She was so deep in speculation, she failed to look where she was going and almost tripped on a loose kerbstone. She was also perspiring in her formal suit and high-necked, long-sleeved blouse. The outfit was fine for New York’s air-conditioned offices, but felt uncomfortably sticky in a temperature of close on ninety degrees. And her tight, high-heeled shoes were totally unsuited to a long ramble through a garden. It was clearly time to go inside – cool down, calm down and stop torturing herself. She could always sit in the waiting-room until the service started and, if nothing else, escape the fierce stare of the sun.
As she approached the chapel complex, there was still no one to be seen and even the waiting-room was deserted, so she resigned herself to her own company again. Perching on one of the upright chairs, she glanced around at the pale-blue walls, squiggled, grey-blue carpet and skimpy rayon curtains. There were no pictures on the walls or magazines to read – both presumably too frivolous in this context of death and grief. Neatness reigned supreme once more: the chairs arranged in severely straight rows; the room scrupulously clean. Well, at least her father would approve, as he would of the plastic orchids on the otherwise bare table. Real flowers dropped their petals, or shed a dust of pollen on highly polished furniture, and their water turned green and smelly, especially in hot weather.
She cleared her throat, the noise intrusively loud in the empty room, and her sense of isolation prompting further memories of childhood. After her mother’s death, her father used to closet himself in his study, requiring to be alone with his grief, but that, of course, had left her on her own. Since he never welcomed visitors or allowed her friends to come, she often felt like a child in quarantine – infectious not from illness, but from her faults of character.
She fidgeted on her seat, wishing brain-transplants were available, so she could replace the jangling chaos in her mind with serenity and peace. Yet, in the absence of such procedures, her thoughts kept circling back to that same oppressive time, when she and her father had co-existed as separate, silent mourners, sharing nothing but their loss and the same house. Being motherless at the age of twelve had been a test of endurance; having to learn to sleep without her usual goodnight kiss; to live on tins and takeaways, instead of home-cooked food; to go through puberty alone, with no mother to explain things, or help her buy the Tampax.
Rudderless and terrified, she eventually stumbled on a way to survive. She would close her eyes and imagine the goodnight kisses; imagine her mother’s presence; paint vivid pictures in her mind: her mother standing in the kitchen, in her familiar blue-checked pinny, making apple pie, spiced with cloves and cinnamon and awash in velvety custard, or bread-and-butter pudding; its crusted, sugared top contrasting exquisitely with the eggy, creamy softness underneath, or the lemon sponge they always had on Sundays squidgy inside, with little shreds of lemon peel to provide an extra kick.
She was just savouring its taste again, when she was aware of sounds outside: cars pulling up, people talking, even a burst of laughter from a child – signs of life, at last. Opening the door a fraction, she saw a largish crowd, waiting outside the chapel – the three-o’clock booking, presumably – and felt ridiculously relieved to be not the only living person in the world.
Returning to her seat, she closed her eyes and did her best to relax. There was still an hour to wait and she would be ragged by tonight if she continued giving way to all these futile regrets and painful memories. The ponderous clock on the wall ticked out a soothing cadence, which, gradually, began to calm her mood. She was all but drifting off to sleep, when a door opened from the chapel side and an official popped his head round to enquire, ‘Are you for the three-o’clock service? If so, please come through immediately, as it’s just about to start.’
She stared at him, confused and, scarcely knowing what she was doing, rose from her seat and let him usher her into the chapel. As she slipped into the last pew at the back, she was astonished by the music – not a solemn organ, but some jaunty pop tune, blasting out full volume. And everyone was dressed in bright, eccentric clothes – the only severe black suit was hers. Some of the congregation even had flower-garlands looped around their necks, as if they were partying in Hawaii, rather than attending a funeral. And the coffin itself wasn’t the usual mahogany or oak, but a psychedelic affair, painted in flamboyant colours, and looking as out-of-place in this sombre chapel as a hippie in a community of hooded, black-robed monks.
‘Hi! I’m Tamsin,’ the woman beside her whispered, flashing her a friendly smile.
