The Posthumous Adventures of Harry Whitaker

by Bobbie Darbyshire

  ‘It takes care of them how, though?’

  ‘I’m not up on the details. My section doesn’t deal with those cases.’

  I stare frantically about me. We’re passing landscaped shrubbery and herbaceous beds. ‘This is outrageous. I need someone competent.’

  ‘You know all that you need to know. Try to concentrate on resolving your own situation.’

  All at once, up ahead, our terrifying destination swings into view. A stone tracery of wide lancet windows, a carriage-arch between twin steep-pitched roofs, an ornate tower looming above. From one or other of these two mock-Gothic chapels I’ve watched several of my fellow thespians’ coffins disappear behind curtains on their way to the fire and the chimney. Did their ghosts roll through too, shrieking for mercy?

  ‘Duty calls. Got to go now.’ Scotty begins to shimmer and fade. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Stop. Hang on. You said you’d look into my case.’

  ‘And I did,’ he says sorrowfully.

  ‘There must be discretion,’ I beg him, ‘a way round this, some grounds for appeal. My genius must count for something. It has to be possible.’

  His inscrutability lingers in the air for a moment, then he’s gone.

  The hearse and the limo are slowing and stopping by a mass of parked cars – oh please, let there be someone inside that I cared about, just one. Here’s my agent’s Mercedes – not him, I don’t give a stuff about Julian, but there has to be someone.

  Simon Foyle stares in at my coffin with bloodshot, lugubrious eyes. Mrs Butley stands apart, puffing on a cigarette and chortling about something with one of the undertakers, while fishing a crumpled tissue from her hideous, faux-leather bucket-bag. Bill and Frank, in top hat and tails, with long, sorrowful faces, are opening the hearse door and starting to lift out the flowers. Please, there has to be someone.

  Richard

  He waited uneasily, sandwiched between Claire and his mother in a pew just inside the door. The crematorium chapel was too small for the murmuring crowd, packed bum to bum, shoulder to shoulder, all the seats taken and many standing now at the back. Amidst extravagant floral arrangements up front, a live string quartet was playing. If his mother planned some disruption, she would have to climb over him and Claire to get out and run up the aisle. For the moment at least she was quiet, sizing up the other mourners, while Claire twisted in her seat, awed by the celebrity faces.

  ‘I thought the press would be here,’ Claire said.

  ‘I told you – Mr Foyle’s kept this one quiet. There’ll be a big memorial service in Westminster Abbey.’

  ‘Still,’ she said, peering anxiously at the door, ‘I thought there’d be at least one or two journalists.’

  He couldn’t help smiling, she was so keen to be photographed at Lord Whittaker’s funeral. As well as a new dress – a long, slinky thing in dark green – she’d splashed out on a head-hugging hat and borrowed a rope of jet beads from a fellow care-worker. He squeezed her hand.

  His mother’s tactic so far had been to blank Claire completely. Emerging regally among the stray cats sunning themselves on her doorstep, she had ignored his introduction and Claire’s greeting: ‘Lovely to meet you at last, Deborah.’ Then all the way here – on the bus to the Old Steine, on the second bus crammed with chattering students heading off to the campus at Falmer, and on his arm up the cemetery drive – she had channelled her displeasure that this gate-crashing strumpet was tailing along with them into a haughty pretence that she wasn’t. Claire’s efforts to engage her in conversation, his appeals to her not to be silly, all fell on deaf ears.

  ‘Richard, look,’ whispered Claire, pointing out yet another film actor who meant nothing to him. ‘I can’t believe I’m breathing the same air.’

  His mother craned forward to see the chief mourners. He’d twice had to dissuade her from standing on the pew to get a better look. She tugged at his sleeve now. ‘Look, Richard, the nerve of it. Bold as brass.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her.’ She pointed. A smartly dressed black woman had just taken a seat at the front.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘A reserved seat – I ask you. His latest fancy piece, I don’t doubt. Claiming right of place. Hogging the limelight.’

  ‘Come off it. You’ve no idea who she is.’

  The woman seemed to be on her own. She was shifting impatiently and kept glancing at her watch.

