by Bel Mooney
‘Where’s Miss Ryan, Daphne?’
‘She isn’t feeling very well, but I don’t think she needs to rehearse really, do you, Mr Wright?’ Daphne was always punctilious about surnames; sometimes it bothered her that her own unattractive Christian name was common property, and yet she disliked the ‘Miss’.
‘Playing her bit of Chopin, is she?’
‘No, Mozart, this year – I think.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded, sagely.
They all stood awkwardly in front of the stage, as if here for the first time ever. Adrian Wright kept telling each new arrival that he found it hard to get away because his barmaid had rung to say she had a migraine, but that it was important that he came for his Sally’s sake. His daughter clutched her flute case to her chest. ‘She’s a bit nervous, aren’t you love?’ he said loudly for the fifth time, so that the thin twelve year old flushed scarlet and muttered a strangled, ‘Oh Dad!’ Ray Tilley referred constantly to a piece of paper, then stared at the ceiling, his lips moving soundlessly, whilst Margaret Ainslie chattered to her friend Jean Orton about the desirability of wearing ‘dressy’ clothes. ‘Oh, I’m definitely wearing my red, Margaret, the one with the sequins. People like it; makes it more of an occasion if you’ve made the effort.’ The fifteen members of Winterstoke school choir chased each other round the hall, giggling each time their ever-decreasing circles brought them closer to Lee Simmonds and his three friends from the estate, who stood in the centre of the hall dangling their guitars like necklaces and grinding cigarettes underfoot.
Daphne consulted her list. ‘Er … what did you decide to sing, Mrs Orton? You weren’t sure.’
‘I’m going to do “My Way” again. It always goes down well. And then “All The Way”.’
‘Two Ways,’ Adrian Wright grinned, ‘Or will they stand up and shout, “No way”? I tell you what, Jean, why don’t you sing “Over the Hills and Far away”?’
‘I don’t know the words.’
‘Oh gawd, Jean. Go and sing over the hills and far away … see? Joke!’ The two women raised their eyes to heaven, but laughed.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late.’ The rector looked nervously around, and raised his hand to his mouth in a characteristic gesture. ‘What do I have to do?’ He was a tall man with a beard, still in his early thirties and ‘too young’, Eleanor always said, ‘for the job’. His beard gave him the look of a disciple but he was not robust, and allowed his eyes to slide off sideways whenever a parishioner approached.
‘Edwardian music hall – that’s what we want,’ said Adrian Wright before Daphne could open her mouth. ‘Slick back your hair, put your wing collar on, and shout, I say, I say, I say.’ The Reverend Andrew Dunn looked panic-stricken and started to murmur, ‘Oh, I don’t think I can quite, you know …’
Daphne glared at the publican, and took the rector lightly by the arm, steering him away. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said soothingly, ‘I’ve written out a few lines for you, a few suggestions. All you have to say is things like this, (she looked down and read in a flat voice) “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the jolliest, japiest, most jovial joker of them all, Jack Ainslieeeee!” That sort of thing, you know, to make it go with a swing. A sort of music hall approach.’ Her tone was false, and her cheeks reddened, but as the rector blinked and started to speak, Adrian Wright was upon them again, swinging his battered trumpet. ‘Never mind, Reverend, if you forget your words I’ll give them a quick blast of “Oh God our Help in Ages Past!”!’
The rehearsal was not, as Daphne told Enid later, a success, although she managed at least to establish the order of events. Adrian Wright was determined to start the proceedings with a melancholy rendering of ‘Stranger on the Shore’, but was persuaded to try the Trumpet Voluntary as well, and the loudest notes sped uneasily towards their target, falling short and transfixing Daphne’s smile on her face. Ray Tilley gave ‘The Green-Eyed Yellow Idol’ with his face buried in the sheaf of paper, but tried to look up, losing his place each time so that the dramatic monologue was punctuated by muffled apologies. Then he went on to recite a word-perfect ‘Albert and the Lion’, his face frozen with effort and his accent wavering between Blackpool and deepest Cornwall. The school choir sang ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘This Little Light of Mine’, but their performance collapsed as Lee Simmonds and his friends, collectively known as ‘Flick’, gyrated and clicked their fingers to the rhythm of the folk song, ignoring Daphne’s reproving hisses.
