by Tim Pears
One person after another came to ask or tell Charles something but his brooding presence was so forbidding that no one dared disturb him, except for Robert, who in the late afternoon went in and sat on the arm of his father’s chair, leaned on his shoulder, and stared into the fire for a while beside him.
Charles stayed where he was through the evening and into the night. He left Edna to comfort his grieving children and stirred himself only to put more coal on the fire. The members of the household went to bed upstairs while he sat with his anger and sadness churning inside him.
In the morning Edna found Charles in the same armchair, staring at the dead embers of the fire. She made him a mug of tea and placed it on the reading table beside him: he failed to acknowledge Edna and ignored the tea, upon whose cooling surface a white film settled; Charles remained immobile, as his heart turned to ashes.
The rest of the family gathered for breakfast, mourning and leaderless, and remained around the kitchen table. Until, around ten o’clock, there was heard in the silent house a sharp intake of breath, an armchair seat’s springs reasserting themselves and the approaching footsteps of an 18-stone man.
Charles appeared in the doorway of the kitchen and looked around those assembled. They looked back at him, awaiting his lead. Without a word Charles knelt on one knee and opened wide his arms, and the three of his children who were there rushed towards him.
Charles Freeman moved into action. He sought out royal undertakers who came up from London with their own team of manicurist, beautician and dresser, with the last of whom Charles spent hours sifting through Mary’s wardrobe. Ignoring the vicar’s advice on Anglican custom, he had Mary laid out, adorned in her wedding dress, in an open coffin: the drawing-room was filled with scented candles and a botanical garden of flowers; mirrors were draped and voices hushed as relatives, friends and acquaintances filed through the makeshift mausoleum to pay their respects.
The morticians succeeded in removing the crow’s-feet from Mary’s eyes, her odd white hairs, the resignation from the sides of her mouth and her anxious frown, leaving her looking in death like the teenage bride she’d once been. The visitors took one look at Mary and burst into tears at her tragic, futile demise. When they’d recovered they reminded themselves that she was also a thirty-five-year-old mother of four, and they wept again with pity for her poor children and her courageous husband.
Charles stifled the sobs that shook his own great frame to comfort them, offering mourners a grief-stricken version of his bear-hug, squeezing and shaking them at the same time. ‘Yes, yes,’ Charles snuffled, ‘yes, you let them fall.’ In his embrace the visitors – habitués of cocktail party or poetry group – let go of their own noisy sorrow.
James was brought home from hospital by Charles’ chauffeur, and he watched people he was sure had hardly known his mother weeping in Charles’ arms; he couldn’t bear to be in the same room as his father.
The others were swept along in Charles’ wake, taking turns in the drawing-room, accepting condolences. Simon stayed close to his father, both copying him and, in the manner of an eldest daughter rather than son, filling the space where Mary had been. He took it upon himself to embrace those visitors unable to face his father’s bear-hugs.
Robert shed no tears, as if their mother’s death were another childhood affliction whose symptoms he fought, and people understood his stoicism as evidence of deep feeling. As for Alice, she was taken under Edna’s wing, moving between the drawing-room, where she grew faint in the fragrant, emotional atmosphere, and the kitchen, where she recovered.
James only crept in after everyone else had left. He lit his own candle for his mother each evening and sat silently beside her coffin. He wondered whether he’d left some part of himself behind in the hospital bed, because he felt frozen. It was as if he sleepwalked through those days, and woke up at the funeral.
It was a grand affair that Charles organized with more panache than any of his parties. The church was packed. The choir was augmented by singers from other churches, who sang requiems fit for a queen. Carefully chosen readings, prayers and hymns were followed by a eulogy from the diocesan bishop, who completed the impression that the deceased had been an extraordinary wife, a marvellous mother, a special friend, a rare, talented poet, a both exquisitely sensitive and unusually happy ray of sunshine in the mortal shape of a woman.
James sat fuming, and those who glanced in his direction saw not an angry child but a boy bravely holding back tears with a supreme effort.
