It was all over. Ida squeezed out with difficulty
a last tear into a handkerchief scented with Californian
Poppy. She liked a funeral—but it was with horror-
as other people like a ghost story. Death shocked her,
life was so important. She wasn't religious. She didn't
believe in heaven or hell- only in ghosts, Ouija boards,
tables that rapped and little inept voices speaking
plaintively of flowers. Let Papists treat death with
flippancy: life wasn't so important perhaps to them as
what came after. But to her death was the end of
everything.
She believed in ghosts, but you couldn't call that thin,
transparent existence life eternal: the squeak of a
board, a piece of ectoplasm in a glass cupboard at the
psychical research headquarters, a voice
she'd heard once at a séance saying ''Everything is very beautiful
on the upper plane. There are flowers everywhere.”
Flowers, Ida though scornfully- that wasn't life.
What was the sense of dying if it made you “babble of flowers?
She took life with a deadly seriousness: she was prepared to cause
any amount of unhappiness to anyone in order to defend the only thing she believed in.
To lose your lover—“broken hearts,” she would say, “always
mend” to be maimed or blinded—''lucky” she'd tell
you “to be alive at all.” There was something dan-
gerous and remorseless in her optimism...
She came out of the crematorium-And there from
the twin towers above her head fumed the very last
of Fred... a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens.
People passing up the flowery suburban road looked
-tip and noted the smoke; it had been a busy day at the furnaces.
Fred dropped in indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms:
he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.
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