The Stillness the Dancing

by Wendy Perriam

  ‘Good God! Whatever happened? Are you all right?’

  Morna opened her eyes. A dowdy woman in a blue nylon overall and fingerless woollen mittens had entered from the sacristy, and was standing over her, carrying a vase of tulips and forsythia. A church worker. Morna knew the type. Many of her mother’s friends spent half their lives in the service of the church, women betrothed to God, wooing Him with Brasso and Quickshine and endless flower arrangements, rewarded with smiles and titbits from the priest. She forced a smile herself, tried to struggle up. The woman only frowned.

  ‘Shall I call a doctor? Are you ill?’ The voice was sharp, officious, made the word ‘ill’ sound culpable.

  ‘No, no. I’m quite all right.’ Morna half sat up, fell back again. She had died a moment, still felt weak and dizzy. ‘I’ll be … okay in a second.’

  ‘You gave me quite a turn, stretched out like that as if … Did you faint or something?’ The mittened hand yanked roughly at a tulip which had fallen out of line.

  ‘No, I … er … didn’t. There’s … nothing wrong with me. I’m … absolutely fine.’ It had become automatic now. ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine.’ There weren’t words for what death did to you, and ‘fine’ was no more meaningless than any.

  ‘Well, you’ve no right to be lying there, in that case. What do you think you’re doing, sprawling on the floor right up near the altar? Kindly get up at once.’

  There was no kindly in the tone. Morna used the wooden trestles as a prop, pulled herself up against them. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled, smoothing her crumpled skirt. Best to placate this martinet. A church worker could be useful, would know the details of the funeral, had probably cleaned the church for it herself, set out the hassocks and the service books.

  ‘Is …? Was …?’ The words died on her lips. The woman had put her vase down and was standing four-square in front of her, blocking her way, her breastless chest blazoned with a medal of the Sacred Heart dangling from a heavy silver chain, symbol of her authority, her piety.

  ‘Father Stroud’s not here at the moment, but I’ll have to report this, you realise. We can’t have people just …’

  ‘No, no, please. I’m leaving now.’ Morna dodged round one side of her, stumbled back along the aisle, not daring to run until she had actually closed the door, put a shield of solid oak between her flimsy self and that woman’s laser eyes. She fell into the taxi, urged the driver on.

  ‘The Queen’s Road Crematorium, please, as quickly as you can.’

  The driver turned the sports news up, made a lurching u-turn.

  Crematorium. Morna tried the word again, whispering it to herself. Odd how words she had hardly used before seemed now so full of pain. Strange, too, that a devout Roman Catholic family should have decided on cremation at all. It had been forbidden in her own day on the grounds that it denied the Resurrection. She wished it were forbidden still. It was wrong for David—too modern and too final. Barbarous to burn bodies, reduce someone you loved to a handful of cinders. At least with a grave there was something you could visit, some spot you could hallow with your tears or flowers. David’s ashes would be his parents’ private property, interned in their small sitting room, sharing the mantelpiece with his boyhood photographs. She would be shut out—was nobody up here, just a slumped anonymous figure in a taxi, distorted by the smeared and dirty glass.

  She tried to distract herself. Wolves were tipped to win away; the three-thirty had been scrapped. The streets were emptier now. They were winding through the outskirts of the town, half-built housing estates, still bleeding at the edges, blocking out the bleak brown hills beyond. The driver turned off left, jolted through tall iron gates, gleaming in the rain. There was a patch of garden, sodden grass, one shivering tree imprisoned in an iron cage, one bare and gaping flowerbed. All the flowers were blooming on the hearse instead, growing up from the black and shiny roof, ranged all about the empty space inside it. Minutes ago, that oblong had been David. Was he burnt already, raked and poked by careless crematorium staff? Bunny had told her that all the different bodies were often burnt together, to save time and fuel, so that the ashes you received might be mixed with someone else’s. There were scores of current lawsuits in the States, she’d said—outraged people objecting that their loved ones might be fused with whores or murderers. Did it happen over here as well—David’s unique and special self profaned?

