The woman in the red coat

Text 1: The Front Pew, by Lorna Strachan

An original novel extract.

The woman arrived after the first hymn, when everyone had sat down again, and so the whole chapel heard the door. It was a heavy oak door with an iron latch, and it opened with a clank and a long complaint of hinges, and fifty heads turned as if pulled by the same string.

She stood in the aisle with the grey light behind her. She was tall and very upright, and she wore a red coat. Not dark red, not wine or burgundy, but the clear bright red of a pillar box, and in that chapel full of black and navy and charcoal it looked like a shout.

Nobody knew her. Lydia could see that at once, from the way the aunts glanced at each other and the uncles looked straight ahead. The minister paused with his page half turned. The woman did not seem to notice any of it. She walked up the aisle, unhurried, her heels loud on the stone, and sat down in the front pew, on the family side, at the very end, next to Lydia.

Up close she smelt of rain and cigarettes and an expensive perfume. Her hands, folded in her lap, were old hands, freckled and knuckly, but the nails were painted the same red as the coat. She did not look at Lydia. She looked at the coffin, steadily, with an expression Lydia could not read: not grief exactly, not quite anger, something tighter and older than either.

The second hymn began. The woman did not sing. Halfway through the second verse, she reached out without turning her head and laid one finger on the brass plate on the coffin, where Grandad’s name was, and traced the letters of his surname very slowly, as if she were reminding herself how it was spelt.

Lydia’s mother leaned across. “Who on earth is that?” she whispered.

Lydia did not know. But she was looking at the woman’s profile, at the long straight nose and the stubborn line of the jaw and the deep crease between the eyebrows, and a cold, strange certainty was creeping up the back of her neck. She had seen that face every day for fifteen years. It hung in the hall at home in a silver frame. It looked back at her from every mirror.

When the service ended, the woman stood, buttoned her red coat, and walked out without a word. On the pew where she had been sitting, she had left a single photograph, face down.

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