Debby glanced at the tie-dyed dress, the profusion of beads and bangles, the flowers twisted through the long untidy hair. If Tamsin was the hippie, she was the hooded, black-robed monk.
‘Here – you’ll need one of these,’ the woman mouthed, passing her an Order of Service.
Again, it was a shock. On the cover was an elderly man – not far off her father’s age – but dressed in leathers and sitting astride a ferocious looking motorbike; his safety-helmet rivalling the coffin in its riot of crazy colours. BOBBIE DUGGAN was printed below the photograph, A CELEBRATION OF LIFE.
Although her father’s name was also Robert, no one ever presumed to call him Bobbie. He had abhorred abbreviations and, despite her dislike of her own full and formal name, insisted on calling her Deborah. She was about to study the service-sheet, when a plump and tousled female in a gypsy blouse and full-length crimson skirt got up from the front pew and positioned herself behind the lectern on the altar. Some sort of hippie priest, maybe.
‘His daughter,’ Tamsin hissed. ‘But I expect you know her, don’t you?’
‘Er, no.’
‘Meg – she’s fab! And she and Bobbie were always really close. His wife died young, you see, so he brought her up on his own.’
Surprised by the coincidence, she studied the woman with new interest. ‘Fab’ she might be, but also distinctly unconventional, at least in her appearance. Despite looking about sixtyish, her long, grey hair hung loose and straggly to her waist and on her feet were incongruous pink flip-flops.
‘Welcome to you all!’ she said, reaching out her arms in an expansive gesture, to include everybody present. ‘I know Dad would be thrilled to see you here, at this, his final party. As you know, he loved any sort of celebration, so we’re gathered here together to give him a rousing send-off.’
Debby was startled by the burst of applause; the congregation clapping and cheering, as if they were at a gig. Except ‘congregation’ was hardly the word, with its churchy connotations – these were party guests.
Once the noise subsided, Meg continued. ‘We’ve chosen all his favourite songs and we’re going to kick off with his namesake, Bob – Bob Dylan.’
As ‘Hey, Mr Tambourine Man’ boomed out on the sound-system, two girls in their late teens joined Meg by the altar; clad in pelmet-short skirts and each shaking a tambourine.
‘His great-granddaughters,’ Tamsin informed her in a whisper, ‘Poppy and Isadora.’
Listening to the offbeat words – ‘jingle-jangle mornings’, ‘magic swirlin’ ships’, ‘dancin’ spells’, ‘ragged clowns’ – Debby couldn’t help comparing the stern, black-bordered hymns that she and the Reverend Matthews had chosen for her father’s funeral: ‘Day of Wrath, O Day of Mourning’; ‘Abide With Me’; ‘Fast Sinks the Sun to Rest’ – all themes of dust and ashes, darkness, gloom, decline. Admittedly, Dylan had his dark side, too, but she still found it near-incredible that those two sexy-looking girls should be leaping around only inches from the coffin, shaking not just their tambourines but their hips, their hair, their boobs.
‘And now,’ said Meg, returning to her seat as the girls give a final flounce and twirl, ‘a tribute from Bobbie’s best mate, Rex.’
A big, bluff man took her place at the lectern. Although eighty, at least, and completely, shiny bald, he was attired in drain-pipe jeans and a lurid purple T-shirt printed with BOBBIE DUGGAN’S FAN CLUB.
Waving an age-spotted hand towards the coffin,
he addressed its occupant. ‘Bobbie, old pal, I’m going to miss you terribly. I’ve no one to go to the pub with now, or share a vindaloo.’
Debby found herself gradually warming to this bizarre but upbeat service. Most funeral tributes focused on the virtues of the deceased, not their penchant for beer and curry.
‘Bobbie was a one-off,’ Rex declared, now turning to his audience. ‘Everyone adored him, so I’m sure you’re all as gutted as me to lose such a special guy. I’m proud to be his oldest friend. He and I go back more than seventy years. We met at primary school and he was a right little devil even then!’