Like a marionette Jean Orton waved her arms in stiff gestures as she bellowed her Shirley Bassey imitation, making the microphone splutter, but much admired by the three youths, who thought she sounded like someone on the television, especially with the American accent. She went on to ‘All the Way’ with such suggestiveness in her voice that the boys roared approval and the rector turned pink.
Margaret Ainslie was too nervous; her thin soprano cracked on the top note in ‘Tonight’ from West Side Story, and lost itself in her abdomen in ‘Summertime’ so that twice she asked the pianist to start again, and Adrian Wright looked at his watch and bawled ‘Time, gentlemen, please!’ All through, the rector read his introductions in the heavily jovial voice he reserved for Family Services, when he would stare at the few children in the congregation and ask rhetorical questions (‘Who can say why Jesus washed his disciples’ feet? Because they were dirty, weren’t they? And when we’re dirty we wash, don’t we? I hope we all wash, at least …’) which made them squirm and look down. He was regarded with awe by Sally Wright, who, at Daphne’s suggestion, performed her flute solo with her back to them all, so that she would not be distracted. ‘She can’t do it like that on the night,’ her father muttered. ‘Her mother’s bought her a new dress with lace all down the front; her mother’ll be disappointed.’ After three long songs by ‘Flick’, consisting chiefly of Lee Simmonds snarling incomprehensibly into the microphone whilst the drums thudded behind him and the little choir children clapped their hands, Daphne thought she could close the rehearsal. ‘But what about my Jack?’ asked Margaret with a worried frown. ‘His new jokes are really good, they are; I can’t think why he isn’t here yet.’
‘Never mind,’ Daphne said abstractedly, wiping her forehead. ‘Oh, I almost forgot, we’ll have the Queen at the end. And Reverend … er … Andrew, do you think that your wife might draw the raffle?’
Mrs Dunn was a mouse-like woman, given to wearing brogues even on the hottest days, and despised by women like Jean Orton and Sheila Simmonds for ‘not making more of herself. For a wild moment the rector imagined they might ask her to dress up as a saloon bar floosie, and said hastily, ‘Oh, I don’t think she would quite like to, you know, she isn’t very … Wouldn’t Mrs Anderson do the job well? She is more the type, I feel.’
There was a silence. Then Daphne said stiffly, ‘Well, I don’t honestly think, in the circumstances.’ He crimsoned.
‘Oh, I am sorry. It was a foolish lapse of memory, Miss Ryan. And I am remembering Mrs Anderson in my prayers everyday.’
‘I’m sure we all are.’
‘Do you think Dr Anderson will come back, Reverend?’ asked Margaret, timidly, discomforting him with the expectancy on her face.
‘Oh Mrs Ainslie, it’s not for me to say. All I can say is that God’s will must be done, even though our faith may sometimes be tested.’
The youths were revving their motorbikes outside; Adrian Wright called his goodnights in a loud, embarrassed voice, and pulled his daughter away as if something indecent were being said. He was almost knocked over by Jack Ainslie, who rushed through the door in his old brown work-clothes.
‘Oh Jack, where’ve you been?’ Margaret began, with the rising note of the wife who feels let down, but he held up his hand to her, his face drawn. ‘They’ve found him,’ he said in a hoarse whisper, as if the secret was not to be told, ‘up about two and a half mile from Rookcombe. He’s dead, Mags. Mrs Anderson told me. I been with her the last hour and a half. Heart attack, it were, or that’s what they thin
k at first glance. And he always seemed so fit, he always seemed as fit as me.’ He shook his head.
The village hall, and the few people left in it, seemed to melt away around Daphne and Margaret; there was a sense of folding up, of girls hurried away by their waiting mothers, and the rector straightening up, as one who knows at last which path to take. Margaret took Jack’s arm in silence; they looked at each other with identical expressions and no need to speak, whilst Daphne crumpled her list into a ball and pressed it against her fleshy cheek.