  The scent of lilies itched the back of Richard’s nose. The quartet’s mournful strains insisted that he should be sad. He wasn’t sad, he was hemmed in and apprehensive. He wanted to shake off the two women, vault into the aisle, and stride away through the sunshine, his suit jacket over his shoulder, his tie stuffed in his pocket. He would head home to Worthing: to the café where Tiffany, bless her, was supervising the installation of Wi-Fi today, or, better still, to his flat for his bicycle and off for a ride across the Downs, plotting a more conclusive escape. Peru had looked amazing over his cornflakes this morning. Rainbows and mist, mountains, rivers and jungles, Inca ruins. He would learn Spanish, earn his living somehow, go trekking.

  ‘Hey, babes.’ Claire leaned in close, smiling up from under the brim of the hat. ‘Can we go to the big memorial service? Will your nice Mr Foyle get us in to that too?’

  Richard coughed, hoping his mother hadn’t heard. Nice Mr Foyle would almost certainly get them in if he asked, but the last thing he wanted was to have to go through this again, only worse, with banks of cameras and microphones.

  His mother had tuned Claire out completely, thank goodness. She was still tutting about the woman in the front pew. ‘She’ll be no one important,’ he soothed her. ‘Just paying respects. A producer or something.’

  ‘A Hollywood producer maybe,’ Claire said eagerly, reaching across him to touch his mother, who shrank like a snail from salt.

  ‘Mum, be civil,’ he snapped – but at last something was happening. The string quartet paused, then launched into another, more sorrowful, piece, and the congregation rose to its feet. Here came four undertakers bearing a casket laden with cream and yellow hothouse flowers around an incongruous little wreath of red carnations. A paunchy man followed behind, openly weeping, and a down-at-heel elderly woman brought up the rear, dabbing her dry eyes with a tissue.

  ‘It’s her, Richard, look,’ hissed his mother. ‘That cow who rang the police and slammed Harry’s door in our faces.’

  ‘Mum, shush.’

  She was right, though. Déjà vu. A younger version of this person had blocked the doorway of Marine Parade when he was eleven.

  ‘Ha!’ said his mother. ‘I can’t wait to see her face when Mr Foyle welcomes us in for champagne and smoked salmon.’

  The weeping man was presumably Foyle. His tears had Richard wondering suddenly, scanning the pews for more signs of male grief. There was an old guy near the front who looked very sorrowful. He was wearing a plum-coloured velvet jacket, and that was surely a toupée.

  Could it be that Harry was gay?

  There was no doubting paternity – ample proof of that in the mirror – but his mother’s account of her seduction was untrustworthy. He wouldn’t put it past her to have been the one who’d backed Harry into a corner.

  He liked the idea. It had him softening towards his father. All those media photographs of the handsome old goat coming on to women: were they one of his masks, a marketing angle, a persona he’d hidden behind? He tried to re-imagine him as half of a devoted gay couple, faithful for decades to Simon Foyle.

  It didn’t quite gel. ‘Quite a rogue by all accounts,’ Foyle had said on the phone, which didn’t seem like something a gay partner would say, and wouldn’t Harry have confided to a partner that he had a son? Maybe all would be made clear in the eulogies or at the wake.

  Richard glanced at his mother. Her eyes were as dry as the housekeeper’s. The love she never tired of proclaiming was no more than self-pity, and even that wasn’t genuine. It was a role she had played until it became her existence. A
s far as he could see no one here but Foyle and possibly the man in the toupée felt any genuine grief. The thought provoked a twinge of compassion. Whatever the self-serving truth of his father, it saddened Richard that someone so illustrious, with back-to-back retrospectives running on television and a day of public mourning in the offing, had barely anyone to shed genuine tears for him.

  He put an arm around his mother’s furiously quivering shoulders. ‘The housekeeper’s not worth bothering about,’ he murmured. ‘No one here cared for Harry except Mr Foyle.’

  Harry

  I am tearing from one end of the coffin to the other, leaping at each person I see – stranger, friend, enemy. There has to be someone here who will save me. How about these three at the back – two ill-dressed women, a young man with curly hair – my son, is it possible? – oh help me, please. But I’m dragged away.

