by Jilly Cooper
Determined to ensure a working funeral to launch his new career as a fundraiser, he had seized Sampson’s address book and files and bought a book of remembrance, so every celeb and captain of industry could sign their name and be tapped for donations or personal appearances later.
What a tragedy, observed Martin and Carrie, that Dad had bought a shredder advertised in the Daily Telegraph and spent so much time at the end destroying letters from illustrious mistresses and business acquaintances.
‘Family flowers only,’ said the announcement in both The Times and the Telegraph. Sampson would have been delighted that there were enough spring flowers to be found in the garden to decorate both the church and the house, so no one would have to fork out for florists.
‘Such a pity cow parsley isn’t out,’ sighed Romy, ‘so pretty and so cheap.’
The only thing Martin needed was for his literary brother-in-law Alan to dig out a few poems so they could get the service sheet printed, but he was still ostensibly interviewing monks up north.
‘I’m sure I saw him at Cheltenham on the news just now,’ said Romy beadily.
Once the children were in bed, Martin and Romy riffled through the albums to find a suitable photograph of Sampson to put on the service sheet.
‘What a handsome chap he was,’ sighed Romy. ‘And who’s that?’ She peered at a curling print. ‘My goodness, it’s you, Etta. You were glam in those days. I can’t believe it’s you. And who’s that gorgeous woman with Sampson? Heavens, it’s Blanche – wasn’t she lovely?’
‘Lovely now,’ said Martin warmly. ‘Blanche is an awfully sweet person, and quite inconsolable. I talked to her again today.’
At supper of chicken Marengo that had Carrie reaching for the salt and tabasco, Romy tried to shake Etta out of her blank-eyed grief.
‘You must talk to Mummy, she’s handled widowhood so splendidly. Mind you, she’s got so many friends who adore her and keep asking her to stay, she never has a moment to herself. Of course, she can’t get enough of Poppy and Drummond.’ Then, as Etta gave the rest of her chicken to Bartlett, ‘Are you taking anything in, Etta?’
‘Yes, you’re very kind,’ muttered Etta.
‘It’s good to talk,’ said Romy smugly.
‘Can you possibly wash a couple of white shirts for me, Mother?’ asked Carrie.
Romy was gratified to find a disc of ancient dog sick under the spare-room bed. Martin was gratified that in bed that night, at the prospect of never seeing his father again, he cried his eyes out and buried his face in his wife’s splendid breasts, which led to them having very noisy sex.
‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!’
Etta, in the next bedroom, put her pillow over her head. On the other side, Carrie’s rage redoubled that Alan still hadn’t arrived. She suspected he was at Cheltenham.
5
Blond, slight and delicate-featured, Alan Macbeth was a very good writer. He was also a drinker and gambler, whose thirst for winners was only equalled by his fondness for alcohol. Carrie, who liked to project an image of a two-career family, wanted Alan to write more successfully and constantly nagged him to work harder.
In fact Alan had spent a large proportion of his married life as a househusband, enabling his wife’s career to soar. Currently writing a book on depression, Alan most enjoyed carousing with his friends and chatting up the crumpet outside the school gates so assiduously that he had been nicknamed ‘Mother Fucker’.
Those blond, delicate looks, soft voice and languid manner misled women and more often their husbands into thinking that Alan was gay. Women felt safe with him, until it was too late.
‘Being married to a workaholic,’ Alan was fond of saying, ‘gives you a lot of days off.’
Despite leaving him so frequently to his own devices, Carrie had inherited her father’s insanely jealous nature and kept her husband very short.
Alan’s arrival at Bluebell Hill the following afternoon coincided with the end of the Cheltenham Festival. Having had a good win on the Gold Cup, he brought for Etta, to whom he was devoted, a tube of Berocca, a bottle of vodka, a huge bunch of freesias and a white cashmere scarf to relieve the black of her funeral outfit.
‘Poor old darling,’ he said, hugging her.
‘I can’t get used to the quiet and him not calling for me,’ mumbled Etta. ‘So awful I wasn’t there.’
‘Trust the old bugger to depart in Cheltenham week.’
‘Is that where you were?’ said Romy reproachfully.
