‘Nothing funny about it dear. This is it,’ he said once when Colette opened the front door to see him standing on the step in his work clothes (a dark suit with a narrow black tie), ‘my number’s up. Will you get off the floor?’ Colette had got down on her knees in mock worship at her brother’s feet.
It had happened several times, usually as a result of reading some health article or other, that Janus Brian would discover symptoms in himself of a fatal disease. Now she couldn’t even remember what it had been. An innocent pimple, wart, or pedunculated polyp. A benign confusion of cells. A temporary thinning of the blood. As with most hypochondriacs, however, Janus Brian remained annoyingly free of real illness.
Then, only last week, he’d called at the house in his dark suit and Colette had poured ironic gratitude on his presence, unrolling an invisible red carpet, forming a solo guard of honour, kissing him on both cheeks like a Russian at a superpower summit, before she noticed how Janus Brian’s countenance had fallen. His face was a game of Kerplunk and someone had just extracted the crucial straw sending all the marbles tumbling. Colette thought that perhaps death really was coming for him now, after a dozen false alarms. But it was not his own death that Janus Brian had come to announce – it was that of his wife.
Colette had always felt responsible, in some way, for the marriage of Janus Brian and Mary Moore. The Waugh children – Lesley, Agatha, Meg and Colette – had all married within a few years of each other, in a post-war nuptial frenzy. Colette didn’t want to see her favourite brother left out, sensing that he desired husbandhood while feigning indifference to women. She fixed him up with numerous blind dates, always keeping an ear to the ground for marriage-hungry spinsters, inviting Janus along for evenings in the pub with eager single women. Janus was not spectacularly good looking; tall, bespectacled, balding, thin-lipped and with too much chin, in some people’s eyes he was rather plain, if not ugly. But there was an air of dishevelled elegance about him, a look of casual distinction that some women found attractive. Over the years Colette had rooted out plenty of females willing to wed her brother, but for a man she supposed mostly uninterested in women, he proved surprisingly fussy in his preferences.
‘She was a charming young girl, dear,’ he would say the following morning, ‘really charming, but, you know, I felt that she had rather a tall forehead, and it seemed to come forward slightly, and then go in again,’ he described the shape with his hand, ‘do you know what I mean?’ ‘No. I thought she was beautiful.’ ‘She was, in her way. It was just that her forehead was the wrong shape.’ Another time, she recalled, it was the eyes that put Janus off. ‘They were grave eyes,’ he said, selecting the adjective carefully and with much thought. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I don’t know how else to put it. She just had . . . grave eyes.’ Then there was a girl he described as having a ‘wet mouth’. ‘It’s when someone makes slippery, sticky noises with their mouth while they talk. It drives you mad. I could never marry a girl with a wet mouth.’
How many would-be wives had Colette procured over the years? Ten? A dozen? And then he goes and picks the most unlikeliest of mates from under her nose; Mary Moore, sister of Reg Moore, Janus Brian’s oldest friend, and one time admirer of Colette.
‘Janus never wanted that sort of wife,’ Aldous had said, many years later, ‘He always wanted a glamour-puss for a wife. A dolly-bird. A long-legged, high-bosomed blonde.’ It had not occurred to Colette that her brother was much of a connoisseur of female beauty – pernickety over minor anatomical details like the height of the forehead, yes, but not the sort of man to be drawn to the brazen sirens that filled his sizeable archive of Silver Screen and Movie Goer.
‘How do you know?’ said Colette, indignant that Aldous should claim to know her brother better than her.
‘Can’t you see how he fancies himself? He thinks he’s some sort of suave film star. A Cary Grant . . .’ Colette burst into a sniggering laugh at the idea, ‘. . . or an Errol Flynn. He’s always been like that. A narcissist.’
Mary was not a beautiful woman. She was small and stout with dark, curly hair always cut at a sensible, practical length. Her eyes were those of a mouse – small, black and attentive while her little mouth was crowded with what looked like milk teeth, only just showing above the gums, too much of which were exposed when she laughed.
