Last Post

by Robert Barnard

  Now she was out in the open air she could assess the congregation. There were all the teachers at Blackfield Road Primary, and many older ones now retired. There were teachers from the local comprehensive, and above all there were ordinary Crossley people from all walks and classes of life, people who wanted to pay tribute to a local institution, someone who they felt had been a good influence on their lives. Eve was marking down people it might be interesting to talk to and went through the ceremonies at the graveside in a dream, vaguely wondering what the scattering of earth was meant to symbolize.

  Suddenly she was seized upon by a trio of women, one of them her mother’s age, the other two probably in their forties.

  “We just wanted to say,” said the senior of them, “how sad your mother’s death made us, and how much we owed her.”

  “We went to school under your mother,” said one of the middle-aged ones, “that’s the only way I can put it, and then our sons and daughter did, and in a couple of years’ time two grandchildren will start at the same school.”

  “I cried when I thought my grandchildren would not have the experience,” said the other woman. “But then your mother retired, so they would have missed her anyway. Such a shame she didn’t have a long retirement.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same,” said Eve. “We had planned to do so many things together.”

  “She might even have married again,” said the oldest of them. “But of course she could have done that earlier if she’d wanted to.”

  “She was so busy,” said Eve, almost apologetically. “She never had time, it seems. Did you know my father?”

  “Oh no. I was newly married when your mother and father came here, and had no children. The only thing I’ve heard was that he was likable. Very approachable, people said.”

  “Well, that’s nice to hear.”

  “But did your mother never—?”

  “She didn’t talk about him much. I suppose she must have found the subject painful.”

  Then she turned, seized the arm of George Wilson to thank him for his reading of the Hardy and started with him toward the church hall.

  When they got there and went inside, she whispered to George, “I’d like to talk to you later—you will stay, won’t you?” and when he nodded she went around to press flesh, welcome and thank people, invite them to eat the sandwiches and fruitcake and drink the tea, coffee or white wine the catering firm had provided. She was met with enormous friendliness, tales of gratitude to her mother for this or that, and assurances that she would not soon be forgotten in the community.

  Would a small, old-fashioned community like Crossley be as wholehearted in its enthusiasm if they had known that May had had a lesbian relationship in her past? Eve had to admit that she didn’t know the answer to that question. Times had changed—but how much had they changed in Crossley?

  While she was engaged on her last duty as a daughter, she was aware of the figure of Aunt Ada, gaunt and unprepossessing, lurking in the background, occasionally talking to people similarly alone, but mostly standing by the food table and tucking in almost nonstop. It occurred to Eve that she could be one of those pensioners who went to any funeral that might offer free food. When the sound of Ada’s voice did reach her ears, it invariably had the same old croak of disapproval, or sneer or open self-congratulation. At one point she thought she heard the dreaded words, “I’m not like that. I say what I think.”

  When she had been shaking hands, thanking and encouraging all to eat and drink for over half an hour, she thought the time had come when she could put off no longer the encounter with the only other family member present. She walked over to the lank, scrawny figure, a smile on her face and her hand outstretched.

  “I think you must be my aunt Ada.”

  The cadaverous face glanced at the hand, then resumed piling her plate with prawn sandwiches. Eve thought of keeping the hand outstretched until she was shamed into taking it, but she thought Ada was unaware of the emotion of shame, so she tucked it away.

  “Did you think the service was appropriate?”

  A sneer blossomed on her face.

  “I suppose he earned his fee. He did what he was called on to do: said all the things people wanted to hear, and none of the things that they didn’t want to.”

  “I suppose they generally do, don’t they? . . . Did you and she make it up in her last years?”

  “Make it up?” Her face creased up questioningly, and looked like a deflated rugby ball. “I don’t know what you mean. We never talked, if that’s what you were asking. No call to.”

  “I wondered why you came to the funeral.”

  “I saw the notice in the Yorkshire Evening Post. It’s family, isn’t it? Hardly any of us left. I thought I might as well come along.”

  “You’re very welcome. And it means I’m not completely on my own. It’s sad you never phoned Mother and made things up—you living so close.”

  “What’s that got to do with it? Didn’t change things. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me, and I certainly didn’t want to have anything to do with her.”

  “It must have been something serious that brought about the split.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Will you tell me what it was?”

  Aunt Ada leaned the top half of her body forward in confidential mode, then decided to prolong her period in the limelight. She drew back.

  “You wouldn’t want to know. It’s a long time ago.”

  “It is. And I would want to know what brought about such a long estrangement.”

  “Estrangement? I don’t know about that. We were never close.”

  “But other than me, you were the last family she had, after her father and sister died. Please, I think I have a right to be told what the cause was.”

  Aunt Ada leaned forward again.

  “There were rumors going around. In the family, or what was left of it. In Melrose too. Her father heard them, and he blustered away—said they were tittle-tattle and there was nothing in them. Then I saw them together in Manchester. Walking together down Dean Street, laughing and holding hands.”

  It was as much as Eve could do not to burst out laughing.

