Bunny and Bunny Junior attend Libby’s funeral and burial

Bunny and Bunny Junior attend Libby’s funeral and burial at St Nicolas Church in Portslade, where the ceremony’s restrained rites expose the distance between public mourning and the family’s private grief. For Bunny, the service is not a settled farewell: his attention moves between the congregation’s judgment, the fact of Libby’s death, and an increasingly urgent sense that she is still present.

The service at St Nicolas Church

The service is simple. Bunny and Bunny Junior stand with their heads bowed in brand-new black suits Bunny had found hanging together in the otherwise empty closet in his bedroom. A receipt in one jacket showed that Libby had bought the suits at Top Shop in Churchill Square two days before her suicide. The discovery gives the clothes an unsettling connection to her final days, while leaving Bunny wondering what she intended by buying them.

The funeral’s other fragments deepen that uncertainty. A neighbour had seen Libby burning pieces of paper and letting them fall from the balcony a couple of days before her death; the scraps proved to be love letters Bunny had written before their marriage. At the church, Father Miles delivers the eulogy in a whisper so faint Bunny has to crane his head to hear. He describes Libby as full of life, loved, selfless, and generous, but does not mention her medical condition or the manner of her death, referring instead to her having joined the angels prematurely. The polished language of the eulogy leaves the circumstances that trouble Bunny outside the ceremony’s public account.

Judgment, flight, and burial

Bunny surveys the congregation and finds only a small group of Libby’s friends among the mourners. Patsy Parker gives him accusatory looks, which he expects: she has never liked him and has repeatedly made her disapproval known. When Father Miles speaks of those left behind and calls Bunny Libby’s loving husband, Bunny thinks he hears a groan, a boo, and a hiss from the congregation. Unsure whether the reaction is real, he turns his back to the pews and faces the wall, as though his posture might shield him from their judgment.

The eulogy continues while Bunny’s attention slips away from the service. A painting of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus draws his eye; its plaque names the image Madonna and Child, but his thoughts veer instead to Madonna’s sexuality. Against this distracted, self-absorbed train of thought, he senses Libby’s presence and, at the same time, his own imminent doom. He can no longer remain in the church. Telling Bunny Junior to wait, he sneaks out with his head bent and crosses the lawn to a small brick public toilet shaded by a palm tree.

Inside a cubicle, Bunny rests his head against the graffiti-covered wall and masturbates. Afterwards he bats gloomily at the toilet-paper dispenser, cleans himself, and studies his face in the stainless-steel mirror. He expects to see a slack-jawed ogre, but recognizes the familiar, dimpled face he considers warm and lovable. He pats his pomaded forelock and smiles; even the new tragic intensity he detects in his eyes becomes, in his estimation, an addition to his allure. The episode sharply separates the ritual obligations of the funeral from Bunny’s reflexive retreat into sexual fantasy and vanity. His sense of doom does not yet translate into contrition: he turns grief into another feature of his imagined attractiveness.

At the graveside, Bunny Junior opens his eyes after the journey in the Punto and gives his father a tight smile. The two make their way down the gravel path and into the gathered mourners, offering quiet apologies as they approach Libby’s final resting place. Bunny Junior struggles to concentrate on the vicar, distracted by two squabbling seagulls nearby, while Bunny watches the burial. When Father Miles looks at him with a perplexed expression, Bunny understands that he is expected to take part. He moves to the grave, picks up a handful of earth, and drops it onto the lid of the simple mahogany coffin. As he does so, he feels darkness spread over him. The small, physical gesture completes the public rite, but it brings no uncomplicated release: the funeral ends with Bunny carrying the weight of Libby’s death rather than resolving what it means.

The burial and the persistence of grief

The handful of earth Bunny drops onto the mahogany coffin marks the funeral’s outward conclusion, but the story does not treat burial as an end to the family’s bond with Libby. In the days that follow, her absence takes different forms for Bunny Junior and Bunny: the boy struggles to preserve his mother in memory, while his father experiences her as a presence that returns amid his own grief and mounting collapse. The graveside gesture thus becomes a point of contrast rather than closure. The coffin is lowered into the earth, yet Libby remains active in the consciousness of those left behind.

Bunny Junior’s struggle is especially bound up with the passage of time. Although he can readily recall facts stored in his encyclopaedia-like memory, he finds it increasingly difficult to picture his mother. He tries to preserve their shared past as if it were an exhibition in the Booth Museum, arranging remembered moments like figures fixed behind glass. One scene remains legible in outline: Libby pushing him on a swing at St Ann’s Well Gardens. But he can still see himself flying upward, laughing, while the person pushing him dissolves into an incomplete, ghostlike image. The loss is not only that his mother has died; the remembered presence that should connect him to her is itself fading.

The mother who returns to Bunny Junior appears instead through touch, smell, and imagined recognition. In the Punto on Meeching Road in Newhaven, he thinks Libby will eventually find him, then senses her hand cream and feels a hand trace his face, ending in a gesture like a kiss. Later, when mist gathers around the car, he sees her seated on a low cream brick wall in her orange dressing gown. He leaves the Punto, joins her, and rests his head against her. The scene gives bodily warmth back to the mother who had been vanishing from his memories; it offers the boy a moment of closeness, not proof that the funeral’s loss has been undone.

At the novel’s later public gathering, Bunny sees Libby through the crowd and asks her to forgive him. When he says he has missed her, she rejects his idea that she had been haunting him. Her appearance therefore unsettles the distinction between bereavement and haunting without resolving it into a simple supernatural explanation. Read against the church service, where Bunny already felt Libby’s presence and his own doom, the later encounter makes the funeral an early scene in an extended reckoning: burial gives the community a rite for acknowledging death, but neither Bunny nor Bunny Junior can reduce their relationship with Libby to that rite or leave it behind.

A child’s attention at the graveside

The journey to Libby’s burial reaches Bunny Junior through fragments rather than a continuous account of grief. With his eyes closed in the car, he listens to a radio discussion about advertising and the sexualisation of children. When the speaker says, “Our children are having their childhoods stolen from them,” he hears Bunny repeat the sentence, then repeat it again as if committing it to memory. The boy takes comfort from his father’s reassurance that he will be all right, even while he senses irritation in Bunny’s voice, directed not at him but, perhaps, at the world. The radio’s broad concern for children briefly enters the private space of a father and son on their way to the grave, without settling what either can say about their own loss.

At the graveside, Bunny Junior’s attention catches on two squabbling seagulls, apparently caught up in a mating dance. His dislike of them is longstanding, and a recent report in the Argus gives his fear a vivid shape: a gull attacked an elderly man in Hove, who suffered a fatal heart attack; the boy imagines that, without the man’s wife driving it away, the bird would have pecked out his eyes and perhaps his guts. The burial is therefore not experienced as a single solemn scene shared uniformly by the mourners. For the child, the final resting place of his mother stands alongside the immediate, alarming details through which he tries to understand danger and death.