by Weldon, Fay
But Vilna? Alexandra didn’t like the thought of Vilna viewing Ned’s body before she, the wife, had done so. In fact, she didn’t want Vilna to see Ned dead at all. Ned scarcely knew Vilna. What he did know he didn’t like. Alexandra would say, ‘Oh, Vilna’s OK, just highly-strung and un-English.’ Ned would say, ‘She’s voracious. She’s a monster.’ Alexandra could see that Ned had been right about Vilna all along. She had hung around The Cottage ever since the news broke, like a vulture. In fact, thought Alexandra now, Vilna looked like across between a vulture and Ivana Trump. If Ned on his slab suddenly opened his eyes and saw Vilna and not Alexandra, who looked like a cross between a flamingo and Marilyn Monroe, he would be displeased.
2
In the morgue, Abbie and Vilna stared down at Ned’s body.
‘I went down to St James’ Infirmary,’
sang Vilna in her croaky voice.
‘For to see my true love there.
All laid out on a white table
So cold, so white, so bare.’
They stood a little distance from the body. There was full sunshine outside, but the morgue, a plain concrete structure, was windowless, very cold and artificially lit.
‘Ned liked me to sing,’ Vilna observed. ‘I have a very fine voice, don’t you think?’
‘Very fine,’ said Abbie.
‘He looks younger now he’s dead,’ said Vilna.
‘Do you think so?’ asked Abbie, politely.
‘Definitely,’ said Vilna. She had a middle-European drawl. She lengthened the vowels and thickened the consonants. It was as if the earthy spirit of her cunt rose up to issue from her mouth. ’He’s a very handsome man, don’t you think?’ said Vilna, and stretched out her hand to touch the bare, strong, muscled, cold, marble forearm. ‘Especially now that everything’s kind of tautened up around his chin.’
‘Was,’ said Abbie. ‘Not is. And I don’t think you should touch him.’
‘You English,’ said Vilna. ‘So inhibited! So cut off from proper emotion.’
Vilna moved to stand next to the corpse, and pulled back the sheet that reached to mid-chest. Ned was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of thin white cotton trousers, tightened and tied in a bow with a cloth drawstring. Vilna undid the bow, loosened the string and, ignoring the fly, simply turned the fine fabric back. Now they could see the crudely sewn autopsy scar which reached almost to the crotch. The penis lay dormant, firm and thick, as if carved in stone, part of the whole.
‘He’s only forty-nine,’ said Vilna, ‘and so good at it. What a waste!’
‘Was only forty-nine,’ said Abbie.
‘He doesn’t look at all dead to me,’ said Vilna.
Abbie got the better of her natural abhorrence at touching anything dead. She refastened the trousers. She pulled the sheet up to Ned’s chest. Someone had to. Vilna couldn’t be allowed to run riot.
Ned was the morgue’s only occupant. The place was situated in the yard of the undertaker’s office, where the ceremonial hearses were parked. The morgue’s shop-front faced directly on to the curve of Gurney’s High Street where the pavement narrowed almost to non-existence. There was an urn in the window containing dried flowers, and some dead flies trapped between the double-glazing. The front door had a nice little Georgian portico often pointed out to visitors to the town, but it was hard to open. Most clients used the side door. Who, in any case, wanted to be observed as they went in and out, going about their dismal business? The vehicle used for transporting corpses – ‘Private Ambulance – Lightfoot and Sons’ – was parked outside the porch, in the street, creating a traffic hazard on a blind curve. Few people understood why it was there, or what it was used for.
‘You’re interested in the Roman cemetery,’ said Mr Lightfootto Abbie as she emerged into the sun to wait for Vilna. The cold had got to her bones. ‘Tell your friends in the BohemianBelt that I had a bagful of bones from the University today. Returned from the Roman cemetery excavation. The Bishopis coming to inter the remains with the dignity they deserve.’ Mr Lightfoot was gaunt and thin and pale, as if he often went underground himself, in sympathy with his clients. People would pay him in advance, for fear their families would skimp on the funeral the better to prosper themselves.
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Abbie. ‘I’m glad to know he can finally overlook the fact that those are pagan and not Christian bones.’