Much later, as she pulled on her enveloping winceyette nightdress, Daphne wondered if Enid had been right to persuade her not to visit Eleanor that night. Conscious of a reluctance to approach the Andersons’ dark driveway, she had agreed that perhaps Paul should be left to comfort his mother. In any case, she thought, Jack and Margaret will have gone, and the rector is certain to have called; and my duty is to be here with Enid, after the shock. She gazed at the mirror and slapped some cream on her face, making the round image more pale, more ugly. It wavered at her from the glass, impassive, not moved to tears as she expected. She was puzzled; David was dead and she wanted to find release, now that the mystery was over, in tears. But something lurked at the back of her mind, puzzling her even more by bobbing at her like a shadowy threat in a bad dream, and keeping her away from Eleanor. Perhaps I don’t really care about any of them, after all, she thought later, lying sleepless, and listening to Enid’s rumbles from next door. But the thought was too lonely; Daphne could not bear it and switched her thoughts, with deliberate sentimentality, to Eleanor, until at last she felt a softening inside.
At that moment Eleanor was sitting alone watching the late news, which did not mention David. Nor had she expected it; ‘After all,’ she thought, ‘it only matters to me in the end, and one more heart attack is not news. Missing people, people searching, people missing, people lost, all the time, and so what does it matter if this is over, now? It’s a very common death, after all, just as he told me.’ She tried, by a great effort of will, to recapture the grief she had felt earlier, but only emptiness was left. ‘Shock,’ she said aloud.
Eleanor had once attended a study group on the effects of bereavement, and so she fixed her mind on her own feelings with a tiny glimmer of satisfaction that she understood the processes. Yet there was something that bothered her, which she did not understand at all. They described exactly where David’s body had been found by a man out walking, but she could not explain why he was there. The policewoman had seen her confusion, and supplied a kind explanation, something about a sudden impulse to take a walk and the unaccustomed strain on the heart. Sudden? Nothing David did was sudden; once or twice she had told him sharply that he thought much too much about everything. So what was he doing there? She wrinkled her nose, and focussed her eyes on the wallpaper pattern, as though looking for clues in its lines. She found herself imagining a rendezvous with somebody, and her heart thumped. To stop it she rose, pulled out the plug of the television set, and opened the curtains, ready for morning. She saw her own image in the blackness outside, and reflected with some bitterness that it was typical of Winterstoke that not one person, since Jack, had been to see her to offer condolences.
That evening The King’s Head had buzzed, though quietly. Even Brian Simmonds felt a shifty shame that made him duck his head when Adrian Wright informed yet another newcomer to the bar that the doctor had been found. At the words ‘heart attack’ (delivered with a half-shrug and a pious expression that denied all previous gossip) men would nod as if they had always known. In the single ‘Oh’, before all the commonplaces of sympathy (‘Poor man, and him only in his fifties … Feel sorry for her … terrible thing …’) was the chill awareness of the closeness of death. It penetrated all the corners of the bar, and flickered wanly from the mirrors behind the bottles, and ascended to the ceiling in clouds of cigarette smoke, deadening the conversation and making the rattle-tinkle of the pinball machine sound echoing and unnaturally loud.
Alex Cater’s Guinness clung to his short moustache like scum at the river’s edge, just out of reach of his tongue. ‘I remember when old Cheggers finally bought it. Nearly back, white cliffs of Dover in sight, then bang! Rogue Messerschmitt … Jerry trying to get himself the Iron Cross. Anyway, his wife hit the man who told her. It got some of them that way – wouldn’t believe the bad news. Mind you, in the war it was all different. None of us knew if we’d be coming back. You ran out on to that tarmac, and then it was just between you and them. But let me tell you, the Messerschmitts had nothing on the Typhoons, and Jerry knew it too.’
‘What happened to your old lady, Alex? Don’t remember if you told us that.’ Brian Simmonds sometimes heard his own voice utter words that were in advance of his heart in malice, and took him by surprise. The old man flushed, and drank deeply, then fumbled in his packet for a cigarette. ‘Embarrassing subject, Brian, I thought I had told you. Don’t like to talk about it, but I’ll tell you this for nothing. There’s never been anyone else for me, even though she did run off with that bloody Yank. You know what we used to say about them, don’t you? Over …’
‘… paid, over-sexed and over here, yes, yes, yes. You told us that too.’ He yawned. Alex Cater sat in silence, staring into his glass, the affair of the doctor forgotten.
