Alys, Always Read Online Free PDF Page B

thick rustling layers of tissue paper, purple and sober dove-grey.
    ‘They won’t miss them,’ she says. ‘Take them, for heaven’s sake. Alys would have hated those flowers to just sit there in a dark room, not being looked at. Honestly, it’s fine, no one minds. Take them.’
    I walk back through the slippery streets holding the flowers, the white petals cool and firm when they brush against my cheek; and although my hands are soon numb with cold from the wet stems, I find myself enjoying the conspicuous beauty of my trophy, the glances it attracts and the alternative life it seems to suggest.
    In the flat, I remove the tissue paper and cellophane and discover the little note tucked inside, which I realise is from the controller of Radio 4 and her husband (‘To Laurence, Teddy and Pol. All our sympathy and best love’), and then I trim the stems and put the arrangement in my bedroom, so I can drift in and out of the scent as I sleep.
    A week or so later, as the petals begin to tumble off in milky clusters, I find an envelope waiting in my pigeonhole when I get home from work. A stiff white card inside, the scratch of a fountain pen, the pulse of blue-black ink. It’s from Polly, inviting me to the memorial service in a month’s time. ‘We would be so glad to see you if you felt like coming,’ she writes. Beneath her name, three quick automatic kisses: ‘XXX’. I put the note on the mantelpiece and, when I mention it to Hester, I say I haven’t decided whether to go or not. Of course, this isn’t strictly true.
    I sit at the back of the church, which is spectacularly full. It’s an expensive crowd: plenty of familiar faces behind the out-size shades. I see Mary Pym several pews in front, leaning over to greet a playwright; one entire row is occupied by senior representatives from McCaskill, Laurence Kyte’s publisher. As well as some distinguished actors and academics and a few cabinet ministers, there’s a healthy showing from his old Soho cohort, the poets and raffish literary hacks he ran with after Oxford (he still plays tennis with MalcolmAzaria and Nikolai Titov at weekends, according to the cuts I’ve been browsing online).
    Kate Wiggins, in a tidy jacket and shiny heels, comes over to say a quiet hello before the service starts. ‘I wondered if you’d be here,’ she says. ‘Polly asked for your details, I hope it was OK to give them to her.’
    Of course, I say. She’s on the point of saying something else – possibly a reference to the little extra that I dropped into the discussion in the Kytes’ kitchen? Most likely she’s forgotten all about it – when there’s a general fluttering as people reach in unison for their orders of service. She murmurs, ‘I’ll see you later,’ and returns to her seat.
    Yes, Laurence and his children are entering the church, coming down the aisle. Edward – Teddy – is erect and inscrutable, wearing a defensive social polish which allows him to smile at people in the congregation, but Polly, drooping in black, reminds me of a bird in the rain. A fragile-looking elderly lady whom I take to be Alys’s mother walks with them, clasping Laurence’s arm. He has lost some weight, I think.
    We stand to sing ‘Eternal Father Strong to Save’. Initially this trawlerman’s hymn strikes me as a strange choice but, as we work through the verses, its vision of the tinpot vulnerability of human existence seems increasingly fitting.
    All around me, people are fumbling in pockets and bags for tissues.
    Teddy, very composed, reads a poem by Christina Rossetti. A middle-aged woman – an old schoolfriend? A neighbour from Biddenbrooke? – rushes through a passage from one of Vita Sackville-West’s gardening columns and then sits down, blowing her nose. A tenor sings a song by Peter Warlock.
    Then Malcolm Azaria, bearish and grizzled in a black moleskin suit going grey at the knees, delivers the eulogy.
    He speaks with tremendous warmth and affection, but without