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The funeral is far larger than he would have liked. It’s just fanfare for an empty coffin, she thinks, and yet Madeleine is sat in the front row dressed in black. There are medals and a eulogy that’s so impersonal it may as well be the cover letter to an HR file, polished heroism devoid of anything that would clash with the press releases.
His name has been unsealed, inked, and stamped onto the pages of history, and yet, she cannot recognize him in the man they are talking about. She remembers him in profile from the passenger seat, in the hollow of blunt force trauma, the stinging of her tears. Crunching glass, the clatter of metal, the tangy smell of blood on her hands. He’s forever standing on that train platform in Civita Lucana, the image of him ripping through her still, like shrapnel.
It finds her in bed at night when she wakes up beside Mathilde and she doesn’t know whether, in curling around her tighter, Madeleine is trying to shield her daughter or be shielded by her. It’s hardest then, in the dark, when the grief comes double fold. Mathilde, fatherless in her entire existence, doesn’t know to mourn him. It is Madeleine’s weight alone to carry, her shoulders weary under the bones of so many skeletons. Her mother, her father, the daughter she once was, and now her daughter’s father.
Why hadn’t she told him about Safin in Italy? Hiding her own past behind the veil of him not having made peace with his own; she’s paying the price for her hypocrisy now.
Under the blue light of the stained glass in the eleven o’clock hours, they’re reading out the names of his parents, and she feels sick to her stomach learning them from a voice that is not his. How little they knew about each other in the end, always assuming there would be time for the secrets later.
All those years ago, the past felt like something you could escape. She had believed it in the crisp perfection of Altaussee and refused to let go of the fantasy even as she sat sweating in the cool night air on a train in the desert, her father’s picture already waiting for her on Blofeld’s mantelpiece. She held onto it in London, wrists bruised to the bone, and carried it with her to Campania.
She thinks of Vesper’s bones — once such a threat — now splintered on a hillside. A violation committed in her name, Madeleine is left aching for a woman she wished did not exist until it actually happened.
How cruel it is to learn even a grave is a luxury; she didn’t know that before James. Before him, there were only her parents, buried comfortably in the earth of Trøndelag under nameless boulders you can see out of the window if you know where to look while he is nothing but dust on an island so remote and contaminated, she can never visit him again no matter how much she wants to. It would be impossible to try to pick him out of rubble, filled with poison, his killers bones mixed into the same soil, so she casts the pebbles Mathilde pocketed that day into resin and calls it a tomb.
It’s nothing at all and yet truer than the coffin they’re putting in the ground today. Someone is holding an umbrella over her at the graveside, Madeleine too distracted to notice the London drizzle with her nose buried in a handkerchief. When she shudders, it’s Moneypenny who presses her arm against Madeleine’s, reaches for one of her hands, and squeezes. And when she looks up across the grave, there are Q with his awkward sorrow and Tanner, clasping his gloved hands together stoically.
For years, they told each other he was dead, but looking at them now, she knows they, too, never quite believed it, and it takes her back to Blofeld: her father on all those screens, dead to her in theory for a decade yet only truly gone once the shot rang, and James on his knees begging her not to look.
All these killers she’s loved — after twenty years, she finally understands her mother’s weariness. She’s paid for all the lives they’ve taken with her own, death finding her time and time again, in pieces, through others.
SPECTRE’s daughter, MI6’s asset, Safin’s obsession — she’s worn so many faces, she can hardly remember the shape of her own.
It is only when she looks at Mathilde in the morning light that she sees herself. It is only in her, that she can let go of the anger. Their fathers, so aberrant in their devotion, could never set them free. It is only a mother that can forge a life free of these eponymous bloodlines.
It’s the last thing she promises James as she casts her handful of earth over the coffin and wills him to rest, wherever he lies, in however many pieces.