by David Nobbs
A humorous note crept into the vicar’s voice like a mouse into a platter of cheeses as he related a vaguely amusing anecdote with which James had primed him. No, James wanted to cry, don’t signal the joke, you’ll kill it, frail thing that it is. He closed his ears to it, he couldn’t bear to hear it, but he did hear the faint flitter of laughter that passed through the congregation like a breeze through a spinney, rapidly stifled as the Reverend Martin Vigar slid back into evangelism. He ended on the note that, just as James would in his house in less than an hour’s time, Deborah would look forward to welcoming them all during the eternity that was to come.
James hardly heard a word of the next prayers. He didn’t believe in God. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to talk of Deborah in this building. She had gone for ever. He had been unworthy of her. It was too late for him to make it up to her.
‘James will now say a few words about Deborah, striking a more personal note than I was able to do.’
He stumbled from his seat, walked uncertainly towards the lectern. He hadn’t touched a drop, but people would think he was drunk.
He couldn’t believe how crammed the pews were, and there were even people standing at the back. The faces of the mourners were blurred, except for Charlotte, sitting there like a ghost (but where was Chuck?), and Dwight Schenkman the Third, ramrod straight and huge, a quarter-back in a convention of dwarves. He must speak. He had been silent with these images too long. People were getting uneasy.
He pulled himself together, and began.
‘The vicar has told you that we met in Malta,’ he said, ‘when we were both holidaying with our parents. What he hasn’t told you, because he doesn’t know it, is what we did in Malta. We were all staying at the same hotel, and when our parents were asleep … how can I put this tastefully, as befits a chapel? We experienced some very interesting nights, and none of them were Knights Templar.’
‘You didn’t!’ exclaimed his mum, almost under her breath, but clearly audible in the deeply silent chapel. Another titter ran through the congregation, and James almost smiled, but he feared that hysteria would follow if he let himself go. He looked very stern, and the titter fizzled out. But his mum was blushing like a beetroot.
‘I’m afraid we did,’ he said. ‘It was love at first sight. There was nothing sordid in it. We’ve had such a happy life, and I must be thankful for that. In a few minutes you will all, I hope, come to our house. When you do, have a look around you, at what you see. I bought some of it. To be more precise, I bought one of the decanters, the Chinese vase in the hall, and a hundred and ten bottles of booze. Everything else in the house was bought by Deborah. I was told the vase was Ming. I paid two hundred pounds for it. I took it to the Antiques Roadshow. It was a fake, worth fifteen pounds. I never bought another antique. But Deborah never came back from anywhere without something. It might just be a Victorian pepper pot. “It looked so lonely without its salt cellar. I had to give it a home.” Everywhere she went, she saw something that wasn’t happy being left on the shelf. If she saw a Dresden dog, its eyes followed her round the room. When things were a bit slow in packaging, I sometimes drove round all the bypasses to avoid passing any antique shops. Later I realised, such was her eye, that I needn’t have worried. Everything she bought turned out to be worth more than she had paid for it.
‘We never had a dog, they’re too great a tie and she couldn’t have faced leaving it at the kennels. We did have cats but they all get run over in Islington. She loved animals, though. Even rabbits, which is odd in a farmer’s daughter. Sometimes we’d go out for a day in the country. “Oh, look at that poor horse, James. It’s got no company.” “Oh, dear, one of those sheep is very lame, James.” “I think that jackdaw’s hurt its wing, James.” We’d get home and she’d say, “Well, that was a lovely day,” and I’d say, “I’m really depressed.”
‘She was a great cook. She made the best beef Stroganoff this side of the Urals. And always so neat and elegant. She didn’t sweat onions, she perspired them. She …’
His voice cracked. Tears were beginning to trickle down his face.
‘She …’
He couldn’t go on. He couldn’t fight against it.
‘I wasn’t worthy of her,’ he wailed.
A murmur of embarrassment rumbled through the congregation.
He needed to confess. Here. Now.
No. Don’t.
But he had to.
‘I … I did … I …’
Should he confess? Would she want him to? The tears were streaming now.
‘I’m sorry. I can’t … I can’t …’
He began to stumble back towards his seat.
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
Max, mature beyond his years, came out and put his arm round him and helped him back to his seat.
‘Let us pray,’ thundered the Reverend Martin Vigar.
During the next short sequence of prayers and responses, James managed to pull himself together, but how he longed for the end of all this.
‘Felicity Parkington-Baines will now read a poem in memory of her sister,’ intoned the Reverend Martin Vigar.
James hadn’t always seen eye to eye with Fliss, they had never been truly warm together, but he hoped with all his heart now that she would do this well and with dignity. All his irritation with her melted away. He loved her in that moment in a wonderful, simple way, with a love that had no sexuality in it. Sadly, this was the best form of love.
He needn’t have worried. She had been building herself up for this moment for days. In her elegant black-and-white outfit, with her hair far more successfully styled than she believed, she looked, if not as lovely as her sister, a pleasantly attractive woman in early middle age.
‘I’m going to read a poem by Christina Rossetti,’ she said in a clear, strong voice.
