My mother comes in to say that she has rung the vicar—it is not yet eight, so he can say a prayer at matins and word will get round the village without our having to phone: the church still has its uses after all. I ring my wife and children in London to give them the news, and during this my mother comes in to ask: was that me who’s just been in her bedroom? Somebody had seemed to be walking alking about. go through, and stand at the door, but it feels unspooky, and goes on feeling unspooky. My father, I’m sure, is too much of a materialist to become a ghost, and the room in which we’ve watched him die is unwaveringly bright and rational. It isn’t he but we who move about like ghosts, pale and hovery and traumatized. There he lies, solid on his bed. I touch his skin. An hour after his death his forehead has cooled to marble already, but when I slip my hand under the covers and across his huge ribs, the chest is hot.
And it is still warm when the GP comes at nine: ‘Poor Arthur, you didn’t deserve this,’ he says. And it is not much cooler—I know, I check—when Malcolm, the undertaker, arrives at eleven. He is fortyish, remembers me from school, is gangly in a grey suit with a Rotary Club badge on his left lapel: ‘Oh dear, oh dear, Arthur,’ he says and doesn’t know where to put himself.
He asks for a bowl of water, and while my mother is out of the room uses a long tweezery implement to shove a piece of cotton wool into my father’s open mouth, where it rests (visibly) at the back of the tongue—‘to stop any gases coming up,’ he explains. My mother returns with the warm water. Malcolm takes a razor and for the next hour or so works away at my father’s week-old stubble, ‘just tidying him up.’ I look at my mother and see that she is thinking what I am thinking—why bother with these cosmetics? Who will see him in the coffin? And even if he were to lie open for public viewing in a chapel of rest, who would mind the stubble? He might, I suppose: he was always a great one for checking whether I’d shaved. But he didn’t like this sort of shaving himself—used only an electric razor—and would have resented the waste of manpower: better to have got Malcolm out doing something useful in the garden. If he’d been here, really been here, that’s what he’d be arranging.
But my mother and I are new to all this, and yield to Malcolm’s sense of etiquette. And at least it gives him something to do while he chats:
‘I’ve done forty-eight this year—about one a week it works out. It’s a sideline, the undertaking. My main business is joinery. But I don’t get much call for that these days, and you’ve got to make ends meet. There’s nothing special you want, is there? No? Fine. Of course some people want the works, you know, the whole waxworks. It’s amazing what you can do these days—inject the client with formalin by sticking this tube into the neck artery, or drain the blood and urine off with an electric pump, and put caps under the eyelids to make the eyes more rounded, sleep and peace, like. I don’t hold with that: making a corpse like a plum instead of a prune, it’s not right. No embellishing, nothing fancy, simple and clean: that’s my philosophy.’
I wait for the moment when he will nick my father’s chin—do the unpumped dead bleed less profusely than the living?—but he does it all spotlessly. I help him roll my father on to his side, so he can remove the pads from under him, wash his bottom and put a fresh nappy between his legs: it’s dirty work, but someone has to do it, and ‘there may be more fluids,’ he says. My father’s body is a little stiffer now, but his back, as I hold him, is still warm, the skin red and corrugated where the sheet has wrinkled under him. ‘This is why we come in fairly sharpish,’ says Malcolm, ‘before the rigor mortis. After twelve hours they can be very stiff and hard to move. After four or five days they go floppy again.’
My father said that he’d never wear a shroud in his coffin; and he would not have wanted to waste a good suit. So now I help dress him in a pair of fawn cotton pyjamas. Malcolm hasn’t batted an eyelid yet, any more than my father has, but suddenly he seems flustered. I hold the body upright for him. He puts the right arm in the left sleeve, only realizing his mistake when he finds the pyjama buttons are underneath my father’s back. We lift the body, and get the pyjamas off then on again the right way. They won’t button up over the swollen stomach and zip scar, so we leave them open. There’s one final cosmetic act: the chin support, a small white plastic Τ to keep the jaw from dropping too far open. Malcolm has some trouble adjusting the length of this: it’s either too short, leaving my father dopily open-mouthed, or too long, clamming him up, unnaturally tight-lipped. Finally he jams the stick end into the collar-bone, an awkward riving process, and I have to remind myself that this won’t be hurting. My father, at any rate, looks better for it—peaceful, no teeth showing.