  “A lot of women hold hands. A lot more women have pleasure in each other’s company without being lesbians.”

  “Not those two. And I didn’t mention a woman, so you’ve obviously heard. Didn’t shock you, I suppose. Young people don’t shock, more’s the pity. Anyway I followed them to the Gallery Hotel (not somewhere I could afford for myself) and they went in for lunch. They had a table by the window, and I could watch them from the other side of the road. They were like lovers: looking into each other’s eyes, giggling at each other’s jokes, hands on knees, hands on hands—you name it, one of their hands had been there . . . I said to myself when I decided to come here that I wouldn’t tell you this.”

  “Did you really? You were still thinking about it, after all this time?”

  “You forced it out of me, so you’ve only yourself to blame. So now you know: that’s why me and May never spoke in the last years of her life.”

  “More than thirty years, that must have been.”

  “That’s right. I have my principles, me. I never go soft.”

  “That must be a great comfort. Eat up. If the prawn sandwiches have run out, there are still plenty of egg-andcress ones. You won’t go hungry.”

  And conscious that she was repressing with difficulty the impulse to order Aunt Ada out of the reception—repressing it for the sole reason that it was she who had prompted the expression of Ada’s antediluvian prejudices—Eve retreated to the far corner of the now-emptying church hall to the more comfortable and comforting figure of George Wilson.

  He must now be, she reckoned, in his early seventies—older than her mother, whose loyal deputy he had been for many years, turning Blackfield Road Primary into a local beacon for stability, with his genuine love of children and the value he placed on learning. Pro
bably the school, with its new head, was now finding that stability came at a price and that in many areas it was time for change. May would have understood that. But she had valued George Wilson’s unfailing support—always stretching to warnings of possible trouble—which most people would have expected from the persona he presented to the world: plump of figure, firm of step, with a twinkling eye and an untidy mustache. Eve had always loved him, and remembered playing with him in the garden when she was on her first tricycle. Presumably her father’s early death had prevented her having any similar memories of him.

  “Problem?” he asked, looking at her with understanding.

  “You could say that.”

  “One of the rellies, as Australians say?”

  “Yes. Or rather the only one. Which makes it rather sad.”

  “She looks a problem, but what’s her beef?”

  “She hadn’t spoken to Mother for thirty years or so, and she came to the funeral to scoff half the food and to spread—reluctantly, of course, so why the relish in her eyes?—stories about my mother that she is now in no position to rebut.”

  “Hmmm. I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” said George in his well-known calming-the-whirlwind voice. “I can’t think of anyone who was less likely than your mother to be the subject of gossip or calumny. A life lived beyond reproach, that’s how I see her. And that woman—somehow just the look of her, and certainly the hearing of her voice, makes one uneasy. Sometimes one automatically distrusts what someone says because of the way they say it. I stood near her for half a minute, and I wouldn’t trust her an inch.”

  “I think you’re bang on target there,” said Eve with a feeling of relief. “But the nasty old bat was talking about rumors—rumors that had even reached my mother’s hometown, Melrose.”

  “Well, they kept up the Scottish connection, you know. Through your father’s job on the Glasgow Tribune, and your mother’s family.”

  “So it was the Tribune? I wasn’t sure. George, you were here when my mother and my father moved down from Scotland, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was. I was a wet-behind-the-ears young teacher, though I was two years older than she was.”

  “What were your impressions of them?”

  “A lovely young woman, first-rate at her job, and John a talented artist. Ideal combination. She was very young when she got the deputy headship a year or so later, but she had had a brilliant record at teachers’ college, and two teaching positions that she filled outstandingly well—everyone agreed about that.”

  “How did she fit in here?”

  “Beautifully. She was such an inspiring teacher, everyone liked her and she transformed the organization of the school.”

  “Was that popular with the actual head?”

  George Wilson hesitated.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything about that. There were a few problems as the years went by—not at first, so far as I know. But Evelyn Southwell was a difficult woman, not by nature a leader figure or an organizer, so May found herself doing more and more of the head’s jobs as time went by. The fact that Evelyn gave her the jobs to do didn’t make her less prickly if she thought her authority was being bypassed or questioned. That’s human nature, I suppose.”

  “I see. And then when she retired, Mother got the job?”

  “She didn’t retire, she moved on. But yes . . . Yes, there was no question your mother deserved it.”

  “You haven’t said much about my father. I should say I have no memories of him, and hardly any memory of really talking about him with my mother.”

  George Wilson thought, but his response was disappointing.

  “I certainly saw him now and then, had chats with him. He seemed a nice chap.”

  “Did he come down to live with my mother?”

  George had to think.

  “Yes. They had a council house briefly, while they were looking around. Then they bought the house that I imagine you’ve just inherited.”

  “How did they afford it—young, and not long married?”

  “He was a cartoonist with a fairly important newspaper. It doesn’t qualify down here as a national newspaper, but it certainly does in Scotland. And housing was much cheaper then—more affordable in relation to normal incomes.”

  “Yes, of course. You hesitated a bit when I asked if John came down to live here . . .”