To his wife, brother-and sister-in-law’s disapproval, Alan got stuck into the whisky. He then produced a lovely piece of Milton, appropriately from Samson Agonistes, for Martin to read.
‘Dad loved Bunyan – what about something uplifting from Pilgrim’s Progress?’ suggested Carrie.
‘Giant Despair had a wife and her name was Diffidence,’ quipped Alan. ‘Sums up your dad and mum to a T.’
Then, when they looked disapproving, he suggested Carrie might ‘read the bit about Mr Valiant-for-Truth and the trumpets sounding for him on the other side. We could hire a trumpeter to play the Last Post.’
‘That would cost money,’ complained Martin. ‘Dame Hermione is singing “Where’er You Walk” for nothing.’
‘Drummond wants to get up and describe all the nice things he remembers about Grampy,’ said Romy, putting on a soppy face.
‘Shouldn’t take long,’ murmured Alan, looking down his list. ‘And for you, Romy …’
‘I prefer to source my own material. I’ve found this lovely piece about only being in the next room.’
‘I love it,’ said Martin, crinkling his eyes engagingly. ‘“Call me by my old familiar name.”’
‘Stingy old bugger, in Sampson’s case,’ muttered Alan, who’d detested his father-in-law, a dislike that had been reciprocated.
Carrie often vanished to work in Sampson’s office, but she and Martin also kept sloping off round the house earmarking loot.
‘Don’t they remind you of the Walrus and the Carpenter,’ Alan remarked to Etta, ‘sobbing over the oysters? Boo hoo, I can manage the Sickert if you can accommodate the Nevinson.’
Etta didn’t laugh. Getting ice out of the fridge for Alan’s whisky, she proceeded to drop four cubes into Bartlett’s water bowl. She was haunted by a memory of Sampson sitting on the edge of the bed looking bewildered, not knowing where he was, like a torch battery running out. She shouldn’t have left him.
Alan wandered upstairs to talk to Hinton, the gardener, who was dismantling the hoists in Sampson and Etta’s bedroom. He and Ruthie, he said, though shaken and worried about their own future, were determined to look after Etta as long as possible.
‘Poor soul’s pushed herself too far. I wish she’d rest. The boss made her use teabags twice. He was so tight with money.’
‘I’m tight without money,’ sighed Alan, aware that he’d overspent at Cheltenham. Wandering downstairs and finding Romy and Martin sipping sherry in the drawing room, he poured himself another large whisky.
‘If you’re writing that book on depression,’ said Romy beadily, ‘perhaps you could counsel Etta. I’m drawing a blank. She’s selfishly refusing to listen, and I’m such a good listener.’
‘All roads lead to Romy,’ observed Alan and received a scowl from his brother-in-law.
Alan wished he hadn’t embarked on the bloody depression book. The advance had all been spent. Observing his wife, brother-in-law and Romy, however, Alan didn’t feel any of them were suffering from depression, more like suppressed euphoria. They were at last free of Sampson’s domination and anticipating riches to come. It was as though Saddam Hussein’s statue had crashed to the ground like a felled oak.
Alan, however, was desperately worried about Etta, who’d been bullied into a gibbering wreck by Sampson and, if her children got their way, would swiftly exchange one tyranny for another. He must protect her.
On the way to bed, having turned on Teletext to look at tomorrow’s runners, Alan noticed that o
ne of the expected guests at the funeral, an arms-dealing billionaire called Shade Murchieson, had a good horse in the 3.00 at Ludlow. Swaying upstairs, he found his wife already in bed, wearing a red wool nightshirt, working on her laptop, and went into the bathroom to clean his teeth.
‘So what’s the form?’ he asked.
‘We’ll have to sell.’
‘Poor darling Etta.’
‘You always stick up for her. She can’t be left rattling around in a huge house with only her memories.’
‘Particularly when you’re going to get four million for it.’
‘Someone’s got to think about money in our house,’ snapped Carrie and regretted it. In blue-striped pyjamas her husband looked about fourteen.
‘I don’t believe you’ve been interviewing monks,’ she snarled. ‘Romy saw you at Cheltenham.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, yes,’ came sobbing confirmation from next door.
