This is the card I chose for you: Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, one of your favourite paintings in the National Gallery. The last time we went there, when you were still well enough to come up to London, we sat in the room for a long time looking at it. An old warship being towed for scrap, a steam-tug puffing merrily away in the foreground and the sun blazing on the right.
A hero ship at Trafalgar, then a hulk storing provisions, then a heap of parts to be sold. Five thousand oaks went into the building of her, and how much iron to fasten the wood? Not valueless, but no longer treasured. Except that Turner makes a treasure out of this last voyage, this imagined ending.
The National Gallery was always our favourite place to go, full of the things you loved. Dutch flower paintings and interiors, Turner, Constable. An egg sandwich and a St Clements fizzy drink in the café, your treat. You’d talk to the gallery attendants, ask them who their favourite painter was. This is my daughter, you’d tell them, in each room we went into, as if you could never get tired of saying it.
The florist looked surprised when I gave her the card. Most people go for florals. Or something religious; it’s a church funeral, after all. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now, except to say goodbye to you in a way that’s about the two of us, a way that feels true.