‘I hope you lot turn up for the ceremony,’ said Mr Lightfoot, ’after the fuss you conservationists made. What this town needs is development, not undisturbed remains.’
‘Of course we’ll turn up,’ said Abbie. ‘Those of us who remain.’ Ned had been prime mover in the ‘Save the Roman Cemetery’campaign.
‘Makes no difference to me,’ said Mr Lightfoot, ‘if a person dies now or two thousand years ago. I agree with you: any corpse deserves the best. Mind you, I wouldn’t be saying the University sent back exactly the same bones as they took. Any old bones, any old period, they look like to me, from the back of any old curator’s shelf. But human, decidedly human. It’s the gesture that counts.’
Abbie and Vilna got into the car, unwilling to converse on such a subject at such a time.
‘Will Mrs Ludd be coming to view the body?’ asked Mr Lightfoot.
‘All in good time,’ said Abbie. ‘Is the temperature in there low enough?’
‘I’ll be the best judge of that,’ said Mr Lightfoot. ‘It’s customary that the first ones to view a body are the widow and the children, if any. I was surprised to see you two come up. But I expect you do things differently in the Bohemian Belt: you see the body in an artistic light.’
‘We do the best we can,’ said Abbie, ‘to deal with grief; like everyone else.’
‘Darling, do let’s get out of this doomy place,’ said Vilna, loud enough for Mr Lightfoot to hear. ‘Everyone hereabouts is quite, quite mad.’
Abbie manoeuvred the car backwards out of the yard. She was being harassed by Vilna; the Private Ambulance obscured her view of the road; she all but collided with a little hatchback coming into the yard. In the passenger seat, haggard, tear-stained and aghast, was a dumpy middle-aged woman. A white-haired man neither Vilna nor Abbie recognised was driving. His face was set and grim.
Abbie regained control of the car.
‘I’ve cricked my neck, darling,’ said Vilna. ‘You should be more careful.’
‘But did you see who that was?’ asked Abbie.
‘It was Lucy,’ said Vilna. ‘Of course.’
3
When Abbie and Vilna got back to The Cottage, Alexandra was weeding the pansies in the back garden as if nothing had happened. Diamond sat upright on the low stone wall which kept the rampant foliage of the back garden from falling into the house and allowed access to the back door to guests, milkman and canvassers alike. The front door was large and stiff, the path to it not in good condition, so it was seldom used: the back door did instead.
‘Was Ned all right?’ Alexandra asked Abbie. She looked through and beyond Vilna.
‘He was just fine,’ said Abbie.
Vilna snorted and said she must be off. She’d taken a chill. She should have known you’d need a jacket in a morgue. Could Abbie give her a lift back?
Abbie said she’d stay another night if Alexandra wanted. Alexandra said no, she was OK now. She could be on her own. Sooner or later you had to cope with the ghosts. Ned’s brother would be coming the next day. Abbie’s own family would need her.
Abbie asked if Alexandra wanted her to come with her when she went to see the body, and Alexandra said she’d go down on her own in good time: she expected even a body needed some rest from constant observation.
Vilna said, as their car drove away:
‘She was gardening without gloves. Can you believe that? One of our leading actresses? She’ll ruin her hands.’
‘Actor,’ said Abbie, but Vilna did not take the point.
Abbie had left the answer phone on. This meant, Alexandra realised, that wh
oever called would hear Ned’s voice on the tape. She went into Ned’s study and used the office phone to call the house and listened to Ned’s voice herself. She said in reply, ‘Hi, Ned, this is me,’ and hung up. She looked for the instruction booklet which would tell her how to change the tape, but failed to find it. She solved the problem by removing the phone jack from the wall. She did not wish to erase the tape in case Sascha, now four, wanted to hear what his father’s voice sounded like when he grew up. Except, of course, perhaps Sascha wouldn’t. Always a disappointment to have Gods turned into mortals. Who ever enjoyed hearing Einstein’s voice on CD Rom and realising he was just another old man?