  The driver had stopped, was waiting to be paid, but Morna still sat motionless. How could that glossy swanky funeral car have carried David—David who rode an ancient bicycle or went everywhere on foot, David who loathed show and ostentation?

  ‘£5.30, please,’ the driver said a second time, making the ‘please’ sarcastic now.

  Morna stared at the contents of her purse—silver, coppers, notes. It meant nothing any longer, as if she were in a foreign country where the currency was alien, or like a child who had not yet learnt to count. There was only feel and weight—heavy silver, flimsy notes. How much did £5.30 weigh? She stood dithering, trickling coins from hand to purse and back again, dropping one or two. Suddenly, she thrust the whole purse through the window, pressed it into the driver’s hand.

  ‘Could you take what I owe you? And a tip, of course. And the waiting-time. Or is that included? Take whatever you want.’

  He stared at her incredulously, cigarette drooping from his lips.

  ‘Go on,’ Morna urged. If he grabbed too much, who cared? Perhaps his wife had died, his son drowned.

  ‘Thanks, Miss.’ He started extracting notes. ‘Thank you very much indeed.’

  He was right—she was a Miss—unmarried, without a man. David was an oblong edged with flowers. She turned her face away as she passed the funeral cars, their drivers smoking and chatting as if this were just a tea break. A dark-suited official was standing at the entrance of the chapel.

  ‘If it’s Mrs Carter’s funeral, would you please wait in the waiting-room.’

  Waiting-room. Doctors, dentists. Extractions. Pain and loss.

  ‘No, it’s Mr David Anthony’s.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re late, then.’

  Far too late. A month late. If she hadn’t left the island, he …

  ‘You’d better just slip in and stand at the back.’

  The man was holding open the door for her. She stepped inside the chapel, stifled a cry as she saw the coffin resting on a platform in the front. Six foot by two of chipboard, veneered to look like oak, plastic handles simulating brass. That was David. No. No … It couldn’t be. She shut her eyes, appalled. What would she see if she wrenched that wooden lid off? Would David be wearing his old and balding corduroys, or wrapped in a winding sheet? Had the gulls pecked out his eyes? She took a step towards the coffin. She had to get him out, warm him up, give him the kiss of life. Even bits of him would be better than nothing. Nothing.

  She couldn’t seem to stand straight, sagged back against the door. It appeared to be still raining, even inside, things blurring, misting up, her clothes damp and sticking to her, water dripping down her face. Must keep still. It would clear up soon if she didn’t lose control. This was a public place. Mustn’t shout or sob or she would disturb those people in the pews. Why were there so few of them, and why such dowdy creatures, fidgeting and shuffling in their dripping macs, gabbling the responses as if they were multiplication tables? A man turned round to glance at her—watery eyes, nicotined moustache. The woman next to him had an insistent phlegmy cough; the hem of her black dress undone, dipping down beneath a shabby coat. This couldn’t be David’s funeral—this smell of damp humanity, this cramped and stifling chapel with its shiny khaki paint, its old-fashioned water pipes lumbering along the walls. It might have been a waiting-room itself for all that was sacred about it. Even the priest, droning at the other end in a flat South Midlands accent, looked somehow wrong. He had no majestic vestments on, just a creased white surplice trimmed with lace, too fancy for the grey serge trousers and butch black shoes protruding from it. A purple
stole hung around his thick bull neck. His jaw was heavy, stubborn. You could hardly imagine him holding God in his hands each day—more likely a pickaxe or a shovel. Perhaps he wasn’t a priest at all, just a standin or an understudy. Maybe the whole thing was a play, the coffin just an empty box, the mourners hired. If they were really David’s friends, they should be ascetics, intellectuals, high-minded scholars beside themselves with grief and loss.

  She peered towards the front row—David’s parents, or their understudies. She could see only their backs—a slight stooping man with thinning hair, a woman in a navy Crimplene trouser-suit with a cheap scarf at the neck, printed with poodles’ heads. ‘How dare you,’ Morna muttered, pummelling one clenched fist in the palm of the other hand. ‘How dare you dress like that and look like that or …’ She watched the woman’s shoulders heave, her hand keep dabbing at her eyes. No, not an understudy. That five-foot-nothing female with her pathetic poodles, her over-permed and brittle fizz of hair, had been summoned to a mortuary, made to peer at the remnants of the body she had given birth to, identify the pieces as her son.

