Read Out on a Limb for Free Online

hissed right on back at her. Why is it that, however much you don’t think you ever will, there always seems to comes a time when you start speaking to your parents as if they were your children?
    To be fair, i t’s not that you can’t wear lilac to a funeral if you want to. Some people even make a point of stipulating that they’re sent off by mourners in colourful clothes. It’s just that the ‘lilac’ to which my mother referred – she’d shown me – was a boat-necked affair with a slit up the thigh and an explosion of lace at the way too high hem. The last time she wore it, as far as I can remember, was to her friend Celeste’s seventieth bash. But though the evidence from the photos made it clear it wasn’t remotely out of place on that occasion – there were as many pastel wash-n-wear crystal pleats as there were bottles of Cristal – here she’d just look like she’d mistaken St David’s crematorium for a branch of Castle Bingo.
    ‘Well, I just hope they’ve got air-conditioning in there,’ she muttered crossly. ‘Or, believe you me, I shall be dropping dead as well.’
    In order to make the most of what little breeze there was, I took the wheelchair for another quick turn around the guests. Because of her knee replacement-replacement her right leg shot out in front of her horizontally, like a ladder on a window cleaner’s van. I perhaps should have tied a bit of rag around her ankle, because it preceded her at crotch height and kept jabbing people’s bottoms. She looked a bit like a short prow maiden minus the prow. Which was fitting, at least, because she met Hugo on a boat.
    Oh, I so didn’t want to be at a funeral. I particularly didn’t want to be at this funeral. I knew I had to support my Poor Dear Mother, of course, but already it was beginning to look like there was going to be trouble, because everyone DNA-related to Hugo seemed alien, hostile, from an entirely different clan. And none of them seemed to want to talk to us. Which was odd. His daughter Corinne, who I had now spoken to on the phone and who I also recognised from various photos, was shooting us looks of such naked hostility that even the peonies between us were wincing.
    So it was with a powerful sense of things being not quite right that I picked up the sounds of raised voices in the distance, and noted the vicar, who must have been roasting in his funeral frock too, hurrying across the lawn at the behest of the undertaker, who seemed to be in a very un-undertakerly state of flap.
    Pru, who had been in a state of flap herself all morning because Chloe and the boys (my niece and nephews) had been rollicking around on the garden of remembrance ever since we got here, rushed across now, eyebrows raised.
    ‘What on earth is going on?’ she panted, pointing at the entrance. There was some sort of to-do happening over near the crematorium gates, partly obscured by the planting. Members of the other clan were beginning to peel off towards it. From what we could see the vicar was involved in some sort of minor altercation.
    ‘Wheel me over there,’ my mother commanded, her view of events clearly not commanding enough. But my grip remained steadfast on the chair.
    ‘Good Lord,’ Pru said. ‘Do people really do that?’
    ‘Do what?’
    ‘Take photos at funerals.’
    My mother harrumphed. ‘Nothing would surprise me. He did have some fearfully common friends.’ But then she started in the chair. ‘Good Lord! Pru! Abbie! Look ! Good grief! You know who that is, don’t you?’ We followed her gaze. She’s sharp-eyed, our mother. All those years of scanning dimly lit audiences for scouts. And two seconds ahead of us, for sure. We both saw what she saw simultaneously.
    ‘God!’ said Pru (though he probably wasn’t listening). ‘That’s Lucy Whittall! What on earth can Lucy Whittall be doing here?’
    None of us knew, of course, but Lucy Whittall’s being here did explain the hoo-hah in the entrance. Lucy Whittall