Alexandra removed the more disturbing memories of Ned from the living room: a pair of his shoes, the proof of the critical essay on Ibsen he had been writing and hoping to finish at the weekend. She glanced at a column or two: apparently Ned found A Doll’s House the worst constructed and most sentimental of Ibsen’s works. Shoes and papers went into a cupboard to wait until she was prepared to face the job of clearing the evidence of his life away in a proper fashion. She ejected the tape from the video machine. Ned had apparently pressed ‘Stop’ some ten minutes into Casablanca. Why Casablanca? She, Alexandra, was the one who so admired Bogart. Ned would dismiss him as a performer rather than an actor. What had induced Ned to watch Bogart on a Saturday night? He could never tell her. She would never know.
Alexandra sat on the arm of the sofa and stared again at nothing in particular. She supposed this now familiar state of suspension served as some sort of absorption buffer for emotion: it was a drifting, waking sleep. It was not pleasant: on the contrary, but at least while she was in it unpleasant thoughts travelled in a loop, round and round, so you got immune to them. They did not branch out into anything different or worse. She imagined that an animal in a bad situation, caught in a trap, in a vivisection lab, lost and hungry, would feel no worse than this. If you had a poor memory, no language skills, very little sense of time, and a limited understanding of cause and effect, this was what it would be like. Buffered by these constraints, you would not suffer too much.
Alexandra’s hand went to sleep. She’d been sitting on it. She stood up and shook her arm until the blood returned. It was dark outside. The house seemed alive with unnatural noise. Bangings and creakings came from upstairs. She thought perhaps Diamond had gone up again, and went after him. On her way up the stairs she thought something invisible and unpleasant brushed past her and went ahead of her. She was terrified but went on. She stood at the top of the stairs and listened. Nothing. If anything, everything was now suddenly quieter than it ought to be, as if someone was saying if you don’t like noise, try quiet, see how you like that. She didn’t like it, but on balance it was preferable to bangs and crashes, a sense of whisperings and the movement of invisible entities. There was no sign of Diamond. Old houses would do this, of course. She should not attribute inexplicable sounds to supernatural causes. No doubt all her senses were unduly edgy.
Plumbing would echo through the wooden structure of an old house as referred pain did through the body. Impeded liver function, for example, would surface as a pain in the right shoulder. It had been a warm day; now it was cold: sudden changes of temperature could cause this structure, this material, to contract, that other to expand: noise could come from anywhere, just as did aches and pains.
All the same, Alexandra turned on all available lights. She even pushed open the door of her bedroom, which once had been her and Ned’s bedroom, and although she didn’t enter it because of the brooding presences within she slipped her hand round the door and turned on the light and went away. Now the house would glow like a beacon to anyone travelling along the top road to Eddon Gurney: we will not be defeated. The road was not much frequented these days – a new bypass siphoned off most of the heavy traffic, which was good for property prices but could make those who lived in The Cottage feel unduly isolated at the best of times. And these were not they: it was as if the here-and-now had slipped, in the aftermath of sudden death, into something shaky and incoherent.
Property prices, money, wills, insurance claims, documents, certificates: she would think about all these later in the week. There was no hurry. Hamish, Ned’s brother, would help her out. While the Doll’s House run lasted at least she had an income. Alexandra turned on all the downstairs lights as well. She went into the kitchen. Diamond was lying beneath the table and not in his basket. She thought she would stay in this room; it seeming less haunted than anywhere else in the house. She moved a chair so that when she sat her leg would be in contact with Diamond’s solid warmth, but no sooner had she sat than Diamond moved away. Well, he was entitled. He had been alone with the body for hours, without help of human kind.
Diamond must find her, Alexandra, neglectful and wilfully so. What did he know about the necessity of earning a living? His food just appeared in a bowl.
Abbie had put a jam jar of summer flowers from the garden on the table. They were browning and failing: they looked as if they needed water, but when Alexandra tested the level with her finger there was plenty there. Perhaps death in a house made flowers wilt sooner than they should?
