PART 1 — THE LINING
Not burgundy. Not a dark wine colour. Red.
Every other man in that chapel was in black or charcoal, and my brother came up the side aisle past our father’s coffin looking like he was going to a party.
I got him at the door with the jacket over his arm, before he put it on.
“What are you doing?”
“Not now, Daisy.”
“Give me that, put my coat on. Dad would have hated this. Don’t do it in front of everyone.”
About forty people were already sitting down and at least eleven of them were watching us.
And Dermot said, quietly, “No, he wouldn’t.”
Then he put the jacket on and went and sat in the front row in it.
Our father was Alasdair Cordell and he was seventy-nine and he had worn grey to everything for fifty years.
After the service we went up to the cemetery, and Hollis Bray came over. He has done this family’s legal work since 1996 and he is seventy-two and he had been crying, properly, at the back of the chapel.
He saw Dermot and he stopped walking.
His eyes went down to that jacket and stayed there.
“Where did you get that suit?”
“It was in Dad’s cupboard.”
That is not a thing that is true. I cleared out most of my father’s clothes myself in the March, and there was no red suit in that house.
“Which cupboard?”
“The one downstairs.”
There is no cupboard in my father’s study. There is a wall of bookshelves.
Dermot had been in there in the April looking for Dad’s service papers, and he had found a narrow door behind the end section of the shelving, and inside it were three suits in garment bags.
Two black. One red.
And a note pinned to the red one with Dermot’s name on it, in our father’s handwriting.
Hollis Bray went the colour of the gravel.
“Did you check the pockets?”
Dermot said no.
And that man took us both about thirty feet away from everybody else, behind the yew, and said, “Take the jacket off.”
Dermot took it off and Hollis went through the inside pockets and found nothing.
Then he ran his fingers down the lining at the chest, and stopped, and pressed.
Something crackled under the fabric.
He turned that jacket inside out. There was a section of lining about six inches long that had been sewn by hand, badly, with a different thread.
“Your father told me I’d know when it was time,” he said.
He got a little pair of scissors out of his briefcase and cut it open.
Inside was a folded letter and an envelope stiff with documents.
He put both into my brother’s hands.
“He spent the last year of his life on this. He made me promise it only reached you if you found the red one and chose to put it on.”
And then he quoted our father, and I have not stopped hearing it since.
“He said: if Dermot wears the red one, he’s understood, and he’s ready. If he wears black like everybody else, he hasn’t, and it waits another generation.”
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