Lucy, too, needed to be told. ‘He was always good to me, as was your mum. It’s awful for you all, I know, and nothing helps,’ she said when he rang. ‘There was always more to him than he allowed to show, wasn’t there? When’s the funeral?’
‘Thursday.’
‘I could get down in time and I’d really like to. Okay?’
‘Sure.’
‘Would you mind if Nigel came?’ she said after a pause. ‘We’d probably see his folks on the way back. He needn’t be at the service if you’d rather not.’
‘No, it’s okay. Let him come. It’s not going to be a religious service. Dad didn’t want that.’
‘I’m really sorry. It’s so sad.’
‘I know you are,’ he said.
‘Would you mind booking us a motel? Just for Wednesday night?’
‘No problem.’
‘I’ll ring again when I’ve got myself sorted.’
‘Okay then,’ he said. How should he feel about that? Lucy’s partner coming to his father’s funeral. He gave himself a moment to reflect, and found he felt nothing at all.
‘Oh, I’ve been to the house a couple of times. Things look okay and someone’s been collecting the mail and doing the lawns.’
‘Janice said she’d look after mail, and Nick’s been round a few times to check on things. I’ve given him a key.’
‘I’ll see Janice and go through stuff. I’ll bring down anything I think can’t wait.’
‘Thanks. That’ll be good.’
‘It must be awful for you,’ Lucy said.
‘He was ready to go.’
‘Yes, but that only helps so much, doesn’t it? How’s Belize?’
‘Too soon to tell really. She’ll be pleased you’re coming.’ Sheff was surprised how much he was affected by talking to Lucy. Not by what was said, for they had lost the ease and trust that enabled self-revelation. But the voice remained that of the woman he had loved and married and with whom he had a daughter, and whenever he heard it, all that fulfilment was there, as well as the pain and bewilderment that followed. He must have failed her after Charlotte’s death, because she sought consolation everywhere except with him: hospital counsellor, the local woman vicar with whom they had no history whatsoever, friends, grief consultants, her muddle-headed mother, Janice next door, and once Sheff had come home to find her weeping with an aromatherapist she had met while in the dentist’s waiting room. Their natural reactions to tragedy were diametrically opposed: he could cherish his child’s memory only by binding all close to himself; Lucy had sought release.
Later Sheff rang Jessica, too, who had appointments for the morning, but said she could meet for a walk and coffee at lunchtime. Sheff parked outside the clinic a little before twelve and was observed with some curiosity through the main window by a bespectacled receptionist, an elderly woman who worked her jaw continuously like some contented ruminant. ‘She doesn’t trust me,’ said Sheff when Jessica, a little late, came out to the car.
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘Your office lady.’
‘No, she’s just curious, and sympathetic. I told her you’re a friend who’s just had a loss. I’m really sorry. I know how sick he’s been, but the shock must be awful all the same.’ It was the word Lucy had used too – awful. But for Sheff it wasn’t awful, at least not in the sense they intended.
‘It’s all happened so quickly in the end. He was very low last night, but that wasn’t unusual, and then Mum woke me and he was gone. The three of us still keep our voices down even though there’s no need.’
‘I hardly knew him really,’ said Jessica, who remained standing outside the car, close to the driver’s side. ‘Georgie I’ve caught up with off and on, and Belize I’ve got to know again through bridge, though in a different way. Once she was my friend’s mum, and now we’re equal adults at the club – well, almost. A few years mean a hell of a lot when you’re young, but the distinctions fade.’
The receptionist was still chewing, and glancing often at them through the office window. Belize had told him as a boy that it was rude to sit and talk to a woman who was standing. He opened the door slowly to allow Jessica to back off, and got out to be beside her. ‘You’ve got time now?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got an appointment with a parrot here after one,’ she said.
‘You’re joking.’
‘Nope.’
‘You can bring it back a cracker.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I remember you said you don’t like treating birds.’
‘They’re often difficult, just like people,’ she said.