Alexandra sat with her head in her arms at the kitchen table. She closed her eyes. She was on a speedboat with Ned: they were on a wide, wide lake; a white foamy wake spread out behind in the deep, still water. They were good close companions on a journey. The day was brilliant, glittery with light. The boat was making for a shore, a beach, a forest; there was a greeny-blue mountain in the background. The boat was suddenly faced with a wall of shadow: a fog. The light in front, over water, beach, forest, mountain, was washed with dark. The boat stopped a fraction before the fog began. Alexandra stayed with it, still in bright light. She remained as she was, suspended; but Ned didn’t stop: he spun suddenly on into the fog. Now he stood on the shore with his back to her; he seemed puzzled, forlorn. She watched him leave the beach and plod on into the dense, dark forest. She called out after him but he didn’t hear, and didn’t look back. There was no helping him. She knew he was beyond help. Nor did her heart go out to him. He was alone. The vision stopped, as a film stops. She was awake, but had not been asleep in the first place. The last frame stayed in her mind, indelible. Herself on the lake, in the sunlight – Ned going on into the forest: tired, so tired, without her blessing. The vision was framed like a picture in the glitter of her own life.
Alexandra tried to dismiss the vision – for so she saw it – as created by some sort of hotch-potch in her own mind. A doomy mixture. The bourn from which no traveller returns? Whatever a bourn might be. An illustration of Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Traveller’ in a volume she’d had as a child? The weary voyager turned away, limping on his stick, journeying on into the murk of the forest. But Alexandra could not convince herself that what she had seen was old stuff rehashed: no, it was too new, too vivid for that. Clearly fresh and framed in her mind. And the dream, or rather vision – and Alexandra could tell the difference, because she had such a clear impression of not having woken but simply of having been in a more perceptive and realer than real state before – was reassuring. She had a blueprint of what had happened, to which she could now refer. Alexandra stayed – Ned went on. Why she had made where he was going into so dire a place, she could not say. Why she had refused him her blessing she did not know. But at least she now had in her head an actual location where Ned could be. She had seen it, and was comforted.
There was an umbilical cord between them: his for her, hers for him. It would in time pull him back; or would she follow him? Perhaps she would have another vision soon: Ned would reappear on the beach to wait for her; the cloud would be gone; she would join him on the shore in the sunlight. They’d go on into some other form of life, together. That was how it went. She could not accept the finality of death. Here now, then suddenly not here. Impossible. The line between the two states was too sharp and clear to be acceptable. Everything else drifted from one stage to another, grew, developed
, faded, dispersed; why should this be different? She felt almost cheerful.
4
Alexandra, in need of conversation, plugged the phone jack back in the wall. It rang at once. During the evening there were seventeen calls.
Three people hung up as soon as she answered.
One asked for Lucy and then hung up when Alexandra said, ‘Wrong number.’ Alexandra felt bad for a minute, because after all it might have been for Lucy Lint, whose name was next to theirs in so many address books: Lint, Lucy; Ludd, Ned and Alexandra. Only the L-o’s could intervene and there weren’t too many of those. Though she’d once known a Loseley. But it was too late anyway: the callers had evaporated.
One from the theatre. Sam, the front-of-house manager, to say the understudy Daisy Longriff was atrocious, houses were bound to suffer as a result of Alexandra’s absence, but there was no fear of Daisy being asked to take over the role permanently. Alexandra must just relax and not return before time.
‘A whole crowd of us will want to come down to the funeral, darling,’ he said. ‘So long as it’s in the morning, and not on a matinee day.’
Alexandra said apologetically she didn’t think anyone Ned had savaged in his time – and there were many; that was the fate of critics, to make enemies – should feel obliged to come to his funeral. Sam said, ‘Ned was a man of integrity. The play was always the thing. He spoke as he found. He’ll be sorely and sincerely missed.’
Alexandra said, ‘You mean everyone will want to come to his funeral,’ and laughed for the first time since Sunday. She explained to Sam that her brother-in-law Hamish was coming down the next day from Edinburgh to arrange everything, including funeral dates; she’d do what she could; otherwise she supposed there’d be a memorial service sometime later, in London. ‘You’re in your competent mood,’ said Sam. ‘That’s better than “poor-little-me”. Look on the bright side: at least you were saved from him falling dead at your feet.’