  “Only because he had to go up to Scotland for, I think, a couple of days a week. Wednesdays and Thursdays, I seem to remember. They had to get someone to look after you those days. It was Elsie Brinsley, wife of one of the older teachers in the school. A motherly type, I recall. I suppose the paper insisted he be around part of the week.”

  Eve thought.

  “Or he could have been two-timing my mother.”

  “Is that what the old bat over there suggested?” Wilson asked. He looked over in Aunt Ada’s direction. “My God—those sandwiches disappear, don’t they?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Most people have gone. She’ll go on to what’s left of the cakes, I expect . . . No, as a matter of fact that wasn’t what she suggested. I’d rather not talk about that.”

  “And by the sound of it, she shouldn’t have brought it up at the funeral of the person concerned.”

  “She shouldn’t, but I’m partly to blame. And she speaks her mind, as she’ll tell you. With that sort of mind, it would be much better if she didn’t.”

  “Okay then, I won’t press you any further.”

  “Let’s just say I had a letter the other day that upset me.”

  “Provenance?”

  “An unknown woman. Thought mother was still alive. No address, postmark illegible.”

  “Well, as I say, I won’t pry. But I do know a chap who’s a whiz-kid philatelist. Used to be a pupil at Blackfield Road. He’s a policeman now by day, and runs a philatelic business by night or when he’s off duty. I’ll give you his address. Can’t do any harm.”

  “That could be useful. Though by the way, I won’t have any use for the policeman side. What worries me is not connected with crime.”

  “I never thought it was. I was just filling you in . . . But you know, Eve, if this is a private, personal matter, and if it was something your mother kept from you—”

  Eve sighed.

  “I know, I know. Is this the time to break down her silence?”

  “No. Is any time right to do that? You have no duty to ferret out her secrets.”

  “No. But there is a side issue, and that seems to concern my father. He’s not around to fight his corner. I would like to get to the bottom of it. To tell you the truth, I feel quite guilty that I made almost no effort while Mother was alive to find out anything at all about my father. Why didn’t I? I just can’t explain why not. And certainly Mother never rushed in to tell me. And now I feel a niggling curiosity about him, just when it has become impossible to get any information from her.”

  Eve was conscious of George’s deep, dependable gaze being fixed on her. She was conscious too that she had not been telling him the whole truth. She was, if necessary, going to invade her mother’s posthumous privacy.

  “I’ll write down the chappie’s address for you,” said George. “He’s Indian, from a Hindu family. I apologize if the spelling is a bit haywire.”

  The moment had passed, and Eve was glad it had.

  She looked around. Aunt Ada had consumed her last egg-and-cress sandwich and had her last slice of fruitcake and was departing alone through the door. Eve bade her no farewells. She felt suddenly hungry herself and went and sampled the cake, the apple sponge and one last sandwich, a corned beef one, just beginning to turn up at the edges. Soon she was the last person in the room, and there was no excuse for not going home.

  Eve was not happy with herself. That warning from George Wilson had been a reproach, and she felt the need to justify herself to herself, and yet couldn’t. She did want to find out the truth about her mother. Had May lived a lie throughout her adult life? If so, she,
Eve, did not blame her. The blame should be attached to the times May had lived in, to the people who cherished old prejudices, to the popular press, so strident and vicious in Great Britain.

  And blame was, in truth, no part of Eve’s plan. She wanted to find out the truth about her mother simply because she wanted to know. And she wanted to know because she thought she should have been told.

  She suddenly realized she did not want to go back to her job. She never wanted to see Wolverhampton again. She never wanted to persuade herself that the Midlands countryside was quite as beautiful as West Yorkshire. She wanted to stay in Yorkshire, where she had grown up.

  It occurred to her that she had left here to be independent, to have her own secrets, to get away from a much-loved mother who expected to know everything about what her daughter was doing. Now the positions were reversed, and she was trying to find out what her mother had got up to all those years ago around the time of Eve’s birth.

  CHAPTER 4

  Postmark

  Eve had no weapons to combat the emptiness of an evening at home after a funeral. She would have liked to go to a pub and sit alone with her thoughts over a couple of drinks, but there was no pub in the vicinity of Crossley where she was not likely to encounter somebody who had memories of Blackfield Road and its headmistresses, and she had no stomach for a long drive. In the end she put jacket potatoes in the oven, then made a meal that could be cooked from frozen, and ate alone with a glass of wine. Alone. It seemed to strike the keynote of her life at the moment. Well, alone was better than being with Aunt Ada. But not better than being with Grant, that she had to admit. With all his pomposity and dogmatism, he could be entertaining and was almost always stimulating. She put the thought from her: that was a part of her past. She sighed aloud. She had only old, failed relationships to meditate on, not the prospect of future ones.

  Faced with the yawning waste of the rest of the evening, with nothing but cheap trivia on television and cheap chat on radio, she fished in her handbag and brought out the slip of paper given her by George Wilson. The name of the stamp expert was Omkar Rani, and he lived at 23 Butterfield Road, Bradford. His phone number was 01274 867210. What had she to lose?