Charles retained a solemn dignity throughout, but it was clear to all, from his ashen pallor, the hollow rings around his eyes and his crumpled shoulders that he’d neither eaten nor slept in his grief of these past days. As the coffin was carried out to the graveyard Charles, holding little Alice’s hand, followed behind his three sons, the middle one poignantly hobbling along on crutches.
It was that picture that appeared in the local newspapers: the man-in-charge seemed to take on the dimensions of a mythic figure, even as he suffered tragedy like any other man.
‘Your mother has left us,’ Charles told them, gathered in his study back home. ‘We’ll all have to pull together and get along. I’ve considered employing another nanny or au pair but decided not to. Edna will look after us all, especially Alice. It’s best for us to try and carry on as if nothing has happened. Any questions?’
‘Can we go now, Dad?’ asked Robert.
They reacted in different ways except that they all followed Charles’ advice and copied his example. Simon spent more time with Charles than anyone else, without either of them mentioning Mary’s suicide: they thus achieved an equality of denial as they drew closer together, giving each other comfort without realizing it. Simon went straight to Charles’ office after school and helped his secretaries with their filing. They liked him because, unlike his father – whom he was coming increasingly to resemble, since he was now almost the same height as well as weight, and wore, even to school, the same dark suits, white shirts and silk ties, and the same short-back-and-sides haircut – his charm and humour were not erratic but constant. At first they were kind to him, knowing his mother had just died, but he was such an easy listener that soon they found they were telling him about their boyfriends or husbands or children; and before anyone knew it they were listening to and even acting upon the soundest advice they’d heard outside the columns of newspaper agony aunts.
The sixteen-year-old son of the boss, a carbon copy, a clone, rediscovered the charm of his childhood. Charles came across his son in the typing-pool telling the women there what men really wanted, and he didn’t mind that it was only two o’clock in the afternoon. He ruffled Simon’s hair when they got into his car at the end of the working day.
‘You’ll get into trouble, you will, my boy,’ he said approvingly. ‘I like to see you at the factory, Simon. See how it all works; pick it up in good time. You’ll learn more here than they teach you in school. You’ve got to stand on your own two feet. Here’s a fiver.’
Robert was so uncommunicative, so much his own person, no one noticed that he entered and left the house according to an ever more sporadic timetable of his own invention. He never told Edna when or whether he’d be in for tea or other meals.
‘Leave the lad alone,’ Stanley advised her. ‘He knows how to look after himself.’
She tried to entice him with favourite foods, but since he’d never expressed an opinion of dishes laid before him – apart from bacon butties and mugs of tea – she realized it was a fruitless exercise, and they came to a tacit understanding that he was free to raid the larder whenever he was hungry.
Instead Edna lavished her attention on Alice, who began to spend so many nights in Laura’s bed that they woke with cricked necks and stiff joints from squeezing their growing limbs into its space, until Stanley got Robert to help him carry Alice’s bed downstairs and cram it into Laura’s room. When the girls were together and Alice referred to Edna she occasionally dropped the ‘your
’ from ‘your mum’. The absent-minded slip irked Laura. She knew it would be cruel to tell Alice off, to point out that Edna happened to be her mother. But it clearly irked her: her eyes narrowed and there would follow a period of frosty silence between them of which Alice was quite unaware but that gave notice to everyone else that Laura was changing from her mother’s daughter to her father’s. Edna herself, though, didn’t seem to mind at all: she was large enough in both heart and body to take on another, twin, child.
Others, too, stepped into the breach: Garfield told Lewis to keep an eye on his friend.
‘You can invite him to stay the night if you want to,’ he said. ‘We may not have a mansion house but it’s a welcoming one.’
Mary’s oldest sister, Aunt Margaret, drove in with a great baker’s tray full of fruit. She handed it over to Edna and stayed for tea, and told the children they could visit her farm any time they wanted.
‘If you want to get out of the town,’ she said. ‘Get some fresh air in your lungs.’