James expected that it would be ‘Remember Me’, often chosen at funerals, but it was a slightly more ambiguous piece. Fliss read it slowly, not rushing to get the ordeal over as so many people do.
‘When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree;
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
‘I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain;
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.’
As she walked back with slow dignity, Fliss cast just a fleeting glance towards James. Was it his imagination, or was there a challenge in it? Had she chosen this particular poem, which struck him as beautiful but inappropriate, as her way of telling him, ‘You shouldn’t be having my sister cremated. You should have had a woodland burial.’?
Already he knew that before long he would start to find her irritating again.
The vicar announced the second and final hymn. The congregation stood. It was almost over now.
‘Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee …’
James sang, treating the words as noises rather than as things with meaning. Max gave him a look and a fond but tentative half-smile. They sang together, father and son, strongly, lustily, tunelessly, meaninglessly.
The hymn ended, they sat, they bowed their heads, the vicar spoke. The meaning of his words no longer got through to James. There was a clank, and the machinery began, the coffin began to slide away, he couldn’t look, he feared what he had joked about earlier, that a pathologist would rush in and shout, ‘Stop.’ He had a sudden, bright, heart-rending image of a peaceful woodland glade, a bamboo coffin, a nightingale singing without pain (it struck him as cruel that the nightingale in the poem had needed to
be in pain just for the sake of a rhyme – strange to think this now, but anything was better than thinking about what was happening).
She had gone. It was over. Charles was moving towards the piano, but otherwise all movement was stilled.
The Reverend Martin Vigar walked slowly towards the congregation, began to walk down the aisle through the middle of them, looking rather as if he was Moses and they were the Red Sea. He nodded to James, the nod meaning, ‘Follow me, my son.’ Charles began to play one of Brahms’s lovely Intermezzi, Op. 117. James came out of his coma and began to walk, trying not to look at the congregation, trying not to fall, for he was barely conscious of any link between his thoughts and his feet.
He was outside, the remorseless sun was still shining, he was shaking the vicar’s hand, the vicar shook his hand as if it was a wet sock that needed ringing dry.
It was over.
He longed to sit down. There was no strength in his legs. But he couldn’t sit down. He had to greet people, thank them, be nice to them, share his grief with them and their grief with himself. And they were not just any old bunch of people, these were virtually all the people that he knew and cared about in the world.
It was over. He had the feeling – unjustified because we cannot know what is to come, but a comfort at this moment – that nothing quite as bad as that funeral could ever happen to him again. And the strength began to come back into his legs. He was alive still.
The crematorium official approached.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I have to ask you to move away from the doors. The next lot’s waiting. They’ll need access. I’m so sorry.’
It wasn’t fair to blame the man. He had a most unattractive task, but really, ‘The next lot’s waiting,’ what a way to put it. That’s what we were, ‘the last lot’, the lot that has to be got out of the way. And now we come to lot number seventy-three, Deborah Hollinghurst. Oh, for that woodland glade.
James and the vicar led them away from the entrance to the chapel. James could still hear the official saying, ‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ and, ‘So sorry.’ It reminded him of the priest in the Sistine Chapel shouting, ‘No photos. No flash,’ at regular intervals, killing the moment.
He found himself shaking hands with friends, colleagues, acquaintances, relatives. He heard people saying astonishing things – ‘Nice service,’ ‘Well, that went off well,’ ‘Well done, James,’ ‘She’d have been pleased,’ ‘The vicar was good.’ Were they just being polite, or had they been to a different funeral? Were there two chapels side by side, and they’d gone to the other one? Other people said things that seemed more honest. ‘Brave of you, chap,’ from Malcolm. ‘Bet you’re glad that’s over,’ from Ursula Norris. ‘I’ll be thinking of you,’ in a voice near to tears from Roger Dodds.
The dark cars were waiting, the drivers standing respectfully beside them, looking as if they longed to go to the pub.
‘I’ll see you all back at the house,’ James called out. ‘Please come. Please do come.’
And all the while he was looking for that white face, that wreckage of what had once promised to be so beautiful. Charlotte’s face. He mustn’t let her go. He mustn’t let her slip back off to the shadows.
He found Max.
‘Max,’ he said urgently. ‘I must talk to Charlotte. I doubt she’ll come back, somehow. Can you go in my place in the first car, and get the show on the road? Of course you can, and the caterers will know what to do.’
‘What about you, Dad?’
‘I’ll find my way. I’ll get a taxi. With Charlotte, I hope. You can do it, chap.’
Max smiled.
‘Thanks, Dad. Can I just have a quick word with Charlotte?’
‘Yes, of course.’
There she was, slipping round to the side of the chapel as if she couldn’t bear to be seen by the mourners. Well, that suited James. He didn’t want their stares either. This was a deeply private moment. There was a middle-aged man with her. James wondered who he was. Max approached his sister purposefully, then stopped, said, ‘Hello, Charlotte,’ rather awkwardly, then moved forward to kiss her. She withdrew instinctively, then bravely held her ground and allowed herself to be kissed with almost no contact on one cheek. She gave a half-smile. Max said, ‘Hi. I … um … I have to go. See you, Charlotte.’
‘See you.’
Her voice was tiny.
