Janus was alive for the week until his funeral. Dumb, motionless, deaf. Colette found herself silently screaming at a figure on the doorstep who dissolved into a puddle of milk. She found herself running down the street to catch up with a dark figure walking quickly, and she was never able, quite, to reach him. She found herself touching the piano, then withdrawing her hand in shock at a feeling of warmth.
The funeral itself attracted a larger gathering than Colette and Aldous had expected. Fearing an almost empty church, they had phoned all the numbers in the back of a little pocket diary that had been found on Janus’s body. This resulted in a church full of strangers. Many of them Colette supposed were recent acquaintances from her son’s time in prison – burglars, fences, blackmailers. She could tell by their shuffling awkwardness, the hastily combed hair, the badly ironed shirts. There were some vulgarly dressed young women as well, barmaids, perhaps, who’d once leant Janus a sympathetic ear.
Bill Brothers knew some of these people. He was exchanging nods and smiles with them as Colette and Aldous arrived. Colette found herself seated next to Bill during the service, and clung to him as one of the few people she knew in the church. There were Lesley and Madeleine on the other side of the aisle, and Colette was delighted to see Christine as well, all dressed in black. Some other cousins had also managed the journey.
The service itself Colette found embarrassing. How Janus would have scorned the sentiments that were expressed by the obsequious young vicar who’d replaced that kindly, shambling old German. She was also embarrassed because after all the ritual of the Sacrament and Transubstantiation, not one member of the congregation came forward for Communion. Not even devout Lesley and Madeleine. Was the priest really going to let all those consecrated wafers go to waste?
She turned to Aldous.
‘I’ve eaten,’ he whispered to her.
In the end Colette felt impelled to take Communion. Just as the priest, after a moment’s embarrassed silence, was about to return and dispose of the hosts in whatever way they do, she went up alone to the altar and knelt for the Communion.
At the graveside, an hour later, the embarrassment continued. When it came to the sprinkling of holy water onto the coffin, they found that this liquid was to be dispensed from a plastic squeezy bottle, when for previous funerals it had been contained in a silver chalice. When it came to Bill Brothers’s turn, he took the bottle, looked at it in a quizzical way, then pressed it so that a long squirt of holy water splashed onto the coffin below them. Colette, whose arm was through his, did the same when the bottle was passed to her.
‘Give him plenty, he needs it,’ she said as she passed the bottle on. Her voice was distinct in the silence. The priest felt impelled to comment.
‘It doesn’t actually do anything,’ he called from his breezy position at the head of the grave, the opened prayer book flickering in his hands, ‘it’s just a sign that we show, a symbol, it’s not a sort of special magic medicine . . .’
Colette wasn’t listening. Her head was fixed in downward contemplation of her son’s coffin.
At Fernlight Avenue the atmosphere lightened a little. The cousins did their best to cheer people up by relating amusing anecdotes that had nothing to do with Janus whatsoever.
Colette drank Bloody Marys with Bill Brothers. He looked very different. His beard had gone and so had the tweedy clothes of the Marxist intellectual. Instead he was wearing jeans and a cheesecloth shirt that seemed too tight, a brown leather jacket with coarse stitching and wide lapels.
He was accompanied by a friend whom Colette vaguely recognized – a tallish man with gold, curly hair who was dressed in black – like the Milk Tray man but with dark glasses and black leather gloves as well.
‘Steve has just finished filming with Roger Moore for the next Bond film. I’m his personal assistant stroke bodyguard.’
‘Moonraker,’ said Steve, pointing a leather clad finger at Colette, pulling an imaginary trigger.
‘This man is going to be so famous. So famous and rich. He got fifty thousand dollars for just a week’s work on the set with Roger. But Roger’s a personal friend and got him a good deal with United Artists, he’s got a contract to appear in the next three Bond films. Not even Roger’s got that.’
‘I play bowls with Roger at his house in Flushing. He’s very good at bowls, you know. Very good.’