She stood with a dustpan in one hand and a duster in the other, and a nervous hovering look, but eager too, as though Margaret thought that by seeming to offer comfort she might receive some herself. At last she said, ‘I’m sorry about your poor father, Paul. We all feel it, we really do.’ Her eyes were huge; they looked at him with a hopefulness he could not bear.
‘I know,’ he said shortly.
‘It’s always hard to know what to say, to a family, but Jack and I, well you know, Paul; we loved your Dad as if he were one of our own, as you might say. My Jack broke his heart last night, he really did.’
‘Don’t.’
‘I’m sorry, love, I shouldn’t rattle, it’s upsetting for you. But I know how I felt when we lost our Todd; I didn’t want everybody to keep quiet about him as if he’d never been there.’ She stopped and looked down at her hands with surprise, as though wondering why she was clutching the unmatching objects. ‘Look at me, Paul. I never thought I’d be doing all my usual things, and the doctor passed away. Shall I leave the work?’
‘Oh no, please just carry on.’
He stood perfectly still in the hall, then sat down at the foot of the stairs. ‘Oh, please let me escape, please let me go back to London, let me get out of all this,’ was the continuous refrain in his head. A monstrous alien in a landscape suddenly diminished, Paul felt as if an elbow moved with sudden carelessness would bring the house crashing down around him, and his panic made him very still. He could hear Margaret moving around the kitchen. He wanted her to leave, yet the woman was tending to their possessions as if such loving attention to the lamp might summon up a benevolent genie with the gift of miracles.
For a long time he did not move. At last he rose, and shut the front door quietly behind him. It was the stifled feeling, rather than a desire for company, which made him turn in the direction of Conrad Hartley’s house, and he walked with his head bowed, as if in shame.
‘I suppose you’ve heard,’ he said, with some aggression, as the old man stood aside to let him enter.
‘Yes, Jack Ainslie came and told me, then Daphne rang. I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Paul.’
‘Well, don’t then.’
‘Paul?’
‘Don’t tell me how sorry you are. You’re sorry, I’m sorry, Mum’s sorry, Jack and Margaret are sorry, and the whole bloody village is sorry but what’s the point of everybody saying so? We all say we’re sorry, but what about? It’s not our fault!’
Conrad said gently, ‘We’re sorry because we haven’t David with us any more, Paul. People say the simple and obvious thing because that’s what they really mean. Would it sound better if I said, “I have sorrow”, instead?’ Paul was not listen
ing. He sat on the edge of the chair, his fists clenched.
‘God, I hate it all! I’ll tell you something, Conrad. I’m sorry for myself, and I’m furious with Dad for dying. Why did he have to go off and die, so that I have to be here in this blasted village with everybody telling me how sorry they are?’
His voice was harsh in the quiet dusty room. Conrad stared at the white-faced boy – still a boy, although he would think otherwise – and felt his first shock, and distaste dissolve into pity.
‘How is Eleanor?’ he asked.
Paul hung his head. ‘Gone, to see him,’ he said in a whisper, ‘to identify him. I did offer to go with her, but she didn’t want me. Daphne’s gone with her. The police offered to take them, but she’s driven herself. You know what she’s like.’ Conrad nodded. Paul went on talking, very quickly, ‘There’ll have to be a post-mortem. The inquest is tomorrow, but that’s just a formality so I’m not going. They’ll have to adjourn it till they get the postmortem report. It’s all so grisly; seems unnecessary too, dragging her through all that. I mean if Dad’s had a heart attack, that’s all we need to know. She says so too. But she seems calm enough now. You know Mum; she’ll always cope, always make people admire her. I’m the one …’
Conrad looked at him quizzically, saying nothing. ‘I’m the one who gets it all wrong, doesn’t do the right things, and all that. I can’t even respond properly to my own father’s death. I don’t actually believe it, or I won’t. Do you know, I was relieved when she wouldn’t take me this morning. I didn’t want to see him. And yet I have a different picture of myself, somewhere at the back of my head. The ideal son, and all that shit. You know, in a dark suit, and nice tie, with a good job, being a support and comfort to my aged parents. Now I’d be taking my father’s place, of course, with my arm round my poor mother … But it never works out.’