‘I should have said earlier,’ Malcolm remarks as we draw the sheets back up to the chin, hiding the Τ support. ‘That’s a pacemaker there, isn’t it. I’ll have to get the doctor to remove it, or come back with a scalpel myself. We have to take it out, you see, if he’s being cremated: it says so on the form, no HPMs. There’ve been cases where they exploded.’
‘I’d like to have it—if it’s not going to be used by anyone else.’
‘I’ll check with the doctor. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
Once Malcolm has gone I sit with my father again and touch the little pacemaker box in his chest, sliding it about under the skin. Still warm, that chest, though it is six hours now since he died and for two hours he has been exposed to cold air. But the forehead is damp and Siberian. My mother sits across from me, holding his hand. She has not cried properly yet: with each phone call—and as the day wears on there are more and more of these—her eyes water and her lips tremble, but she does not howl. Now, finally, she throws herself across him and sobs into his cold neck and chest.
It is a horrendous, unfamiliar, back-of-the-throat wail. She doesn’t want me there listening, and I suppress the instinct to go and hold her, knowing that if I do she will stop, and feeling sure that she should voice her pain, release it, weep it out:
Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’ er fraught heart, and bids it break.
So I withdraw and move restlessly about the house, looking in on my father each time I pass his door: I’ve been doing this for the past fortnight and see no reason to stop now, just because he’s dead. After lunch—lunch!—I come back in secret and slip my hand under the sheet: nine hours after his death, the body is dimly warm still, but there’s a shock when I touch his icy hands, which unlike his face have turned white. And he is stiffer, too, not just the limbs but the skin. I stroke and clasp his fingers. When my mother comes in, she isn’t shocked; she sits beside me and starts to touch him around the mouth, kneading it into positions which she likes the look of and he holds for her, as if death were a camera pose, or else a new suit he were trying on (‘How do I look?), which in a sense it is.
Later she lies down next to him and falls asleep for an hour. But she spends the night in the spare bedroom, not sure whether it would be unseemly or traumatic to sleep with him. I go upstairs to my room and write a letter. I’m woken next morning at eight by a phone call from one of his patients, a woman who lost her parents in her twenties and has always been devoted to mine.
‘Please tell me it isn’t true. He was like a father to me. What shall I do? I’ve left my house to him.’
Three Visits
THE FIRST DAY of life after his death. I walk to the café on Skipton High Street where we used to come after hours, boys from the grammar school, girls from the high school, cigarettes, a jukebox, coffee. This morning, school holidays and recession, I have the place nearly to myself. My appointment at the registry office isn’t till twelve.
A girl comes in, blonde, eighteenish, white see-through blouse and flowery leggings under a long coat, pushing a Maclaren buggy with a child of two inside, immaculately turned out. Shorter, younger, trim-jacketed, a boyfriend skulks behind. The girl is in charge: she slides a tray along the counter, loads it with cakes and drinks, pays at the till and turns, carrying the t
ray in one hand while pushing the buggy with the other. She chooses a table, parks the pushchair next to it and sits down on the green plastic bench, sliding her legs under the imitation marble tabletop. Some seconds after, as if reluctantly acknowledging he is of the same party, the boy takes the seat opposite, smug-looking, not saying a word to her, not looking at the baby either, who is churring happily with a bottle of thinned Ribena.
Is she a nanny or childminder? No, the baby calls her ‘Mummy’. Is he the father? Hard to say. He doesn’t seem to be a husband—neither of them wears a ring—but is he a partner? His lack of attention to both the girl and the baby is no kind of clue—it could just be shyness, or the domestic boredom of coupledom, or a northern male’s assumption that pouring tea and petting babies falls outside his domain. But I can’t get over how pleased with himself he looks. What’s his power over the girl, that she sits there doing everything—leaning over now to wipe the face of her baby daughter, who’s beginning to be restless in her pushchair straps, who’s saying ‘Mummy’ pleadingly and wants to be out? The more the child whinges, the less a father he looks, the more that sullen-smug face of his suggests a different story: Look at me, I’m just seventeen and have an older woman who gives me her body, no trouble or lip or bills to pay. But if so, what’s in it for her, what does she get from him? Her control, her copingness, seem to say: I can do better than this. But she’s second fiddle to some smug, sullen, misogynistic berk.