‘I organize Steve’s life. In turn he keeps me off the hard stuff. He’s very strict, aren’t you darling?’
‘Your son was a very funny man,’ said Steve, ignoring Bill and looking at Colette over the top of his dark glasses.
At one point Julian went up to his mother.
‘Do you think it’s a good idea to have all these people over here? I’ve just been talking to someone who said he shared a cell with Janus. He said he was a burglar. He said he still is . . .’
‘They wouldn’t steal from the house of their dead friend’s mother, there’s honour among thieves.’
Colette was aware that Janus was being talked about with a sort of awe. She was fascinated to find that, amongst the gathering there, there seemed to be a widely held belief that Janus’s life had meant something.
‘He wouldn’t have any nonsense would he, not old Janus,’ this came from the mouth of an ageing Teddy boy with a greasy grey DA.
‘No, not old Janus. He wouldn’t stand for any of this old rubbish.’
She gathered they were talking about the funeral, the rituals, the dressing up.
She caught another old lag talking about Madeleine in her extravagantly tailored dark suit.
‘He wouldn’t hold with any of this dressing up and showing off. He may have been educated but he was always for the working man.’
Colette almost felt like taking the Teddy boy by the lapels and interrogating him.
‘What do you mean? Are you saying my son was a revolutionary, that he believed in something, that he understood anything about the world, that he had a purpose to his insanity, that what we took for random acts of aggression and destruction actually had some coherence to them?’
‘Funniest bloke I ever knew!’ said someone else.
‘Always had time for you,’ said another.
Were they just finding kind things to say about him at his funeral, or did they mean these things?
A tall, grey haired man with a white goatee spoke to her. He had been one of Janus’s tutors at the Royal Academy, and had seen Janus recently in the piano shop.
‘So he really worked there? I thought it might have all been a fantasy.’
‘Oh yes, he certainly worked there. I’m a very good friend of the manager. He said he hadn’t heard playing like Janus’s anywhere. He said his rendering of the Opus 111 was reminiscent of Schnabel. Of course, I remember young Janus as a terribly good sight-reader. That was his special ability. He could understand a piece just by reading it, and he was always reading at least half a page ahead of his playing. But I really had no idea . . .’ he paused, drawing his gaze across the motley assembly of vagabonds and barmaids that filled the front room, ‘that it all went so wrong for him.’
‘Could he have ever been a great pianist, do you think? Answer me truthfully,’ said Colette.
‘Oh, undoubtedly,’ the professor of music said, ‘it’s always puzzled me why we never came across his name in the concert programmes or recording catalogues, or why he never kept in touch with the Academy. There would always have been a job for him there . . .’
Perhaps this was just another instance of exalting the deceased, an impromptu eulogy. She felt like saying, if he was so special why didn’t you come and find out what he was doing, why didn’t you support him, help him into a performing career, or offer him a post at the Academy?
She didn’t of course. The man had come all this way to an obscure church in a remote suburb, then to a tangled, clumsy house full of crooks.
‘Such a waste, such a waste, such a waste,’ Madeleine intoned.
‘People here are saying
his life meant something for them.’
‘Yes, I heard a car thief saying he had great respect for Janus.’
Perhaps it was the host she’d swallowed that morning, perhaps it was the sweet Spanish wine she’d been drinking, but Colette suddenly felt an overwhelming sensation of love, that the humblest, basest things were suddenly rich and beautiful. Directed towards Madeleine, in her bluebottle clothes, this sensation caused Colette to embrace her and plant a kiss on her plump, roseate cheek.
The experience of engaging with Madeleine’s softness was so rewarding, the sense of human contact so rich, that Colette maintained the embrace for several minutes. Madeleine seemed to take the gesture as a signal of mental collapse, that Colette had broken under the grievous pressure of bereavement, and she rubbed Colette’s back consolingly, patted her shoulders, stroked her hair. When Colette finally withdrew her face from Madeleine’s neck, Madeleine had expected to see it damp and puffy with tears, but instead Colette was laughing, her face bright and animated.