  There was an older woman beside her, with grey wisps of hair straggling from a black felt hat, a shapeless coat reaching almost to her ankles. A grandmother? David had never mentioned one. Even from the back, Morna could see her grief—the hunched and hopeless shoulders, the face stifled in her hands. She could feel her own eyes stinging, the anguish of his family streaming down her cheeks. There was no sign of the brother, that fair, solemn, small-boned, brilliant brother whom David had worshipped half his life. Perhaps he was too busy with Good Works overseas to come home for the funeral. No sign of anybody young. Where were David’s own friends? Was she the only one?

  The only-one crying. She jabbed fiercely at her eyes. The others were more controlled, reciting the responses, joining in the service. She forced herself to concentrate. The priest was still droning on.

  ‘We commend to you, O Lord, the soul of your

  servant David …’

  ‘May his soul and the souls of all the …’

  Here, they believed in souls, but not the sort she knew. Soul had become a sexual word for her. Body and soul, with the body coming first. Body in a coffin now. Bits of body. She heard a sobbing choking sound. Someone turned round and stared at her. Had she made that noise? She bit her septic finger to confine the pain, stop her crying out again.

  The priest was sprinkling the coffin with holy water. ‘May your holy angels take him and lead him home to Paradise …’

  She was David’s seraph, his holy angel sporting in a double bed. The only one he had ever shared a bed with. Punished for it now. At her own wedding, she had knelt right up in the front near the altar, near the trestles. Nuptial Mass, Requiem Mass. Labels which meant nothing. The sacrament of marriage had been just a charade to placate her mother, to please a God who had already jilted her. This was a sham as well, this hollow dreary service for a man who believed in ritual. The words were empty formulae, worn out, as David had complained himself—symbols which had lost their power, phrases which had frayed to platitudes. This was a standard service. Nothing unique in it, nothing tailor-made. Tinker, tailor, beggarman, corpse. David loved music and they had sung no hymn. David had drowned in his prime, in a daring selfless quest for knowledge, and they had buried him with the same stale and sluggish words they might have used for a ninety-year-old dotard who had shrivelled in his bed.

  She stared in horror at the coffin. It was moving, moving. She hid her face in her hands, tried to calm her breathing, before daring one more look. Still moving—steadily, remorselessly—gliding on those bland oiled automated rollers through ice-blue velvet curtains.

  ‘Stop!’ she shouted. The shout aborted, hurt her throat. She tried a second time. No sound came out. She was dumb, dumb, impotent again. Why was no one else objecting, rushing up to snatch his body back, save it from the fire? Why were they all so passive and accepting, even his parents just standing there, heads bowed, while their son slid inch by inch away from them? Only the last two corners of the coffin showing now. Then nothing, nothing. The play was over, the curtains drawn again. Everyone leaving before the curtain calls, shambling out through the side door near the altar while she stood, broken, at the back.

  She stared at the floor. Must control herself. Polished wooden floor. Straight lines of the floorboards. Parallel lines. Order. Everything all right. ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine.’ The black-suited official hovering again.

  ‘Could you please vacate the chapel. We need it for another service.’

  Vacate. Empty. Void. Vacare. Vider. Only words. Someone else had died. Production line. Strict appointment system. She could already see the second hearse, the new knot of huddled mourners. ‘God is compassion and love’.

  She slunk out, concealed herself behind the angle of the wall. They mustn’t see her. She was a mistress—worse than that, a murderer. Might they not suspect her? Cormack must have told the police about the woman who turned up at David’s cottage, stayed with him all those weeks, the woman he had seen himself, had taken back on his boat. The police would have told the parents in their turn. Had they gone further, speculated, connected the woman with the death? There-had been no inquest, no fatal accident enquiry. It was a case of simple drowning and she had long since left the island when the accident occurred, but all the same …

