside, meaning to stand quietly at the back until the worst passed.

He did not notice, at first, that a funeral was in progress. By the time he understood, an usher in a grey suit had already taken his elbow and was guiding him, with gentle insistence, towards a seat near the front. Colin opened his mouth to explain the mistake, but the organ was playing and people were turning, and the thought of a scene was more than he could bear. He sat down. He would leave, he told himself, at the first opportunity.

The opportunity never came. To stand and walk out during the eulogy would have been monstrous, and so Colin stayed, trapped by his own good manners, and listened to a daughter talk about her father.

The dead man's name was Arthur. He had, by every account, done nothing remarkable. He had repaired bicycles from his garden shed and never once sent a bill to a child. He had a habit of learning the names of everyone he met — the woman at the post office, the boy who delivered the papers, the reluctant teenagers who cut through his garden — and of remembering, a year later, to ask after their exams, their mothers, their ailments. He had, his daughter said, a gift for making strangers feel as though they had been expected.

Colin, who could not name three of his own neighbours, felt something tighten behind his ribs that had nothing to do with the rain.

When the service ended, he tried to leave quickly, but the crowd funnelled him towards the door, where a small woman with Arthur's exact eyes was shaking every hand. She took Colin's in both of hers.

"Thank you for coming," she said. "I'm so sorry — I don't think we've met. How did you know Dad?"

Here was his opening. I didn't, he could have said. I came in out of the rain. I'm terribly sorry. Instead, looking into those tired, grateful eyes, Colin heard himself say, "He fixed my bicycle once. Years ago. I never properly thanked him."

It was not, he decided later, entirely a lie. Someone like Arthur surely had fixed a bicycle of his, in the sense that the world was full of quiet kindnesses one never traced back to their source.

"That sounds like him," she said, and her face softened with such relief that Colin understood he had given her something — one more small proof that her father had mattered.

He walked to the dentist through the last of the rain, twenty minutes late, and sat in the waiting room feeling like a fraud and, at the same time, strangely expanded, as though the church had let more air into him.

That evening, for no reason he could fully explain, he knocked on the door of the flat next to his own. A bewildered young man answered.

"Sorry to bother you," Colin said. "I've lived here two years and I've never introduced myself. I'm Colin."

The young man blinked, then smiled. "Dev," he said. "Do you want to come in? The kettle's just boiled."

Colin did not know Arthur. He had wandered into the man's funeral by accident, had lied to his grieving daughter, and had stolen an hour that belonged to real mourners. But as he sat in Dev's kitchen, learning that his neighbour was from Kerala and hated the English winter and played the tabla, Colin thought that Arthur, of all people, would not have minded the theft. He might even have called it a fair exchange: one small inheritance, passed to a stranger who happened to be standing, damp and ashamed, at the back of the church.