The walk in the sun through the streets to their café was a pleasure for him. No wind at all and little traffic. They had blueberry muffins and hot chocolate at an outside table, close to locals strolling by. Sheff had been in the town for several weeks, and yet he felt quite suddenly it was a different place, and he a different person. He no longer had a feeling he should be with his father – that’s what it was. The sickroom was no longer the focus, whether he was there physically or not. Warwick didn’t need him any more. He shared some of this with Jessica, but said nothing to her about the decision Georgie and he had made to hasten their father’s death. No one else need ever know of that. It was something done of mercy and duty, and quite without public excuse. To kill someone dear to you for their sake is a fusion of the two most powerful forces in life – love and death.
‘Georgie has to go back to Wellington almost straight after the funeral,’ he said. ‘I’ll probably stay on for just a bit, until Mum’s settled, or decides to go to Georgie’s, or her sister’s, but we don’t think she’ll do that.’
‘It’s a big place to keep for just one person,’ said Jessica. ‘The house wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s a heap of garden.’
‘Too much,’ said Sheff. His mother could afford to have someone come in to keep it, but he knew she would worry, try to do everything herself, and the satisfaction would be gone.
‘I’ve never lost anyone close to me,’ said Jessica. ‘No one who took up part of my life. I’m really sorry for you, but I don’t know what it’s like. Separation from Kevin is different.’
‘It’s disbelief, sorrow and anger. It’s relief as well, and a sort of emotional apathy, too, as a defence … Just a damn jumble really, so soon afterwards, but it’ll settle down. I didn’t cry when I saw him dead in the bed, but found myself bawling when I took his car keys from the hook.’
‘I thought I’d come to the service,’ said Jessica.
‘I’d like that.’
A woman stopped beside them who knew Jessica. Sheff was introduced, but he didn’t enter their conversation about daughters and school. He smiled and nodded, offered a chair. The woman, Naomi, had a distinctive face, as smooth and oval as that in a Flemish painting, but spoke rapidly and with a rising Kiwi inflexion. She had a green handbag, and the colour prompted in him a recollection of the undertakers carrying his father’s corpse from the bedroom in a body bag of dark green vinyl with raised stitching. They’d called it a pouch and used it with seemly professionalism. Warwick first wrapped in a sheet; his face covered only after the head undertaker had asked Belize for permission. The pouch was secured with straps and buckles at chest and legs before being lifted to the wheeled stretcher and covered with a crimson shroud. Sheff was surprised at the extent of ceremony, but it wasn’t incongruous, or false. With Sheff, Georgie and Belize in attendance, the undertakers had taken care to ensure the stretcher wasn’t bumped on walls, or corners. One had sought to ease the sad awkwardness of the moment by quietly complimenting Belize on the round buxus that flanked the front step.
Jessica’s acquaintance completed a loving enumeration of her child’s foibles. ‘Oh, they can be real little devils,’ said Jessica, with an inclusive smile.
‘Yes, yes indeed,’ said Sheff finally, although he knew as little of raising children as Jessica did of close family loss.
‘Maybe I could take the parrot’s appointme
nt?’ he said when they reached the office.
‘But there’s nothing wrong with you, is there? You’ve lost someone you love. Of course you’re sad. If you weren’t, that’s when you’d need treatment.’
‘Physical therapy even?’
Jessica ignored that. ‘I’m glad you’re not going back yet,’ she said. ‘We’ll catch up.’
‘I look forward to it. Good luck with the parrot. At least it’ll be able to describe its own symptoms.’ He watched her walk towards the entrance, and from the window the elderly receptionist regarded them both with undisguised interest.
‘I’ll see you at the service then,’ Sheff called, and Jessica turned, lifted a hand in agreement and farewell.