  She stared at David’s mother, eyes red, trousers mud-splashed, arm in arm with the confused and shaking grandmother who was mumbling to herself, her wrinkled mouth opening and shutting, her weak blue eyes unfocused. The father stood apart, picking at a loose thread on his coat, screwing up his face against the fine but steady drizzle which still slurred the sky. People were crowding round, entangling their umbrellas, offering sympathy. Fine, fine, fine. Resurrection. Death as sleep. Morna longed to go up herself, add her soft lies to the rest, but she had left it far too late. She should have phoned back immediately, when Mrs Anthony had first reported the death. David’s mother had been hysterical with grief and all she had done was shout abuse at her, refuse even to believe her. She could have found her number, tried to make amends, explained her own state of shock. But she had remained out of touch, aloof.

  Even now, if she made some overture, she would only embarrass the poor woman. She was not only a mistress and a suspect, but a stuck-up southern stranger. She had heard their accents, the father’s broad Stafford, the mother’s softened with a Shrewsbury burn How could accent still divide people; how could it even matter on a day like this? Yet they might be upset by it. Their backgrounds were so different, they might think she was affected, some snobbish phoney female who had provoked their son, driven him to …

  It must have been hard for David, caught between two worlds, changing his own accent as he changed his school and status. Scholarship boy, he had called himself so casually. It was only now she saw the pain in it. David had been educated out of his class, remodelled, alienated, wrenched away from all that was familiar. That would explain his guardedness, his lack of social ease. Public school boys were cruel, could pounce on a provincial accent or a Crimplened poodled mother as a serious lapse of taste. David had groomed himself to fit their standards, made himself a hybrid, concealed his humble origins even from her, presuming she would mock them in her turn. How wrong he was—and how ironical that she had found out after all. A scholarship boy killed in the cause of scholarship.

  She watched his parents climb into the funeral car, their figures reflected and distorted in the black gloss of its flanks. They were probably squandering all their money on David’s death, as they had spent their last penny on his education. Undertakers growing fat on corpses. Death as cash. Death as profit-sheet. The cars purred away, making room for the fleet drawn up behind them. The second coffin was carried slowly out, almost identical to David’s—the same shade and stain of wood, the same toupée of stiff flowers. Morna stood and watched. Should she return to the chapel, attend another funeral? She could spend days and days up here, mou
rning strangers. Nothing else to do now. The official was eyeing her again, suspicious like the church worker. She had become a down-and-out, a vagrant, in just a day, the sort of rootless aimless person who had to be kept tabs on, shooed out of public places.

  She removed herself from view, turned towards the covered passageway where they displayed the wreaths and flowers. The colours were so bright they hurt her eyes. The central exhibit was three free-standing letters made of garish yellow carnations and spelling D-A-D. Dad? David? She peered closer, saw the label on the roped-off square of concrete—‘Mr Colin Thorpe’. Mr Thorpe had many wealthy friends, judging by the banks and banks of flowers—exotic swathes of hothouse blooms and fern, bravura displays with satin streamers and silver lurex ribbon. David had far fewer. His smaller square of concrete was also labelled like a showcase with name and date. In the centre stood a three-dimensional cross of amputated gold and white chrysanthemums edged with laurel. Morna bent to read the card, neatly typed in black. ‘A small tribute to our son.’ Why should that make her cry again? Was it the formality, the lack of personal signature? Tribute was a formal word—suggested submission as well as homage, payment from vassal to lord. Had David been his parents’ lord, their clever special son who had put himself above them? And why the cross? To express their burden or his holiness? Morna brushed mingled rain and tears from her face, turned up the collar of her mac. She hadn’t known their son. Whole areas had been hidden, whole chapters closed to her. Yet they, for their part, hadn’t known her David, would never have understood him.

  Morna turned back to the flowers. Next to the cross was a cushioned heart sculpted from red carnations, the card written in a frail and spidery hand. ‘Have a nice rest, dear. You deserve it, Gran.’ Morna laughed out loud, wiped her eyes. Laughter hurt more than crying. Why had David buried his grandmother? Was she too dowdy in her old felt hat, had left school at fourteen, perhaps, didn’t understand Irish palaeography or Celtic symbolism, wouldn’t know what to say if she met graduate Mrs Gordon?