The café has filled up a bit. I turn back to my paper, sneaking looks as the mother plays a slap-game with her daughter, a rhyming pat-a-cake routine which ends with her smacking the child’s hands more vigorously than the game requires, harder than seems right. She turns to her consort, a bulge and swing in her blouse as she does so—unlike me, he looks away. Her face in profile is not a happy face, the top lip protrudes, the chin is rattily set back, more smoky anger in her than first seemed. Now the child, twenty minutes in captivity, is straining at its harness, whining, ‘Lap, lap,’ and the girl, tensing, worried they’re becoming a spectacle, says loudly, loud enough to make people look across: ‘Shut up. Wait till we’re on the bus.’ There’s quiet for a bit, but then the child whines again, ‘Mummy, lap,’ not seeing what there is to wait for or why, and the whine turns into a cry, and now the girl leans over and slaps the child hard across the thighs. The child screams, less in pain than outrage, long shock-breaths between each cry. The mother and her lover sit silent and impassive, while the crying goes on under its own steam, nothing to do with them. An undeserved slap, a mother at the end of her nerves: no more than this, but there’s a knot of awkwardness now, everyone in the café pretending not to have noticed but conversation faltering and silence gathering as reproach. I think of my father, soppy-stern most of the time (once, after I’d been cruel to my sister, he drew his fist back to hit me in the face but wasn’t able to go through with it), occasionally a mad disciplinarian (his insistence I empty my plate, the smack I got for peeing in some bushes, the day he locked me in the cellar). What was kind and right, where did cruelty and neglect begin, what could you do that didn’t damage your own life or your child’s or both?
At last the girl stands up and begins to tidy cups, cutlery and napkins on to her tray. The boy, smug and wordless still, goes ahead of her to the door. The girl puts the tray down and unbrakes the pushchair—the child ceasing to cry now, aware something is happening—and out they go into the street, among other pushchairs, other people, the mill of bodies, the unending cycle of sex and parenthood, never enough time, never enough patience.
Anita M. Barnard wears a polite smile and an elegant grey dress. She likes to give a personal service, handwritten, no computerization. Friendly but not nosy, she holds a fountain pen and asks me to sit down. She needs to know, for the purposes of the form, who, when, where and how: she needs to know whether I was present at the time. But she does not want to talk about the death more than is strictly necessary, and if she ever knew my father (probably didn’t—works six miles away, is under forty), she isn’t letting on.
I give her his full name. The doctor’s certificate says: Cause of death—Carcinoma 1(a).
‘What does 1(a) mean?’ I ask.
‘Oh, that’s a doctor’s thing,’ she explains. ‘It means leading directly to death rather than a contributory factor, which is l (b). When did he die?’
‘Yesterday.’
She scritches away. ‘Relation to the deceased?’
‘Son.’ I look at the map of Craven District on the wall, her patch of births, marriages and deaths. ‘Are people fairly well in control of themselves by the time they come here?’ I ask.
‘Yes, usually, though you get some who want to talk about it and cry. Sometimes I want to cry myself in the really tragic cases—you know, like children.’
‘But you don’t just do deaths?’
‘No, but this time of year, mostly. Today I’ve had four deaths, a birth and a marriage. Getting wed on a Monday morning—seems a bit odd to me, when they didn’t have to, either. I’ll just copy this out neatly and then we’re done.’
I take the green cremation slip, the form for the DSS, the information booklets for widows, the death certificate itself. Outside on the notice-boards are the banns of intending couples. Four older men, MARR DISS , marrying younger women, SINGLE . A couple whose address is a barge on the Leeds—Liverpool canal. A twenty-two-year-old man marrying a thirty-eight-year-old woman. Not one old-fashioned marriage—people in their mid-twenties doing it for the first time. But then it’s not the marrying season, not Whit or the hot blood of July. And my parent’s wedding hadn’t been so Mills and Boon either, by the look of the photos: registry office, half a dozen friends and relations huddled autumnally by a red brick wall, the war barely a year behind.