He wasn’t ready to rejoin Georgie and Belize, share the emotional weight that came when they were together, despite the summer light on the garden and the absence now of physical suffering within the house. There was a small domain not far from his parents’ home, and he drove there and parked. It was just a drought-browned square of grass with an asphalt path as a diagonal short-cut, two rowan trees with spray rings at the base of their trunks, and a wooden combination table and form seat. Enough of the seat was free of bird shit for him to sit there, elbows on the table, and think of his father, and of himself. And again he wished he had a cigarette. It was the activity he sought, perhaps. The tapping, the lighting, the lifting and lowering of the hand, the conscious indrawn breath, the hit of the smoke deep in the lungs, and then the grey exhalation. At a distance to the north were two lines of high poplars. The movement of the leaves caught the light, and the typical upward growth of the trees made it seem that each was consciously stretching to top its neighbours.
Was he observed from the houses beyond the hedge that bordered the grass on two sides, or from the occasional vehicle that passed? A lone guy sitting at a picnic table, but with nothing laid out before him: a forty-four-year-old man, big-boned and fair-haired because of some Norwegian forebear. A journalist with two degrees and no job by his own choice. Someone surprised by his own tendency to anger, disconcerted by occasional nosebleeds, obliged to accept that his ex-wife was happier with another man. A guy who has lost the one child, the one wife, and the one father, he ever had.
There was a companion, however, of a sort. A mallard drake that came with resolute waddle from the hedge and, having reached the table, stood expectantly with head raised. Sheff knew of no pond in the vicinity, but assumed it a picnic duck: one of those that hung around such public lawns in hope of scraps. He didn’t warm to it, despite its approach. He disliked ducks because they fouled the grass, so that you went home with a pungent, green mayonnaise on your shoes. ‘Piss off then,’ he told it, but the mallard settled itself in the grass not far from his feet. The plumage of its head had a blue-green iridescence.
The conversation had gone no further with the duck, when it was interrupted by a voice from the hedge. ‘Piss off yourself, weirdo.’ No one was visible, but it was a kid’s voice, a boy’s voice, and there were others like it in half-suppressed laughter. Sheff wasn’t much surprised. There were always aimless kids behind hedges waiting and hoping for opportunity for amusement, or mischief. What did surprise him was to be struck hard on the left wrist by a cricket ball. It hurt. He strode towards the hedge that was above head-height, and as he neared it could hear the boys running away: not scattering in fear and dismay, but jogging away with catcalls and whistles. What was the use of shouting after them? Instead he turned back and sought out the ball in the grass. It lay not far from the table: a cheap and rather worn cricket ball, and not red, but a grass-stained grey. The mallard drake was gone, and Sheff was alone again. He felt sufficient vindictiveness, and pain, to deny the kids the ball’s return, and he flung it far to the back of the domain before driving home. His father had died in the night, but ducks and parrots, cricket-ball attacks, blueberry muffins and his affection for Jessica went on just the same. Events seemed somehow compressed until they assumed a grotesque parity. Things that deserved precedence were belittled, those of no significance advanced themselves. The purpose of any endeavour was obscure. It had been that way since Charlotte’s death, and the feeling was intensified by the loss of his father. Maybe it would always be that way now.
Warwick and Belize had little opportunity to see Charlotte before she died, and Sheff had few memories of them together. His mother had spent time feeding her with great care while she waved her hands in the high-chair, and he had a recollection of his father rather awkwardly crouched on the floor, loosely holding her small feet and stroking the tops of them with his thumbs.
Georgie and Belize had been busy in Sheff’s absence, and already the house had a hollow neatness, the paraphernalia of terminal illness checked and stacked. The sickroom was impersonal. The stripped bed with the blankets folded on it, the small table cleared of medicines and cards, and only flowers remaining. The window wide to give an airing now that no body lay within, the syringe pump, his father’s final friend, confined to its transparent box. His father had vanished as a physical presence, and taken with him those apparitions that had surrounded him at the end – his mother, Neddy Ackerley, his first business partner, donkeys in the mountains of Portugal, cascading sand dunes he claimed lay outside the sickroom window, the fur coats he imagined hung in the corner of his room. All was memory, or delusion. There could be nothing new of him.
