‘I’ve discovered something,’ Timmy announced over Sunday lunch.

‘What?’ asked Stephanie, with minimal interest.

‘Tomato soup tastes nothing like tomatoes. It’s not even the right colour.’

The whole family paused and looked at him. Thea had made two cans of soup stretch between four people as a first course before the roast chicken. First courses were unusual, but the chicken wasn’t very big. Besides, it was half-term, which they all thought called for something a bit special.

‘I tried making it with real tomatoes once,’ she said. ‘And it was revolting.’

‘They add a lot of sugar,’ said Stephanie in a helpful big-sisterly tone. ‘And other stuff, I suppose.’

Drew was sipping soup thoughtfully. ‘Makes you think of Andy Warhol,’ he said. ‘And Coca Cola. Icons. Secret ingredients. You could do a PhD on it.’

‘It’s like the emperor’s new clothes,’ Timmy went on. ‘Everybody pretending it’s actually something it’s not.’

‘But it really is made of tomatoes,’ Stephanie pointed out. ‘Like ninety-five per cent of it is, or something like that. It must be to do with the processing.’

‘Hurry up and finish,’ said Thea. ‘The next course is ready.’

‘What’s a PhD?’ asked Timmy.

‘The phone’s quiet,’ noticed Thea, an hour or two later.

‘It’s Sunday,’ Drew reminded her.

‘I know, but it’s been quiet for a week now.’

Stephanie gave her a look. ‘More than that,’ she said. ‘There’s only one funeral this week – and only one last week, too.’

‘Oh.’ Thea cast her mind back, wondering how long it had been since she took a proper interest in her husband’s schedule. ‘It’s one of those phases, is it? You can do some catching up, then.’ You could even go and see your mother, she added silently. Drew’s mother had turned out to be a very mixed blessing since she had reentered their lives the previous year. Encounters with her were dutiful and strained, the lengthy estrangement too deep and damaging to overcome in any meaningful way. Drew had driven up to her distant northern home once, and never again. Talk of her moving to the Cotswolds to be near them had withered away as unfeasible.

‘It’s a bit more than that,’ said Drew with a sigh. ‘Those new people in Cirencester are turning into real competition. They make me feel very stale by comparison.’

‘Um …?’ said Thea, slightly alarmed. She had evidently missed something.

‘That new undertaker business, all run by women. Bespoke funerals, low prices, flexible in every way. Fresh, young, ground-breaking. Overturning all the old practices. You know what I mean.’

‘Oh. I thought you were all those things.’

‘I might have been ten years ago. The world appears to have changed quite a lot without me properly noticing.’

‘Maggs would have made sure that didn’t happen,’ Thea acknowledged in all humility. Drew’s original assistant had handled a substantial portion of the work, subtly educating Drew in countless ways and nudging him in the right direction when it came to public tastes and expectations. Nobody – certainly not Thea – had filled her shoes, and the initial novelty value he had enjoyed in the Cotswolds was rapidly fading away. Alternative burials were almost mainstream now, and providers were proliferating.

‘I know,’ sighed Drew.

Implications were legion. And familiar. Thea had put up a very poor showing as the undertaker’s wife, distancing herself from the details of the work with little or no apology. Not – as many people probably supposed – because she had any difficulties with death, but more because she lacked the subtle sensitivities that her husband seemed to have been born with. The complicated realities of bereavement baffled her at times. She wholeheartedly endorsed the simple burials that were Drew’s stock-in-trade: the absence of any religious ritual; the close involvement of the families in decorating the coffin and speaking over it before it was interred – it was all completely right, in her view. But there were more layers to it than that. The enormity of death had to be handled in small bites, seasoned with humour and tears, and sometimes openly defied. Whilst deploring the often-used passage written by Henry Scott Holland and subsequently turned into a poem, Thea accepted that it reflected what people wanted to believe at the moment of losing a loved one. ‘Death is nothing at all. It does not count,’ it said. ‘I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened.’ ‘Nonsense!’ Thea had wanted to shout, the first time she heard it at the age of thirty-two. Her feelings had only grown stronger since then.

When her first husband had died, a friend had rashly suggested the reading, causing a painful meltdown on Thea’s part, which evolved into a dark period of anguish and confusion. Grief had been subsumed under the heading of rage for a while, morphing into a grim phase of self-harming, as the jargon characterised it. She had pulled herself out of it with the help of her spaniel and a whole new way of life working as a house-sitter. There had been a new relationship which she had come to see as ‘transitional’, before meeting dear Drew Slocombe. Even then, it had been a long time before she’d found the courage to disclose all the details of her recent past to Drew. Her main worry was that he would overreact and offer an excessive level of retrospective sympathy. In the event, he had pitched it perfectly and firmly packed it away as long dealt with and finished. ‘A normal part of the grieving process,’ he said.

She knew she would never be able to match his expertise when it came to managing the minefield of bereavement, and she was going to have to tread carefully when considering Drew’s current predicament. ‘So what are we going to do about it?’ she said.

‘Good question. I’m wondering whether I should get Maggs down here and see if she has any ideas.’

‘She might not want to, you know. She’s got plenty of other things to think about these days.’ Maggs was married, with two small children, not much money and some worrying health issues.

‘I could go there, maybe?’

Thea grimaced. Going there entailed revisiting the area where Drew had lived with his first wife and run a thriving alternative burial service. His children had been born there and his wife was buried close by. Maggs and Den Cooper lived in a neighbouring village, but had moved out of the funeral business. Den worked as a security officer at Bristol airport, and Maggs had become a full-time mother. Her second daughter, Imogen, was only five months old. Two months earlier, Maggs had suddenly become breathless and light-headed. An embolism was discovered on a lung, and everything had plunged into panic and uncertainty. The echoes of Karen Slocombe’s experience were impossible to ignore.

‘You know her best,’ said Thea, ‘but I’m not sure the timing is terribly good.’

‘I’ll phone her and see how things are, then.’

‘The obvious answer is for me to earn some proper money,’ said Thea, returning to a perennial topic that was never entirely resolved. Thea had sold a house in Witney when she married Drew, which gave them a large amount of savings which easily tided them over the quiet spells. Bearing this in mind, she felt she might be excused the annoyance of having to find a job, and Drew had agreed with her. However, there was a new tone to this latest analysis of their finances, which threatened to give rise to a new line of thought. If Drew’s business failed, everything would be thrown up in the air. ‘I should sit down and write a CV.’

‘We’re not very employable, either of us,’ he pointed out. ‘I can’t just let everything fall apart – not with Andrew and Fiona relying on me, and after we’ve made all the alterations to the house and got the hearse …’ He ground to a halt, looking miserable. ‘I just have to pull myself together and keep up with the times. I thought I knew what people wanted, but I can see I’ve been lazy. Maybe I need to invest in another burial field if I can find one, with a different sort of ambience that might appeal to a whole new group of people.’

The conversation rambled on for a few more minutes, with Thea finding less and less to offer by way of helpful suggestions. The spectre of Maggs Cooper hovered at the back of her mind; Maggs who knew how to handle the bereaved and understood what was wanted from a genuine funeral. She had been Drew’s assistant for years, seeing him through the loss of his wife and effectively carrying the business for a while. It would look as if Thea had failed him if Maggs...