One Saturday in that spring of 1970 Lewis came round to watch the FA Cup Final on television, in which Leeds United tortured Chelsea but couldn’t beat them. Afterwards he and James went outside and sat on the lawn – James with his crutches on the grass either side of him – and practised heading a ball to each other. Then Lewis ate two or three of the cream pastries that James couldn’t tell Edna he wasn’t eating himself, and James peeled an orange.
‘You know,’ James whispered to Lewis, ‘they said I can’t play football again.’
‘It’s not the only thing in life, Jay,’ Lewis replied, with a voice that conveyed both authority and a certain lack of conviction.
‘I know,’ James agreed.
‘You’ll just have to think of something else to be when you grow up,’ Lewis told him.
Being grown up seemed a long way away, but then on Sunday morning Zoe appeared. The others were all up and out already, and James was still in bed. Zoe burst through the door in a flurry of colour and the smell of musk.
‘Out of bed, lazybones!’ she exclaimed.
‘Nnnnrgh,’ James replied, pulling the covers over his head as she opened the curtains and light washed over his bed.
‘What a mess in here!’ Zoe cried. ‘How can you live like this? I’m going downstairs to make some tea. If you’re not washed and dressed when I come back in five minutes, I’m going to tickle you into imbecility. Can you hear me, sweetheart?’
‘Nnnnnnn.’
Sipping tea and orange juice, James told Zoe of his feelings of weightlessness while he was trapped in his hospital bed, of being there yet not being there, of the occasional sensation of being on the ceiling, looking down at himself and everyone else.
‘I’m not surprised, James,’ she responded, less impressed than he’d hoped she would be. ‘Lying in bed like that so long, your astral body must have loosened its bonds with your physical one. Probably flew around a lot. Mine does too. Hey, if we’d thought about it we could have met up on the astral plane. Did you have any weird dreams as well?’
‘Weird dreams?’ he blushed. ‘Um, no, not really.’
‘I have a lot of weird dreams, James. I think I’ve got an unsettled psyche. You know.’
‘Yes. Of course,’ he whispered.
Simon and Alice came back from church and joined them, and listened to Zoe’s stories. It turned out that she and her father had gone to the Pyrenees, stayed one night, then sped down through Spain and trekked around Africa for four months. Then they’d hitched a lift on somebody’s boat to Goa, only to get on a plane and come straight home, and not just because they ran out of money (‘We never had any in the first place!’ Zoe laughed) but because Harold had decided to become a student, something he’d overlooked at a more conventional time in his life, since he’d already set off on his travels.
‘He’s going to write a thesis on comparative religion,’ Zoe told them proudly.
‘What’s a thesis?’ Alice interrupted.
‘Like an essay, stupid,’ said Robert, who’d slipped into the room unnoticed.
‘Well, I’m so sorry for not knowing,’ Alice told him, making a face.
Laura appeared in the doorway. ‘Lunch in ten minutes. Oh, hello, Zoe.’
Zoe reached her hand out to Laura. ‘I’m just telling the others about Harry. He’s going to compare English clergy with voodoo priests in Benin. Hey, you know,’ she paused, looking at Alice and at Simon, ‘he might want to visit your quaint church.’
Zoe joined the family for Sunday lunch, which Charles had decided was to become more than ever the focal point of their week. Whatever his own business commitments, he made sure he was home on Sundays, in the belief that sharing roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, greens and gravy was the best way to keep the family together. As well as Stanley, Edna and Laura he invited relatives, like Aunt Margaret and her friend Sarah, Jack and Clare, and he told Zoe she would be welcome any and every Sunday.
‘Thank you, Charles, I might take you up on that,’ she replied.
After lunch, back upstairs, Zoe opened a canvas shoulder bag and handed round presents: she gave Alice and Laura bright Rhodesian scarves, Robert a rude fertility symbol from Mozambique, James a sandstone elephant from Somalia, and she let Simon smoke the thick joint she rolled in an elaborate ritual before their fascinated eyes.
‘Are you going back to school?’ Simon asked her, looking pale.