  Rows of solemn faces turn to watch the coffin go by. Most of them known to me, actors, directors, girlfriends. It’s wonderful to see their bright eyes, their warm, living flesh, and I fling myself at them – please help me – I love you. I’m fired by the sudden, astonishing truth of this sentiment, but the universe presumes to know better. You loved not a one of them, it tells me, yanking me back. You felt contempt or indifference for most of them. The coffin, swaying on the undertakers’ shoulders, tows me past them and on.

  Good God, an ex-wife is here – the Danish one, Birgit. She and two cronies are hunched in a row, sawing chunks off my character, no doubt, as her lawyer once sawed chunks off my earnings. There’s little point hurling myself at them, but I do just the same. And at Julian, my agent, misty-eyed, biting his lip. Ah please, Julian, let’s forgive all our differences. No use, back I bounce to the coffin. The best in the business Julian may be, but I never liked the bastard and there’s no undoing it now. He’s not sad on my account. More likely he’s pondering his own mortality or the decline in income my departure will mean for him. Or else he’s just playing to the gallery. He has seen fit to wear a purple jacket and to sport his best hairpiece and a flamboyant silk cravat around his scraggy neck.

  They are sliding the coffin onto the dais now, from where I can see the whole congregation. The sweet child who has the part of Cordelia is here, three rows back. She had me infatuated for a day or two – pray God that counts as emotional investment – she is less than ten metres away. But no, no, it doesn’t. Next to her are Regan and Goneril and the assistant producer I’ve been bedding. Sweetly short-sighted behind those horn-rimmed spectacles, stacks of books by her bed, reverential towards me. I make frenzied attempts to transfer to her, but it seems I loved her not.

  In a smug, healthy row to the left are the men: the producer, the idiot director, the director’s assistant, Edgar, Edmund and Gloucester, and the fool, poor Lear’s shadow.

  Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.

  Unfair, unfair. Who knew the rules of this game? Not you, fool, any more than I. He’s not even looking up, too busy texting.

  A handful of rubbernecking neighbours has turned out. None of them liked me and I liked none of them. I dare say the prospect of free alcohol and a nosey around inside my house helped Simon to round them up. On the front row is the solicitor – Pearl something – who drafted my will. I fly at her but run out of rope yet again. In our few meetings at her Western Road office, it barely crossed my mind to seduce this attractive Jamaican or to show any interest at all, engrossed as I was in the fine detail of distributing my largesse.

  Is that it, is that everyone? I don’t know the vicar or the four hired musicians in white tie and tails who are gravely bowing their instruments. My hopes lurch back to Mrs Butley and Simon. I strain with all my might to conjure affection for them, to satisfy the universe that this cantankerous, chain-smoking cleaner and pestiferous neighbour succeeded in worming their way into my heart. I propel myself through the air towards one, then the other. It just isn’t true. There is no one I cared about, no one to rescue me.

  The final horror is upon me. Time slows as it would in a movie, but I’m not in a movie. I am damned and defeated, about to lose this real world full of colour, sound, movement forever. The chapel, the flowers, the upturned faces. The lips, and the hands, and the eyelashes. The shuffle of feet and the clearing of throats. The motes of dust adrift in the summer light that dazzles in through the window-tracery. The perfection of Schubert, the poignant violin cadence, the cello’s unhappy searching. The last chord dies away. I am frozen, unable to think or to act. Only a few eulogies stand between me and the flames. Between this transient world and time without end in an urn.

  The vicar steps up beside me and clears his throat. ‘We brought nothing into the world, and we take nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’

  He knows nothing about it. His words show me no hope, give me no consolation. I can’t bear to listen to him. I need a woman’s pity and kindness.

  ‘Mother.’ The entreaty suggests itself. The last appeal of each dying man, no matter how brave. But my mother is decades dead, long forgotten. If her spirit ever lingered with me, I never felt it. I can’t summon it now.

  The vicar has given way to Julian, whose praise of me is so polished and practised, I know it almost by heart. Mrs Butley stifles a yawn. The solicitor looks sad. What was her name? Pearl something, some man’s name for a surname.