Then there was the oddness of her movements, the way she would suddenly clench her nose, as though stifling a sneeze, or a laugh. The strange, wine-taster’s lip-poutings she gave, or the whole-face grimaces, produced for no reason, that came from nowhere.
Also, she was sterile.
Colette often wondered what sort of father her brother would have been, what sort of sons he would have had, what daughters. She liked to think he would have been a good father to his own children, because he was very awkward with his nephews and nieces. She remembered allowing him to hold his namesake Janus when he was a few days old, and Janus Brian had held the baby away from him, as though it might be covered in sharp spines, or that it might explode.
Once, when James was a little boy, Colette was washing his feet, which she did, as she’d always done, by sitting her son in a chair and kneeling down with a plastic washing up bowl full of soapy water. Janus Brian was in the house and witnessed the scene – mother kneeling before her son, washing his feet.
‘What are you doing, worshipping that kid?’ he muttered with a half laugh.
Children never came to Janus Brian and Mary. Somehow, it seemed to Colette, childlessness shaped their lives, gave it its character, its distinctiveness. How could they bear it, she wondered, to know that that was it? That their marriage was just that – two people – and would never be anything else, robbed of the phases growing children give to a family. How could they contemplate old age, tottering together along a lonely path into darkness, with no one to leave their house to but strangers?
When they finally abandoned, after years of tentative efforts, any idea of having children, Janus and Mary somehow raised a drawbridge against their possibility. Janus settled into his career as a draughtsman, producing blueprints for power stations. The concern with precision and accuracy that this job entailed seemed to spill over into his domestic life. Their house became a domain of meticulous order with always freshly hoovered floors, unstained upholstery, dusted ornaments that never moved, intricate and expensive crystalware that could sit safely at the edge of a table. Nothing in Janus Brian’s house was ever broken. Their crockery was of complete and unchipped sets that were changed only when the pattern began to fade.
And then there was his garden, a steeply sloping series of terraces rising from a lush patio, passing through alpines, colourfully laden gazebos, little scalloped lawns, eventually flattening out to a kitchen garden where vegetables grew in straight lines. He and Mary had put everything into their garden. It was not a garden designed with children in mind. Janus and Mary’s house and garden seemed to Colette to have become a celebration of childlessness.
She had only ever had the briefest glimpses of the interior of their marriage, and it always felt chilly to her.
Often when she visited, Janus and Mary would be in their sitting room watching the television with a neutral, bland complacency in their postures as they slumped in reclining armchairs and leather sofas.
Is that all you ever do, she sometimes felt like saying, sit there and watch TV?
But instead she said ‘You’ve got a colour television. I didn’t know you had one of those. Why didn’t you tell me?’
Her brother turned to her, drawing his face away from the screen with difficulty, before saying ‘Dear, when you buy a colour television, you don’t go running down the street shouting “I’ve got a colour television! I’ve got a colour television”.’
Mary giggled and said ‘Why not?’ underlining her remark with a facial tic from her considerable repertoire. This was the nose-draw, where she stretched the philtrum of her upper lip, as if to loosen a dried bogey in her nostril.
Col
ette was fond of Mary, however. She found her witty and friendly. Unpretentious. Unsnobbish. These things set her apart from the other inhabitants of that well-to-do cul-de-sac, along with the fact that she was membership secretary for her local branch of the Labour Party, which didn’t seem to prevent her from being a popular participant in many coffee mornings. She was good at getting along with people. So Colette was upset when Janus Brian told her of her death.
‘She was watching the telly,’ he said, trying so hard to speak calmly in the hall at Fernlight Avenue. He seemed, as always, reluctant to penetrate further into Colette’s house than its hallway. ‘Sat in the armchair with a mug of coffee and a saucer of digestives. Then she said “Oh dear”, and put her head on her shoulder and closed her eyes and that was it. I thought she was just dozing off, not something she usually does, but then she let the coffee go, scalding hot all over her lap, and when she didn’t flinch I realized she’d gone. I wondered how I could ever have thought she was just asleep. There’s a special face we save for when we’re dead, Dear, and that’s the face she had . . .’