Everybody laughed, including Debby. Who wanted all those tears and lamentations? As a child of twelve, she had found her mother’s funeral unbearably oppressive, with its stress on loss and decay, and the gruesome spiel about people turning into dust or withering like dried-up grass. She had wept for days, imagining her lovely, pretty mother, with her rosy cheeks and curly hair, rotting into a black sludge on the compost heap.
‘And when we were young and both out of work,’ Rex continued, with a grin, ‘we just said “What the hell?” and took ourselves off on his bike, in the hope of something turning up. And it always did, you know. Bobbie was a born survivor! He even survived his widowhood with amazing guts, determined to put his daughter first and—’
Debby found her thoughts returning to her own rather different experience and was roused only by a Jethro Tull song resounding through the chapel: ‘Nothing is Easy’ – a sentiment her father would most definitely endorse. For him, difficulty and hardship were basic facts of life. Yet the words she was actually hearing seemed to stress the total opposite: relax and take things easy; stop rushing, tearing, agonizing. The lyric was like a private message, directed to her personally, since she had never taken things easy; spent her entire life under pressure. And this last week especially had been stressful in the extreme.
As the last chords died away, another elderly man went up to the lectern, armed with a guitar. ‘Hi, folks!’ he grinned. ‘I’m Ricky and this here is Bobbie’s guitar. A few years ago, a good friend of his made him a new one, to his own specifications, so he gave me his old trusted Gibson. But what I want to talk about today is not his skill in music, or his sheer generosity, but the way he coped so brilliantly with being a lone dad. To take up Rex’s theme, I know Meg would agree that he managed to be a mother to her, as well as a fantastic father….’
Debby barely heard what followed. All at once, she had plunged back into childhood – twelve again and bringing much-missed people back to life. All she had to do was close her eyes and her dead mother would appear; conjured up in such vivid, detailed pictures they were very nearly real. But now it was Bobbie she was resurrecting – Bobbie not as Meg’s dad but her own. She shut her eyes and, instantly, everything transformed: no more silent solitude; no more need to creep around like a timid little mouse, for fear of disturbing his grief. Instead, the house was full of people – fun, friends, music, laughter, constant cheerful company. But, however many friends might come, he always put her first; spent patient hours teaching her to read, and swim, and how to play the guitar. Yes, she was playing his trusted Gibson and making a quite glorious din and he wasn’t complaining about the racket, but praising her new skill. And now she was on his motorbike, riding pillion, as they roared off together to Glastonbury or Brighton or any place she fancied. She was no longer ‘clumsy’, ‘greedy’, ‘silly’, but the best little girl in the world.
Their house had changed completely. The dark green walls had vanished and it was painted from top to bottom in psychedelic colours. And there were flowers in vases everywhere, shedding pollen and petals on all the polished surfaces, but no one cared a fig. And she didn’t have to keep her room as tidy as a nun’s cell, but could leave her clothes in great, messy piles, and put up posters on the walls, and go to bed whenever she liked, instead of ridiculously early, and even miss whole days at school, if her Dad decided it was time for another motorcycle jaunt.
And then a few years frolicked on, and he was taking her out for a pint in the pub and on to the local tandoori, for a vindaloo and chips. And they were forever throwing impromptu parties, and redecorating the house in new crazy colour-schemes, and she could bring whole groups of friends home from university and play music, really loud, all night.
And now it was her graduation and he was so thrilled by her success he was applauding harder than anyone, and then ordering champagne when she landed her first job; drinking to her future in some trendy little restaurant – and, of course, telling her he loved her: again, again, again. And every birthday he was there, laying on some fantastic celebration; assuring her continually that she was the most important person in his world.
‘Beloved’, ‘precious’, ‘special’ – the words were so bewitching, she rolled them round her tongue, like sweets. But, all at once, she was blasted back to the present by an explosion of sound erupting in the chapel. Opening her eyes, she was utterly astounded to see party-poppers being let off all around her; their scarlet streamers flying everywhere. And the guests were blowing red tin-whistles, making a rumbustious din, whilst a tide of rainbow-hued balloons floated exuberantly up to the ceiling. And then she noticed the curtains slowly closing around the coffin, which meant they must have reached the committal. Normally, she loathed that moment, when the mourners stood silent and the vicar intoned appropriately sepulchral words. But here all was jubilant uproar, as more party-poppers exploded, more tin-whistles were blown, and a roistering swarm of kids skedaddled about the chapel, in pursuit of coloured streamers and balloons. She could hardly believe that any crematorium would allow such pandemonium. Certainly, things had changed dramatically since her mother’s joyless funeral.