‘Jesus!’ cried Carrie, who also longed to be made love to.
‘Death always makes people randy,’ grinned Alan, snuggling under the duvet beside her. Next moment he was asleep.
Hell, I shouldn’t have nagged him, thought Carrie. Unclenching her fists, she slid one hand between her legs.
Alan, who’d only been pretending to go to sleep, thought how nice it would be to see their daughter, Trixie, tomorrow. He’d missed her terribly since she’d been packed off to boarding school by Carrie, who’d been fed up with him chatting up the day-school mums.
Trixie at thirteen was alarmingly aware of her lethally emerging sex appeal. Like a principal toyboy, she had inherited her mother’s ragged dark hair and her father’s slenderness and delicate features. She was also clever. Alan often left her reading a book in the drawing room at night to find her still there finishing it in the morning.
Carrie was not domesticated. ‘My wife can’t even boil a rabbit,’ Alan was fond of saying. But despite living on hamburgers, crisps and chocolate, Trixie looked surprisingly healthy.
Occasionally the family would be rounded up for photographs for an upmarket newspaper, where Carrie would appear most unusually making marmalade or playing Scrabble with Alan and Trixie.
‘I’m a genius at juggling,’ Carrie would tell reporters.
‘Which consists of tossing Indian clubs around and bashing anyone who steps out of line,’ observed Alan.
Carrie had sent Trixie to Bagley Hall, an independent boarding school only a few miles from the barn at Willowwood. Martin and Romy, on the other hand, were delighted Willowwood was in the catchment area of an extremely good state primary, so they wouldn’t have to fork out.
6
The funeral was gratifyingly well attended. The high street was jammed by black-windowed, chauffeur-driven Astons, Mercs and Rolls-Royces. Eight helicopters landed in the field below the house. Private jets had to land at Bristol airport.
‘If Mother hadn’t been so possessive about her garden we could have had a runway here,’ grumbled Martin.
But he was delighted by the presence of Bart Alderton, whose airline had always used Bancroft engines, Kevin Coley, the pet-food billionaire, Freddie Jones, the electronic maestro, Larry Lockton, who was intending to flog a supermarket, Gareth Llewellyn, who had done property deals with Sampson, racehorse owners Lazlo Henriques and Shade Murchieson, whose horse had just won the Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham, plus many more who hoped to network and do business before the afternoon was out.
The church was packed. A marquee with a video link catered for the overflow, mostly local geriatrics and Sampson Bancroft employees.
‘Come to see the old bugger’s really dead,’ said Alan.
At the chancel steps a large, very handsome photograph of Sampson was lit up. His loud, commanding voice reverberated round the church, as one of his legendary speeches to the CBI was relayed on a big screen. The service sheet was adorned with a picture of him looking boyish and windswept in his first car.
Halfway up the church a row of pretty carers, who’d tended, read to and flirted with Sampson, sobbed to a counterpoint of keening from Sampson’s mistresses, led by the maîtresse-en-titre and public partner Blanche Osborne, who arrived in designer black and a David Shilling fascinator. Martin, who’d always had the hots for Blanche, found her a seat in the family pew.
‘Just spent three hours in make-up,’ grumbled Sampson’s other mistresses.
All eyes were inevitably drawn to the widow, who looked frozen, and arrived in a dowdy black coat and too summery a black straw Breton. Shopping trips to London, even taking in Chelsea Flower Show, had been ruled out once Etta had started looking after Sampson. She wore little make-up because as she dressed she had kept hearing Sampson’s voice demanding: ‘Why are you putting that muck on your eyes?’
Blanche rose to admit Etta to the family pew, pointedly kissing her rigid cheek, saying loudly: ‘Don’t reproach yourself, it could have happened to Sampy at any time.’
‘She left Daddy alone to die,’ hissed Carrie.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ muttered Alan, who’d been ringing his bookmaker, ‘Sampson left your mother enough during their marriage.’
Carrie had shocked the congregation by rolling up in a white shirt, black tie and dark grey pinstripe Savile Row suit.
‘She should have worn a hat and a skirt for her father’s funeral,’ Blanche whispered to Martin.