‘I don’t know yet. I don’t have to. I may do.’
She told them stories of her travels, country by country, and they couldn’t believe she was the same only slightly older cousin who’d sat next to them in the cinema a few months before. Simon staggered downstairs to fetch a jug of lemonade because his mouth had gone horribly dry.
Zoe took a sip and said: ‘There was one day, in South Africa, we set off at five in the morning to walk up Table Mountain. We climbed all morning as the sun got hotter and hotter. We reached the top at midday; the sun was directly above. It was sweltering, we were pouring sweat. There’s a café up there, they sold icy apricot juice. You know,’ Zoe said, closing her eyes, ‘it was like drinking gold.’
Charles told James that he didn’t have to go back to school until the next academic year began in the autumn, as long as he did enough work at home to ensure that he wouldn’t have to drop back a year.
Freed of the mindless routine of the hospital timetable, James stayed in bed till long after the others had left for school, but when he got up he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t have to do anything, and he began to suffer twin conditions of existence that would become his companions and which, later on, he would fiercely guard: freedom and loneliness.
James was disconcerted by what he’d found when he returned home to his own room. His possessions, his toys, were strange, alien objects that belonged to someone else, the child he’d been and left behind while encased in plaster. Not that he was anything like a man. He didn’t know what, or who, he was. He hobbled down the stairs at 11 a.m. for breakfast and then climbed back slowly. He didn’t miss running along the corridors, it was amazing how relative health and athleticism were: he was content to feel himself getting stronger and faster on his crutches.
Back in his room James sorted through cupboards and drawers and filled cardboard boxes with clothes, toys, books (save one of poetry), posters, Airfix models and albums of football stickers. Owing to his lack of mobility and his new-found patience, the task took several days, and James enjoyed every minute. When he’d finished his room was almost bare. One of the few things he didn’t throw away was the camera his mother had given him that wedding day four years earlier, and which he’d forgotten about since. He snapped off the lens-cap and looked through the viewfinder. He scanned around the room and stopped, moved his head and stopped again, framing small sections of the empty room.
‘This is interesting,’ James whispered to himself. He hung the strap around his neck; the camera bumped against his chest with each step as he descended t
he stairs to ask Stanley to put the boxes with the jumble-sale pile in the garage and Edna to buy him a roll of film next time she went shopping.
The summer came. James graduated from crutches to walking sticks. His heading ability improved almost as much as Lewis’s, but he doubted whether he’d ever actually kick a ball again. Lewis came round to watch the World Cup games on television, but although he sat spellbound by the beauty of the Brazilians James knew it was a sacrifice: Lewis would be better off watching with the boys he actually played with, with whom he could attempt to put the lucid geometries that they saw into practice themselves on the recreation ground.
James was happier with the more sedentary, mental geometries of chess that he played with Laura in a quiet corner of the house where no one would disturb them.
It turned out, meanwhile, that Zoe and Harold had got back just in time. Local residents and regular patrons of the Electra Cinema were so used to Agatha’s fierce eccentricities that no one had noticed the signs; and the only one briefed to look out for them had been trapped in a hospital bed.
Agatha kept a blue Morris Minor in a garage at the back of the cinema. A local lad polished it once a week, and on Sundays Agatha drove it to church. She was a small, indomitable woman who peered at the road ahead through the spokes of the large steering wheel. Strangers wandering along Lambert Street on a Sunday morning did double-takes at the ancient, immaculate car that appeared to be driving itself, crawling along the sleepy street at a snail’s pace, as if operated by remote control, until they looked closer and saw the top of Agatha’s head, a dwarf at the wheel.
Agatha would have been a safe driver, except that she’d never quite mastered this fiddly business of left and right, and came close to causing a hundred accidents during her years of weekly, half-mile journeys: she either indicated left and then turned right (a cinematically comical sight that created the illusion of making the car appear to suddenly speed up) or else she operated the lever on the wrong side of the steering column, so that the indicators remained still, unblinking, as she turned the wheel, but the windscreen wipers scraped across dry glass.
