Second Chance by Sian James

for everything, don’t worry.’
    â€˜I won’t worry at all about the food. Or the bills.’
    â€˜Or the serving. Lorna and Ceri, my two daughters-in-law, will help with that.’
    â€˜Excellent.’
    â€˜I suppose some of your relatives from Gorsgoch will be there and poor old George Williams as well.’
    â€˜I suppose so.’
    â€˜Because he was very friendly, you know, with your mother in these latter years.’
    â€˜Oh yes. I’ll be very pleased to meet poor George Williams.’
    â€˜You know about him then?’
    â€˜Oh yes.’
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    At last she goes, leaving me with only the order of the service and the hymns to worry about. And what to do with the house and all my mother’s clothes. And the fine cat, Arthur, who’s at the door demanding to go out. And poor old George Williams, whoever he is.
    And where is Paul Farringdon, now that I need him?
    Is he ever around when I particularly need him? No, it’s his ex-wife, the irresistible Francesca and his beautiful wild daughters who have first claim on his time and attention. Always.
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    When I’m fairly composed again, I walk down to the village to speak to the Reverend Lewis Owen, my mother’s minister, who lives in the manse next door to the redbrick chapel. I’m in no hurry, so for a while I stand on the road opposite the little chapel and examine it. It seems to me beautiful; two nicely proportioned arched windows and an arched door on the ground floor, with exquisitely elaborate brickwork around them and under the steeply pitched roof. The men who built it may not have had many resources, but they certainly made the most of different coloured bricks, cream, yellow and rose-red. I don’t think I’d ever looked at it before.
    Slowly and reluctantly I cross the road to the manse and raise the knocker on the door, but it’s opened before I let it fall. The man at the door is in pullover and jeans and looks like a young student, but before I can ask for his father, he shoots out his hand and tells me he is Lewis Owen, minister of Horeb, and that he’s very sorry to hear of my mother’s death. ‘Come in,’ he says, ‘and you can tell me what to say about her. I know you, of course, from the television, but I didn’t know your mother very well. I’m new here, you see.’
    I’m shocked by his youth. Does this boy preach sermons about the love and the wrath of God? Does he expect people to listen to him? Doesn’t he realise that he should wear a black suit and white dog collar to lend him some dignity? If he was on stage he’d be properly dressed and warned not to run his fingers through his red hair too.
    â€˜Please sit down,’ he says, moving copies of the New Statesman and Private Eye from the largest and most comfortable chair. ‘I’ll get you a cup of tea and then we’ll have a chat.’
    A chat? When I was a child, the minister of Horeb, the Reverend William Pierce, wouldn’t have known how to chat. He intoned in a solemn, mellifluous voice, no one else expected to say anything.
    Lewis Owen, latterday saint, came back with some tea things on a tray.
    â€˜How old was your mother?’ he asked as he poured out a cup of very dark tea and handed it to me. I looked at him coldly. Surely he should have referred to her as ‘your dear mother’. After all, she’d only been dead two days.
    â€˜Sixty-five,’ I said.
    At this point, he should have tutted and said, ‘Sixty-five! That’s no age, is it.’ But all he did was look out of the window trying to suppress a yawn.
    â€˜A stroke,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, I heard that from Lorna yesterday. She warned me that you were expected. I hope you didn’t have to leave London in the middle of some television play?’
    â€˜I’m here to talk about my mother.’
    â€˜Of course.’
    â€˜Miriam Rivers.’ I stopped as