Dame Hermione Harefield, the great diva, a close friend of Sampson, was the next to arrive: a Scottish widow in a long black velvet cloak with the hood up. Seeing Blanche ensconced, Hermione insisted on forcing her large bottom into the family pew, so Etta was rammed even closer to Blanche. Hermione’s partner Sexton Kemp, a genial, charming film producer, and Blanche’s husband Basil sat in the row behind.
‘Why the hell did you allow Dad to shred his correspondence?’ Martin chided Etta.
The congregation was getting restless, but the church stilled as Trixie sauntered in. She was wearing a black dress lifted above her groin by a huge leather belt slung round her hips, a black beret on the side of her head, turquoise patterned tights and flat pumps. Ignoring her mother’s imperious wave summoning her to sit next to her in the family pew, Trixie sat down next to her father in the row behind and kissed him.
Up came the coffin, like a vast floral shopping basket.
‘Biodegradable,’ Martin explained to Blanche.
Bio-degrading, thought Etta. Sampson should have had oak.
‘Sampy in the basket,’ whispered Trixie to her father. They both shook with laughter.
The service kicked off with ‘Eternal Father’, because Sampson had been briefly in the Navy. Romy’s fine singing voice was drowned by Dame Hermione’s and taxed by a sadistic organist playing an octave too high.
‘“Man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain: he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them,”’ warned the vicar.
Despite Trixie’s defection, they were such a tight fit in the family pew that Etta and Blanche had to share a hassock embroidered with a white rabbit when they kneeled down, their knees rammed against each other. Etta wished Bartlett was sitting next to her; she hated leaving her all confused at home.
Dame Hermione sang ‘Where’er You Walk’.
The vicar, who’d enjoyed an excellent crate of claret from Sampson every Christmas, had wanted to pay tribute to his old friend but had been pushed aside by Martin, who, in a very white shirt, black tie and dark suit, cut a much handsomer figure than his sister. The mistresses gazed at him hungrily, as he told them how heart-warming and humbling it was that they’d all turned up ‘to burst our lovely church at the seams’.
‘I’m Martin Bancroft,’ he went on pompously. ‘Today is a thanksgiving service, a celebration of a brilliant man, a field marshal of industry. Dad suffered from a deadly degenerative heart disease called Howitt’s, terrifying in that it destroys organs, muscles and brain, wrapping itself around the sufferer like a boa constrictor, causing excruciating pain. I know Dad would h
ave liked me to express his gratitude to all the nurses, carers and doctors who looked after him so selflessly.’ Martin smiled around.
‘What about Granny?’ said Trixie loudly.
‘This illness can linger on for twenty years,’ droned on Martin, ‘and although I would have given the world for another five minutes with Dad, God was merciful.’
The captains of industry were getting restless – all on their BlackBerries, typing with their thumbs, increasing their millions, checking emails and texts. They had deals to close, mistresses to pleasure, shares to buy, conference calls to take.
Shade Murchieson, whose horse was favourite in the 3.00 at Ludlow, said ‘Fuck’ very loudly when it only came fourth. Trixie got the giggles. She thought Shade was cool.
‘This is going on too long,’ complained Drummond, catching the mood.
‘If this is Grandpa’s funeral,’ grumbled Poppy, ‘where’s Grandpa?’
‘In that basket, stupid,’ said Drummond.
The audience rocked with laughter.
Time for the readings: Carrie was meant to kick off with Mr Valiant for Truth arriving in heaven and the trumpets sounding for him on the other side, followed by the Last Post.
But she suddenly lost it, couldn’t get any words out and burst into tears.
An anguished Etta was about to run and comfort her but was forcibly restrained by Martin, secretly thrilled that his sister had screwed up, as the organ tactfully launched into ‘Dear Lord And Father’. Etta looked up at a stained glass window of knights in armour fighting, and identified with a plump strawberry roan sidling away from the conflict.
‘Still small voice of calm,’ sang the congregation.
No voice could have been less still, small or calm than Sampson’s, thought Etta, and blew her nose on a piece of kitchen roll, so far removed from the lace handkerchief wafting Miss Dior with which Blanche mopped her eyes.