‘I love you Madeleine,’ she said, holding her sister-in-law’s face between her hands, planting another stream of kisses on her cheeks, these jabbing little kisses more resembling the way a hawk will pick at carrion. She held Madeleine’s face so tightly it was almost painful. Madeleine began to totter, and whimper softly, not knowing how to control grieving Colette. But Colette finally stopped just as Madeleine was about to cry for help.
‘You’re a sweet woman,’ Colette said, giving great weight to the adjective, ‘you are a sweet, sweet woman.’
Colette then found Lesley, who was drinking orange juice in the kitchen. She did the same to him, though this was a less rewarding experience. Lesley was hard and unyielding, and rather thin beneath his clothes. She may as well have hugged an apple tree.
‘I’m sorry for all the horrible things I said to you and Madeleine,’ Colette whispered urgently after having filled her brother’s rough face with kisses.
‘Let bygones be bygones,’ said Lesley.
‘Are you really teetotal now?’ she said, having heard a rumour that he was.
‘I haven’t touched a drop since the day you came to High Wycombe,’ he said.
Colette laughed.
‘So I made you give up drink?’
‘Madeleine, dear. I did it for her sake. I know you despise her, but she is an angel. A real one. There are such things in the world, dear, but you have to be able to see them.’
‘I can,’ said Colette, pausing momentarily, and glancing slowly around the room.
It was true. There were angels in abundance. She could see their wings shyly fluttering, even on the shoulders of burglars and pickpockets, and the experience filled her with a sense of infinite delight which lasted for the rest of the day, even when the relatives had gone and only a core of hardened criminals remained, who, mildly drunk, talked and laughed with thunderous volume.
Janus safely stowed in the earth, Colette surprised herself by experiencing a sense of achievement. She remembered from before that odd, strangely satisfying feeling after a loved one dies. It didn’t last for long. It stemmed from a sensation of completeness. Of a life having come to a conclusion, the knowledge that there was nothing Janus could now add to the narrative of his life.
She also had the sense of having survived a catastrophe. As though she’d been found by rescuers in a cupboard having endured an earthquake, or had hung on to a twig while the floodwaters surged beneath her. It was almost elation. And there was something else that was sustaining this mild euphoria; the access his death gave to a sense of the infinite, to the life beyond life.
The feelings were short-lived. It was the house itself that was the problem. It bore his traces everywhere. His things. Things he had touched, things he had broken. He was coming alive again, in that pathetic, useless way the dead have, lingering in all the rooms of the house, curled up in cupboards, asleep on bookshelves, tucked away in drawers. Colette quickly realized that she would have to do something about these objects if she was going to survive.
The music room was the hardest thing. The junk that sat there, under and around the piano, swollen bin bags lying beneath the piano as though that instrument had spawned a brood of blind pups, formed a solid, immovable complex of memories.
Colette had wanted to burn it all. She wanted to light a big bonfire at the end of the garden, like the bonfires they used to have every autumn, those rich conflagrations given an extra zest by the empty aerosols Janus and James would put in the fire, which exploded with a white flash as high as the oak tree and sent red sparks drifting across the neighbouring gardens. Aldous persuaded her against it, perhaps remembering the time the police were called when a neighbour’s fir tree caught fire. Instead he persuaded her to let him take the things to the municipal dump.
Aldous filled the car with the bin bags and other obvious rubbish. The pornographic magazines, the drain covers, road-works signs, old bottles . . . However, they found it difficult to penetrate further into Janus’s life. The music manuscripts couldn’t be thrown away. Nor could the records or books. And the piano remained, a deadweight filling most of the room.
‘We’ll sort it out some time,’ said Aldous. They consoled themselves with the thought that they’d preserved the good things about Janus. They had disposed of the offensive and the dirty. The music room was now a shrine to his achievements, his music and reading, his creativity. One day they would sort the room out properly. Redecorate it. Arrange the manuscripts properly, alphabetically, rebind the crumbling older books, put up some proper shelving.