Suddenly, she gripped the side of the pew, struck not just by the startling sight but by an extraordinary revelation. Having spent her life blaming herself for her mother’s death (so clumsy, greedy and idle a child must have been the cause), only now did it dawn on her, with a profound sense of consolation, that it had been nothing to do with her and her deficiencies. It was simply a matter of chance – a cruel twist of fate, for which no one was to blame. And, if her widowed dad had been different, she would have grown up to be more serene; not become a workaholic, terrified of marriage and too frightened to have children, in case some tragedy occurred and her offspring were as miserable as she had been in childhood.
How could she have reached middle age without perceiving such an obvious truth before? But at least she had grasped it now and the relief was so overpowering, she grabbed the tin-whistle Tamsin was holding out to her and blew it in raucous tribute. She must give Bobbie a rousing send-off, but, after that, another, more important task awaited and this incongruous elation must give place to due solemnity. While the revellers were swarming out of the chapel, to congregate in the courtyard just beyond, she turned the other way, slipped out through the main chapel doors and back into the waiting-room. The staff would need some time to clear the debris from the chapel; make it neat and tidy for the funeral to follow.
And she needed time, as well, to compose herself and banish the last traces of those disconcerting, but captivating, fantasies of being Bobbie’s daughter. That little girl – safe, secure, protected, but also lively, rowdy, boisterous – was still cavorting in some region of her mind; troublingly at variance with the tense, temperate, adult businesswoman. In just the last half-hour, she seemed to have been storm-tossed by emotion, but now it was required of her to be calm and in control. Leaning back in her chair, she focused on the carpet; its drab grey-blue gradually replacing Bobbie’s rainbow brilliance; its timid squiggles taming his exuberance; its very ordinariness slowly returning her to the task in hand.
‘Ah!’ said a deep, kindly voice, breaking into the silence, ‘you must be Debby. I’m Gavin Matthews, the vicar. How good to meet you, my dear – although I feel I know you already after all our conversations on the phone.’
She rose to greet him, immediat
ely reassured by his appearance: the immaculate white surplice, worn above a long black cassock; the well-polished shoes and freshly starched clerical collar; the neatly cut grey hair. He was male, mature and eminently presentable – all the things her father would expect. And an obviously warm-hearted person, who could give her moral support.
Having ushered her outside, they stood together, waiting for the hearse. No one else had turned up, but that was how it should be. Her father had always valued privacy and seclusion, so it was only fitting that at this, his final stage, there were no villagers to tittle-tattle, or nosy neighbours to pry.
She heard the noise of wheels and bowed her head respectfully as the hearse drew up and the coffin was unloaded – a traditional model in darkest oak, with the expensive wreath she’d ordered positioned sombrely on top. No riotous, unreliable flowers to fling their petals over him or droop in disarray. And the funeral director was a model of decorum, in his sleek black morning-coat, pinstriped trousers and matching waistcoat, and even an elegant top hat and silver-topped black cane.
With a suitably grave expression, he supervised the bearers as they hoisted the coffin on their shoulders and began their solemn procession into the chapel. Deliberately, she walked alongside, her hand also on the coffin; needing to be part of this last rite. Indeed, if she had only possessed the strength, she would gladly have carried his full weight – without any bearers helping – to make some tiny recompense for the long disharmony between them. The fact that her father was so entirely different from a genial, easy-going type like Bobbie was a question of genes and temperament and therefore simply due to chance again. And, having lost the one great treasure of his life, was it any wonder that he had become distant and detached, and unable to be close to anybody else? At least, now he was beyond distress; released by death from death.
I'm on the train! Page 24