So Aldous and Colette drove to Houseman’s for a black tie, and Colette took the opportunity of stocking up on cigarettes at Hudson’s, the tobacco-reeking newsagents two shops down. Then a straightforward drive along Green Lanes to St Nicola’s church, where there was already a sizeable crowd gathering. In his haste, Aldous had forgotten to actually don his tie, and so spent an awkward few moments crouched down in the depths of the Hillman’s footwells knotting the black silk around his neck, and then at the service found he was the only person so dressed. Even Lesley, Colette’s other brother and Aldous’s oldest friend, had not thought it necessary to wear any black. In fact, he was wearing the sort of teaching clothes (the lifelong occupation from which he’d now retired) that Aldous had felt so uncomfortable in earlier. His wife, Madeleine, was dressed in a bottle-green two piece with a matching hat and veil.
Colette was surprised by the turnout, and by the number of people she didn’t know. As far as she was aware, Janus Brian had only one friend, Reg Moore, but his wife must have been rather more sociable, because the church was teeming with women her age and who were, prior to the service, chatting to each other with the comfortable informality of long acquaintance.
Taking her place at the front of the church, alongside her brothers, and her sister Agatha, pleased to find herself standing next to Janus Brian, whose face was stiff with the effort of self-control, Colette caught her first glimpse of the coffin – four tall candles at each corner, a tasteful spray of lilies on its top, and though it contained a person who had only ever existed on the periphery of her life, Colette felt immediately the surge of unwanted tears behind her eyes. Memories of her mother’s funeral, her sister’s, which had taken place in the same church nearly ten years before, were made intensely real by the stench of varnish and incense, the hopelessness of flowers and prayers.
Colette had once been a regular churchgoer, the whole family spending Sunday morning among St Nicola’s religious kitsch, it’s half-hearted attempt to evoke the grandeur of the Gothic. Nowadays only Aldous continued this tradition, taking leisurely strolls there and back each Sunday morning, seeming to find in Holy Communion a much more ordered and comprehensible version of Sunday lunch than the one he usually experienced at home. Colette, however, now only visited St Nicola’s for funerals, and her convent upbringing meant she could not escape a sense of guilt at her lapse, even more so when she flirted, as she sometimes did, with agnosticism, even outright atheism. Her sister Agatha had surprised her once by announcing, in the plain, casual tone so characteristic of her, that she was an agnostic. She seemed to find a satisfaction in the word, and smiled slyly, as if not expecting Colette to understand what it meant.
‘So am I,’ she had replied instantly, in a childish attempt to appear unshocked.
But entering a church was, for her, like walking into a theatre for a part she had been rehearsing all her life. The words came so easily, the Our Father, the Hail Mary. She knew them in Latin probably better than she knew them in English – Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus . . . The automatic genuflections, the bowing of the head, the whole choreography of the Catholic Mass was written into her memory so deeply she could never truly call herself an atheist without a fear of divine wrath, or the pursuit, at least, of the nuns who had terrorized her childhood.
So she, and her brothers and sister, stood, sat, knelt, sang and recited in unison throughout the service, and only at the De Profundis did she look up
Out of the depths I have cried unto thee, O Lord . . .
And felt the surge of tears again. The coffin now amid clouds wafted by respectful altar boys from their quietly rattling gilt censers, dripping with the holy water the priest had shaken over it with such vigour she had felt a few droplets reach her,
My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that
watch for the morning
She found herself mouthing the words along with the elderly, rather bumbling German priest, who had given her sister-in-law a middle name she didn’t possess, and could not, at that moment, have possibly declared herself an atheist. She stifled more tears, and heard behind her the wet noise of loose mucus being sniffed. She wanted to turn to see who else was crying. She sensed Janus Brian beside her, stoically firm, unyielding to emotion. He too, as far as she knew, liked to call himself an atheist. Far too scientifically and practically minded ever to be ‘fooled’ as he’d put it, by the mysteries of the faith.