‘Perhaps we should do something about the piano . . .’ said Aldous.
They were arm in arm contemplating the new spaciousness.
‘No,’ said Colette, ‘not the piano. We have to keep it.’
‘I didn’t mean get rid of it. I meant restore it. Get it properly tuned. Maybe even restrung and refelted. New ivories. Then there’s all that broken woodwork. And the whole thing needs to be properly polished . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Colette, enthusiastically, ‘we could make it as good as new.’
Somehow this only needed to be said. The desire, the intention, was enough. It didn’t have to be followed through with action. They both knew that a complete restoration of the piano would cost far more money than they’d got in their two dwindling bank accounts.
When Julian, fresh from Dover, played the piano one evening, as badly as ever, clumping through a Chopin waltz with all the grace of a cow doing ballet, Colette in the kitchen broke down in heavy sobs.
‘I don’t think your mum likes you playing the piano,’ Myra said to him, having glimpsed through the kitchen door a scene that disturbed her, Colette and Aldous sitting opposite each other, clasping each others hands, Colette in uncontrollable weeping, while next door Julian hammered out the slow movement of a sonata. ‘I just can’t bear the thought of those beautiful hands smashed up . . .’ she had heard Colette say.
Julian looked at Myra with puzzlement. As though it hadn’t occurred to him that his mother could be sad about Janus.
‘Why are you so insensitive?’ Myra went on, ‘can’t you see how upset your mum is?’
‘She only cries when she’s been drinking,’ Julian said, coldly.
Julian was still playing the piano, Myra was standing next to him. She was bored with Julian playing the piano, playing the same little phrase over and over again, with the same little mistakes, the same hesitations, repeated ad nauseam, the endless, mechanical reiteration of practice.
‘I thought we were going to the pictures tonight,’ she said, irritably.
‘There’s nothing on.’
Myra sighed.
‘I might as well go home then.’
‘Hang on,’ said Julian, trying a phrase again, and repeating the mistake.
‘I don’t understand how you can play this piano yourself,’ Myra went on, with sudden exasperation, ‘doesn’t it make you feel weird?’
‘Why should it?’
&nb
sp; ‘Being your brother’s piano, and the fact he’s just died.’
‘I couldn’t have played it while he was around.’
‘But you’re upsetting everyone. Don’t you realize every time you touch a note you’re reminding everyone in the house about Janus?’
Julian didn’t reply.
‘I’m going home,’ said Myra. It was as though Julian didn’t hear. Silently furious she left the music room, glimpsed again through the kitchen door the desolate figure of Colette, sobbing into her husband’s hands, and made to leave the house.
Julian caught up with her at the front door.
‘I’ve got a surprise for you,’ Julian said, giggling and pulling her back.
‘It had better be a good one.’
Julian took from his pocket two tickets.
‘Two tickets for a concert tonight.’
Myra’s face broke open with genuine delight.
‘To see The Clash?’
‘No. Radu Lupu playing the Debussy Preludes at The Queen Elizabeth Hall.’
The sight of Myra’s face, round eyed with either bewilderment, or horror, or both, stayed with Julian for a long time.
It disappointed Colette a little when no cards arrived for Janus’s birthday in January, but then he didn’t get many when he was alive. In the following April, however, a parcel arrived at the house addressed to Janus. It bore a British Rail logo, and the name of Paddington Station.
‘There are bound to be people who don’t know he’s dead,’ said Aldous. The parcel was difficult to open, being thoroughly sealed with brown packing tape. In the end they had to use a bread knife to cut it open.
The first thing that Colette saw when she peered inside the parcel, was a pair of brown suede shoes.
‘Oh no,’ she said. It could hardly have disturbed her more had it contained her son’s own head. She lifted them carefully out with one hand, examining them closely. Old slip-ons, the soles smooth with wear, the suede glazed at the toe caps. She put them to her face and sniffed deeply. He was there, his recognizable scent. She passed the shoes to Aldous, who quickly put them on the floor, while his wife extracted the next item.
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 44
