St Nicolas Church

St Nicolas Church in Portslade is where Bunny and Bunny Junior attend Libby Munro’s funeral, a simple service shaped by the contrast between public remembrance and Bunny’s private, uneasy response. The church briefly gathers the bereaved family, Libby’s friends, and a congregation whose view of Bunny is far less forgiving than the eulogy’s description of him as her loving husband.

Setting and Funeral Service

Bunny and Bunny Junior stand in the church with their heads bowed, dressed in matching new black suits. Bunny had found them hanging side by side in the otherwise empty closet in his bedroom; a receipt in one jacket showed that Libby had bought them at Top Shop in Churchill Square two days before her suicide. Their presence at the service is therefore marked by a detail that Bunny cannot make sense of: the suits are both funeral clothes and a final, unexplained act by Libby.

Father Miles delivers the eulogy in a quiet whisper that Bunny has to crane his head to hear. He remembers Libby as ‘full of life and loved by all’ and ‘selfless and generous beyond measure’, while avoiding mention of her medical condition and suicide, except to say that ‘she had joined the angels prematurely’. The service’s gentle, consoling language sits beside the painful circumstances it leaves unspoken.

Congregation and Family

A small group of Libby’s friends sits together across the church. Patsy ‘Bad Vibes’ Parker gives Bunny accusatory looks; he expects her hostility, recalling that she had long disliked him and once called him a wolf after overhearing one of his sexual remarks. Her presence makes the congregation’s judgment personal, even before the eulogy names Bunny as Libby’s husband.

Libby’s mother, Mrs Pennington, stares at Bunny with horror and hatred, baring her teeth. Bunny thinks he has been caught in the act of whatever he has been imagining and lowers his head in prayer. Bunny Junior, by contrast, smiles at his grandmother and gives her a small, sad wave. She shakes her head in rage and grief before breaking into a sob; her husband, now in a wheelchair after a stroke, lays a convulsive hand over hers.

Bunny’s Departure and the Church’s Significance

When Father Miles speaks of those left behind and calls Bunny Libby’s ‘loving husband’, Bunny imagines an audible groan, boo, and hiss from the congregation. Unsure whether he has really heard it, he turns his back to the pews and faces the wall, as if he could shield himself from their disdain. The church makes his uneasy position visible: he is present as Libby’s husband, but cannot inhabit the role without sensing the accusation attached to it.

A painting of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus draws Bunny’s attention. Its plaque reads Madonna and Child, but his thoughts turn from the sacred image to a sexual fantasy. As he hears the eulogy continuing, he feels Libby’s presence and a strange sense of his own doom, then whispers to Bunny Junior to wait and sneaks out. He crosses the church lawn to a small brick public toilet shaded by a palm tree, where he masturbates and then studies his reflection. The movement from funeral ritual to furtive escape makes the church a threshold between collective mourning and Bunny’s continuing evasion: rather than stay with the service, he converts even his grief and shame into a renewed fantasy of his own allure.