I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Twelve

The taxi had gone before Niamh realized that it had dropped them in the wrong street. They were in the Rue des Rondeaux instead of the Boulevard de Ménilmontant, which sounded very different to her. But perhaps the confusion had been with the name of the pompes funèbres. The Rue des Rondeaux was full of funeral parlours, but not the one they were looking for. All the streets around Père Lachaise, possibly the most famous cemetery in Paris, were full of shops offering funeral services. A map at the Porte Gambetta revealed that the Boulevard de Ménilmontant ran along the bottom end of the cemetery. The most direct route to it was through the cemetery itself.

This was where the rich, and the famous, came to rest their bones for eternity. Writers, musicians, singers, poets. Even the transient and relatively insignificant American pop star Jim Morrison of The Doors had found unexpected celebrity by being buried here.

Père Lachaise seemed shrouded in a silence incongruous in the heart of the city. Visitors walked its cobbled streets in hushed reverence, passing among the tombs and mausoleums as leaves fell prematurely from trees which had not yet surrendered their greenery to the colours of autumn. But it had been a long, hot summer, and the foliage was burned and bone-dry.

Niamh and Donald stopped briefly to look at a guide to the locations of all the famous names residing here in this city of the dead. Balzac and Maria Callas. Chopin and Edith Piaf. Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde. A roll-call of names celebrated across centuries of Western European culture. Ruairidh would not be joining them. He was just passing through.

From the main thoroughfare transecting the cemetery from east to west, they had a spectacular view out across the west side of Paris, towards the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. A view to die for.

Niamh and Donald had not spoken much since his arrival at the hotel. He had waited for her downstairs, booking their flights back to the island on his phone, while she showered and changed. And then in the taxi neither of them had felt inclined to talk. Her phone call to him in the middle of the night two days before had been traumatic enough. And Donald was typical of the post-war Scottish male. He would never show his emotions. Whatever he felt would be held inside him like a clenched fist, and prised free only with acute embarrassment.

Now he said, ‘How are you holding up?’

She shrugged. ‘As you see.’

He nodded. ‘Mum and Dad are pretty devastated.’ She turned to look at him. There was an odd anger, somehow, behind his words. Then he said, ‘I’m so sorry, Niamh, that you’re having to go through all this. It doesn’t seem fair.’

‘Nothing fair about death,’ she said. ‘Not much fair in life, either. We live it in the certainty that it will end. Just not how or where.’ She paused. ‘Ruairidh certainly never expected it to be here. Or now.’

They walked down the hill in silence for several minutes, before he said, ‘I keep thinking about that poor girl in the car with him.’

Niamh turned, surprised. ‘Really? Maybe it’s bad of me. I haven’t given her a single thought.’

Donald said, ‘Do you really think he was having an affair with her?’

‘I don’t know what to think, Donald. I wouldn’t have believed it of him. But the evidence is pretty damning. I’m just wondering if I’m ever going to be able to forgive him.’

He nodded gravely. ‘I can understand that.’ They were almost at the big stone-pillared gates when he said, ‘For what it’s worth, I don’t believe it for a minute.’

As they passed from the place of the dead, back to the city of the living, Niamh glanced up at the inscription engraved on the stone pillar. She read it aloud, as she thought it pronounced. ‘Spes illorum immortalitate plena est.’ And turned to Donald. ‘You studied Latin, didn’t you? What does it mean?’

‘Their hope is full of immortality,’ he said.

And Niamh thought how all her hopes had died along with Ruairidh. Immortality was an illusion.

Lacroux Frères, Marbriers Funéraires, stood opposite the walls of the cemetery, in the Boulevard de Ménilmontant. A classical stone façade with a modern glass frontage. Green neon lettering above the door read Assistance Décès, which Donald translated for Niamh as Help with Death.

‘It’s not death I need help with, it’s life,’ she said.

The funeral director was a small, wizened man whose bald pate was fringed with dyed black hair. His black moustache might well have been dyed, too. He wore a dark suit and an air of indifference. Death was his business. The currency of his daily life. And Niamh supposed you would have to build some kind of wall between the two, if only to protect yourself.

He examined her paperwork closely and nodded. ‘Mmmm, yes,’ he said in English. ‘You have been expected.’ He led them through a showroom of headstones and wreaths, of plastic flowers and urns, to an office in the back. He had yet more paperwork. This time for her to sign. She barely paused to glance at it all before committing her signature and date to the foot of the final page. Whatever it meant was of no consequence to her.

An assistant came in with a small box of polished wood and set it on the director’s desk. It was about two feet long, twelve inches wide, and perhaps twelve deep. Niamh looked at it, perplexed, then at the funereal face of the director. He said, ‘In cases like yours, we usually use this kind of box. It is favoured by parents who wish to bury a stillborn child. What remained of your husband after the explosion has been vacuum-packed in heat-sealed plastic pouches. The box itself is sealed and leakproof.’ He lifted it to place inside a brown cardboard box, which his assistant closed and bound with plastic shipping straps.

Niamh’s mouth was dry, unable to form words, even had she been able to compose them. She stared at the box on the table in front of her. This was the reality. All that was left of Ruairidh after the explosion. She’d had no idea what to expect, but it had not been this.

The funeral director slipped the paperwork into a clear plastic pouch which he taped to the outside of the box. ‘Everything you will need for customs and airline security,’ he said. His tone was flat, his face expressionless. And Niamh wanted to shout at him. To scream at him, ‘This is my husband we’re talking about! My Ruairidh. A living, loving sentient human being.’ But all that would come were the tears that filled her eyes, and she wondered when they would ever stop.

She felt Donald take her hand and give it the gentlest squeeze.

The box sat between them in the back seat of the taxi, like the ghost of her dead husband. The remains of the biggest part of her life lay inside it, all that there was to take home with her to put in the ground. Donald stared silently from the window, and it was impossible to know what he was thinking, or feeling. Niamh turned her head to gaze sightlessly out of the other side of the car as the city spooled past in a grey blur.

All she wanted to do was curl up and die.