Max walked away, back towards the massed mourners.
‘Hello, darling,’ said James.
He kissed her very gently, as if she was made of porcelain. She accepted the kiss but didn’t return it. He could see that the beauty she had once promised the world had not entirely gone. It might, yes, it really might still be there, one day. He wanted to hug her. He wanted to hug her long and hard. He wanted to relive fifteen years of love. He wanted to fill five years of emptiness. He wanted to do it all at once. It wasn’t possible.
She smiled, a little more confidently than she had smiled at Max. It made her look fifteen again, but her smile was as fragile as a butterfly, and when it had died she was twenty and anorexic and stunted by drugs and with a ring through her nose again.
‘Hi,’ said the man at her side. His complexion was faintly yellow, and his face was lined and crumpled, like a piece of blank paper that has been forgotten on a sunny windowsill. He smiled. His teeth were faintly yellow too. ‘I’m Chuck.’
James was astonished.
‘Ah. Somehow I thought you’d be … younger.’
‘So did I. It doesn’t happen, does it? I’m fifty-three, and I’m in the lift that’s going up. Don’t ask me what I’ve done with my life.’
‘I won’t. You’re here now, you’re with my daughter, and all I’m interested in is what you do with the rest of your life.’
Chuck gave him a serious look. James’s remark had clearly surprised him, which wasn’t surprising. It had surprised James too.
‘Wow,’ said Chuck. ‘Cool. You are one cool dude, James.’
This surprised James too. He had never been described in such terms before.
‘Dad …’ Charlotte stopped. She looked as if calling James by that simple word had been an exhausting struggle. ‘Dad …’ She repeated it a little more confidently, as if she was exploring how it sounded. ‘I don’t think I can come to the house.’
‘Too many people,’ said Chuck.
‘I agree,’ said James. ‘Far too many. A lifetime of people. I don’t mind about the house.’
‘Honestly?’ asked Charlotte.
‘Honestly.’
She smiled again. This smile looked a little more natural, as if she was beginning to remember how to do it. Her teeth looked reassuring. He realised that when he had last seen them they had had braces on them. James felt – it seemed inexplicable at this moment – a sense of optimism. If it was too strong to call it a moment of hope, it was at least a moment when hope was a possibility, when there could be hope of hope.
‘I want to see you again,’ he said. ‘I want to see you again very soon. Max doesn’t go back till Tuesday week. He’d love to see you properly.’
‘I’d like to see him.’
He was pleased to hear this, but he noted that she had not echoed his use of ‘love’. He ought to go slowly.
He couldn’t go slowly. He wasn’t that sort of man.
‘Darling … oh, Charlotte. Oh, Charlotte … what made you leave us? Can you tell me?’
Chuck frowned. James sensed that all the colour would have drained out of Charlotte’s face, if there had been any colour there.
Chuck put his arm round Charlotte’s tiny waist. James could see that he had to do it very gently, so as not to crush her. She was so thin.
‘It’s all right, Chuck,’ she said. ‘I saw you in Porthcawl, Dad.’
James reeled.
‘Porthcawl?’
‘With that woman. On the beach.’
James was too astonished to feel shame.
‘In the sea.’
‘Oh, God.’ Ja
mes had a vision of Charlotte in all her youthful innocence. Oh, God. ‘Were you one of those children building sandcastles?’
Charlotte gave a much more adult smile.
‘Not quite. I was fifteen.’
‘Well, what were you doing in Porthcawl?’
‘What were you doing in Porthcawl?’
‘I was on business.’
‘It didn’t look like business.’
James sighed.
‘She’s called Helen. She was the only person I was ever unfaithful to your mother with. We … I’ve known her for five years. I broke it off this week. Oh, Charlotte, I’m sorry.’
Charlotte shrugged. It wasn’t a nice shrug. There was a long way to go.
‘But what were you doing in Porthcawl?’
Charlotte smiled, and, like the shrug, it wasn’t very nice.
‘The father lived there.’
James felt as if there was no air left on that hot afternoon. He had the greatest difficulty continuing to breathe. Slowly the shock subsided. Chuck caught his eye, and gave a sympathetic wince. He raised his great eyebrows at Chuck, asking the question. Chuck shook his head emphatically and looked shocked.
‘I was three months pregnant, Dad, and neither you nor Mum noticed. You didn’t really care, did you?’
‘Charlotte!’
‘Oh, you did, but you didn’t. You know what I mean. Your fucking packaging. Mum’s fucking gallery. Your fucking friends. Mum’s fucking golden girls. Mum’s fucking bridge. Your fucking meals. Your fucking claret that you sniffed like a dirty old man. Our fucking holidays with all that fucking sightseeing.’
Chuck winced at each swear word. James didn’t mind the swear words. He winced at each truth.
‘That’s how I saw it, Dad. I was fifteen and horrid. I still am.’
‘Horrid?’
‘Fifteen. I couldn’t talk to you. You hadn’t even noticed I wasn’t still a little girl.’
‘Oh, Charlotte. This is … this is … What happened … to the …?’
‘I had an abortion. I so wish I hadn’t. I so wish I hadn’t, Dad.’