I shop for the wake at Morrisons, the big new supermarket where the old cattle mart used to be. My father had talked warmly of the place (‘You can get any bloody thing you want’) and bought shares in it, as if it were the family firm. I load the trolley high with drink—gin, whisky, brandy, vodka, rum, wine, lager, bitter, as much as I can get in, the booze mound, commemoration and amnesia. I have to hold the wine boxes at the top to prevent them falling out. A man in the queue behind me winks. The woman on the till gives a knowing smile: ‘Now here’s someone who’s going to have a good Christmas.’
I drive to Airedale Hospital. Just along the corridor from Ward 19 is the postgraduate medical school, and in the library, among the BMJ s and ghoulish textbooks, I see a woman, greying, fortyish, curatorial, who may be able to help. I explain: ‘My father was a GP locally for thirty-five years. When he retired he donated some equipment here. He said that they were setting up a museum. I wondered if I could look. I wanted to see his donations.’
The woman seems a bit put out: this isn’t routine. ‘Sorry, it doesn’t mean anything to me, I’m afraid. There’s no actual museum, you see. We wanted one but we haven’t the resources.’
‘Not even an archive or display case or something?’
‘We thought it would be good to have exhibits in the main reception, but it’s against fire regulations: the law says you need acres of free floorspace. What’s your father’s name?’
‘Dr Morrison. From Earby. He retired in 1976.’
‘Well I’ve been here twenty years and I don’t remember any bequest. But we do have a storeroom where various bits and pieces are kept.’
The storeroom is taken up with old medical journals, surplus from the library. On a high shelf are some little wooden boxes, beautifully made, chestnut-gleaming, with stethoscopes and other equipment under their sliding lids. It’s cold in here but the woman is slowly warming to her task.
‘We did have a few doctor’s bags, with bottles in—the coloured sort, with stoppers. But thieves broke in—looking for drugs, the police thought—and they whipped them: they’re the sort of thing you can sell at car boot sales. There’s only this one left now.’
It’s leather, and old, and grey—but it’
s not my father’s.
‘That’s about it, I’m afraid, except for George.’ She opens the lid of a large rough wooden box and pulls out a thighbone. She seems to relax, as if she’s forgotten my being here is an irregularity and imposition, as if she’s finally interested.
‘We laid him out on the steps, a doctor and me, to see if he was all there. Of course they’re made of plastic these days, the modern sort, not the real thing like George here.’
She takes out another off-white branch—a rib or arm.
‘People feel funny about skeletons,’ she says, ‘but it never bothers me, coming in here, or working next door after dark knowing he’s in his box. I rather like him.’
She stows the bones back in the box, shuts the lid and locks the door behind us. I thank her for her time. I’d hoped his old medical equipment might restore some part of my father to me, but thieves in the night had got there first.
In the car I wonder: had she been right about George being George? How different are male and female skeletons? Couldn’t George have been janet?
Janet had lived in a box in our attic, in a windowless room with bookshelves on which were ancient medical textbooks with colour plates of appalling skin diseases and disfigurements (at thirteen I swooned darkly over the venereal disease section and convinced myself that the slight soreness of my penis must be a syphilitic chancre). I opened the lid one day and there she was—a grinning skull and a jumble of bones. My father said he’d bought her when he was a medical student—‘already dead, by the way.’ He didn’t know much of her history, only that she was young—and that she was a she. He showed me how you joined her up. At the top of every bone was a metal hook which clipped into the clasp at the bottom of the next bone, which in turn hooked into, and so upward and on. We didn’t attempt the full assembly, and I always doubted if she was all there, whether a few bones hadn’t gone walkies. But we had fun raising a leg together—femur, tibia, patella, talus. I was fixated by the skull, which had been sawn through cross-ways so that you could lift the top off, like a teapot lid. There were two little clasps on either side of the skull, exactly like the clasps on my father’s King Edward cigar boxes, and little stitches or indentations ran round, like Dinky tyre tracks. The eyes were two perfect Os, but the nose was crinkly and jagged. Best of all was the jawbone, or mandible, wired up so that you could move it up and down and set her full set of teeth chomping (or did I imagine the teeth? was she just open-mouthed?)
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 14