  Julian has stepped down and now Simon is speaking, choking with grief at the loss of his only claim to distinction – to have rubbed shoulders with the living legend that was me, occasionally being asked to feed my cat, take in a parcel or deal with my tradesmen. He launches, ill-advisedly, into a halting rendition of a Shakespeare sonnet:

  ‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,So do our minutes hasten to their end...’

  Despite his amateur delivery, I should be concentrating on the beauty of these words, drawing comfort from this sliver of Shakespeare, but I’m distracted by Pearl. There is something very lovely about her as she gazes at Simon. There is almost, I might say, an aura around her. Amidst all the heartrending, ephemeral loveliness of my last glimpse of creation, she’s in high definition. Her broad cheekbones, her kissable lips, her sassy behind. Suddenly she’s the best woman ever, enchanting. I want to dive beneath the lapels of her tailored black jacket, slide inside her blouse and her brassière and find refuge between her brown breasts. If only I’d felt this when I met her before. Oh powers that be, have pity. I loved this woman – I promise I did. I just didn’t have enough time to realise it. You have to believe me. Let me go home with Pearl.

  I reach for her again, go halfway towards her, urging myself on with hope and conviction. But my prayer is unheard or denied. I’m pulled up cruelly short, so near yet so far. My last minutes are racing past me like a river in flood. Forgive me, forgive me. Whatever I’ve done or left undone, I repent.

  My gaze clings to Pearl, who still glows with come-hither gorgeousness. What draws me isn’t her face so much or her breasts. She stands in a sphere of sharp focus, whose centre seems to be the curve of her right hip in the black pencil skirt. All at once I am concentrated and alert. The come-hither is not from Pearl, as I thought, but from her shoulder bag.

  The vicar is winding up, and at his suggestion all present are lowering their eyes in silent remembrance. I hardly know what I am doing or why. I’m reaching again, but for Pearl’s bag this time, not for Pearl, and – surely not? can it be true? – I am gliding towards it as easily as a snowflake to the ground.

  The bag rests on her hip. I sail into the snug gap above and look fearfully back. The hateful box and its wretched contents will surely compel me to follow them. The quartet have taken up their bows, offering drawn out, desolate notes of Beethoven as the curtains glide across. I brace myself to resist the pull of the coffin, aim all the emotion I can muster at my inscrutable new home.

  My luck holds. No malign force drags me away. I daren’t stray an inch from where I quiver, tucked up again
st Pearl’s nipped-in, tailored, feminine midriff. Thank you, thank you, whoever has let this happen. I am still in the world!

  Black leather. A fold-over flap. Something inside the bag draws me in – what can it be? I peep beneath the flap, and I see it. The familiar A4 pages in their clear plastic folder. The black, ornate lettering. It’s the will that I keep in my bureau! My last will and testament!

  My relief is exquisite. I can’t remember ever knowing such joy. Not a second too soon. As I dive under the flap and embrace this miraculous document, the congregation is exhaling wistfully at the sight of my earthly remains disappearing backstage. Sweet Jesus, that could have been me.

  Richard

  There was some kind of problem in the doorway where the crush of mourners waited to exit into the afternoon sunshine. ‘Let me through, I’m gasping,’ grumbled the housekeeper, shoving her way forward, cigarettes and lighter in hand.

  Richard hung back in the pew with Claire and his mother, experiencing a lightness he hadn’t expected. The scent of lilies no longer oppressed him; the claustrophobia had gone. Compassion had lifted the weight. The words said over the coffin hadn’t clarified Harry’s sexuality, but it hardly mattered. The old charlatan wasn’t loved, not at the last, and Richard felt sorry for him.

  A man in jeans and a denim jacket seemed to be blocking the door. Richard couldn’t see him properly past the string quartet, who stood in line, calmly clutching their instrument cases. It must be a pain lugging that cello around. Between himself and the musicians was the black woman, who fished in her shoulder bag and brought a mobile phone to her ear. ‘Hi... Yes, I’ve got it. Mr Foyle found it in a drawer at the house.’

  Richard wasn’t listening. His mother looked dazed. Was she sharing his sense of release? He hoped so. He put an arm round her. ‘I’m really glad we came. Thank you, Mum.’