Things got worse for Colette at the graveside. Still next to Janus Brian, their arms linked for mutual support, Colette didn’t know where to focus her attention – the coffin in half-shadow beneath them? The greengrocer’s fake grass draping the edge of the hole? The all-surrounding wall of mourners? In the end she had to close her eyes, and look at nothing but the afterimages of light that drifted behind her eyelids. She felt herself drifting with them, a dangerous thing to do at a graveside. The priest’s words were mostly lost in the breezy air, as meaningless as the bickering sparrows nearby. She wondered if she was going to faint. She had never fainted in her life, and yet she was always expecting to. She drifted further, and became conscious of her brother’s arm restraining her. She was being gently tugged back from a brink.
Afterwards at Leicester Avenue (never could Janus Brian’s house have contained so many people), Colette found a moment to thank her brother for not letting her fall.
‘Oh,’ said Janus Brian, ‘I thought it was you that pulled me back.’
They laughed, and Colette would have liked to talk to her brother more, to find out how he was really feeling about the loss of his wife, to try and ascertain if they really had been in love for all those years alone together, to know what it was like to lose a spouse, and to have no children, but Janus Brian was the object of a long, commiserating queue which seemed to consist, mostly, of the primly dressed cohorts of Mary’s suburban coffee mornings.
Instead she spent some time trying to recognize faces she hadn’t seen for many years. It was difficult. She must have seen these nephews and nieces since they’d grown up, but somehow she still pictured them as children. The little boy she remembered spreading peanut butter over a record player was now a tall man with a beard, going bald on top. The red-faced girl she recalled tying her teddy bears to a chair with a skipping rope was now a serious looking woman with a drooping bust and bags under her eyes. Frequently she found herself addressing strangers with questions like ‘Were you a friend of Mary’s?’ Only to have them reply ‘No, I’m your nephew, Douglas, auntie Colette,’ or something similar.
To her further astonishment, there was a new generation sprouting, still at the infant stage, but whose arrival had taken Colette mostly unawares. If she thought back she could recall now and then little cards arriving at Fernlight Avenue announcing the birth of these children, which had hung around on the mantelpiece for a few months, sometimes w
ith blurred, black and white photos of sleeping, squashed faces and the caption ‘Hallo!’, until they were lost in the thicket of bills and postcards that grew up around them. And now here they were, in the flesh, full of childish energy and language, addressing her, to her horror, as ‘great-aunt’.
She found her sister Agatha and brother Lesley sitting silently on a sofa. Colette rarely saw these siblings now, since their emigration to opposite sides of High Wycombe, a Chiltern dormitory town famous for making chairs. Lesley had moved there because he’d always had a passion for the Chiltern landscape. Colette couldn’t quite remember why Agatha had moved there, presumably following Lesley’s example, though the two had never been particularly close. Agatha was the oldest, in her late sixties, happily widowed and retired. Lesley, second oldest, retired schoolmaster, had at one time been tutor and mentor of her husband, Aldous. Lesley had taken Aldous to his bosom when he’d been his teacher, encouraging him through art school in the years before the war, paying the fees himself. Lesley had treated him almost as a little brother, but their friendship had cooled once Aldous had turned himself into Lesley’s little brother-in-law, by marrying Colette. He’d never been quite the same man since, Colette felt, at least not since his own marriage to Madeleine Singer shortly afterwards. Colette had taken an instant dislike to Madeleine, and always believed her brother had made the wrong choice in marrying her. She could see it in his eyes, in the haunted looks he gave her over the tea-table in their bookless house when they visited, of a man who has realised, just too late, that he has taken the wrong course through life. Colette viewed Madeleine as a philistine, a gossip and a snob who’d put an end to her brother’s life of reading and high culture.
How she hated Madeleine. The perfect housewife. The perfect mother. How she hated hearing about their latest coach trip to ‘Wordsworth Country’ or ‘Constable Country’, her cultured brother dragged with the rest of the common herd through the plastic tearooms and trinket shops of the tourist trails. On his mantelpiece last time she’d visited she’d noticed a Brontë Calendar, a tiny reproduction of Branwell’s portrait alongside a tear-off pad of days and months.
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 2