HE’D HALF EXPECTED A PRAM for Charlotte, not having paid attention to the vehicles used for transporting babies, but Lucy had said prams were out, completely, and that strollers were the thing. When he looked about him, he realised that she was right. So they bought a beauty, with white wheels and a transparent front cover that gave full protection in wind, or rain. Charlotte enjoyed the movement, and Lucy saw the outings as an opportunity for exercise, sometimes even trotting with it when the footpaths were broad and smooth. Sheff rather liked to dawdle, and look in often to see his daughter’s face. Sometimes she slept, but more often she would meet his enquiry with a smile, or wide-eyed solemnity.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SCREENWRITERS’ FUNERALS ARE SOMBRE, the full frame of portentous weather – lowering cloud, slanting rain, thunder even to signal higher acknowledgement – and the huddle of black-clothed mourners. For Warwick it was another still, bright day with bird calls in the trees, and the fragrance of rough grasses beyond the cemetery. The golfing weather that he’d have chosen. The flight of his ball didn’t suit a wind.
The cemetery was stretched along the grassy slope, with dark, uneven pines on the rising ground behind, and a line of civilised poplars on the other side, which the graves faced as if drawn up on parade. No gardens, but flowers lay at the base of many graves nevertheless. Most commemorations were of modest height in schist, or marble, a few originals close to the entrance made a Victorian display with wrought-iron surrounds like bedsteads, and pale, high angels, or crosses.
Many people came, because Warwick had been a non-interfering, affable man and long in honest business within the same town. The broad, unsealed drive was filled with cars. Most of those attending were older than Sheff, but they didn’t cast themselves completely in the role of mourners. There were light-hearted reminiscences and anecdotes as well as earnest condolences, and folk stood in groups and chatted, laughed even, as they gathered and life went on. Among other emotions, the death of someone else provides quiet satisfaction that you yourself are still alive.
Close to Sheff, a tall woman in green and pink came back from her car with a plastic bag of fruit for a friend. ‘I thought I’d see you here,’ she told her. ‘A good chance. I’ve been meaning to drop something round for ages, but the kids have had chicken pox and been off school.’ All significance is calibrated in accordance with its relationship to our own lives. For the green and pink woman, family sickness rightly overshadowed the death of her accountant.
Aunt Cass was there with her thick-set, chiropractor husband who talked pleasantly of building and flying his own microlight. Cass was
never as attractive as Belize, and was showing her age. The same striking blue eyes, but she was heavy of hip and had a noticeable tide-mark to her make-up at the hairline. Meeting her triggered for Sheff another vivid tableau.
In his first year at secondary school he’d come home early to find his mother out, and his father and Cass in the guest bedroom. From the hall he could hear a rhythmic and muted working of the bed, and low voices in a wordless exchange, but at first he didn’t understand. When he stood at the partly open door he saw his father kneeling hard up behind Cass and with his hands on her shoulders. Cass’s face was lost in the duvet, and her long, pale hair, so much like her sister’s, flowed out before her. She and Warwick intermingled soft noises of pleasure, and Warwick’s face had a faraway blankness. His hair was oddly fluffed up, as if by some powerful neural charge. His eyes were wide, but seemed not to see his son watching at the partly open door, and then he dropped his gaze but continued working.
Sheff had left the house immediately, and on his return he found his father, mother and aunt having coffee and shortbread on the patio. It was as if the lovemaking had never happened. Warwick said nothing, so neither did Sheff, and the more time passed, the less it seemed a possible topic, the more it belonged in a different realm of experience. As an adult Sheff saw it all quite differently, and wondered if his father had told face-down Cass that they’d been observed. Never afterwards did she show any embarrassment, even when alone with Sheff, and she continued to be close to Belize, to come to stay, sometimes with her husband, who was hopeless at golf, but generous with treats for Sheff and Georgie and a whizz with anything that needed repair.
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