The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals

by Wendy Jones

  Mrs Hilda Prout threw open the door, looked Grace up and down and stated, ‘You’ll have come with a question.’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace said, taken aback by Mrs Prout’s abruptness. ‘There is something I’d like to ask, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Hilda Prout, ‘every question has an answer. And you must cross my palm with money.’

  There must have been a Mr Prout once, Grace thought, as she followed Mrs Prout up the wide staircase and past the mahogany grandmother clock. Mrs Prout entered a small parlour that was crowded with two glossy mahogany sideboards, a tweed-covered settee with white antimacassars, a glass cabinet and several gold-framed paintings on the wall. There were ornaments too, of china, silver and glass. The old woman went to the window where she opened a carved bible box, unwrapped a huge Welsh bible from a cream linen cloth then set it down on the occasional table in the centre of the room. The table tipped slightly under the weight of the book.

  ‘Is it the key you’ll be wanting?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Prout.’

  ‘Then run to the back door and fetch it from the lock.’

  Grace turned swiftly, weaved her way around the furniture and ran down the stairs, coming back with a rusted iron key that was as large as her hands.

  ‘This will be a question about birth?’

  ‘No, Mrs Prout.’

  ‘Death?’

  ‘No, Mrs Prout.’

  ‘Then it must be about love. So we will ask a prophet.’ She split open the pages of the family Bible and tucked the key deep into the Book of Jeremiah.

  ‘Why Jeremiah?’ Grace dared to ask, still standing.

  ‘Because the prophets were wild and love is wild, isn’t it, Grace?’

  Grace knew enough to agree.

  ‘If you had come to ask me the day on which you’ll die, I would have put the key in the Revelations of Saint John the Divine. Do you want to know the date of your death, Grace?’

  ‘No. No, thank you, Mrs Prout,’ Grace replied modestly, pulling the sleeve of her cardigan over her hand. ‘I have a question about love, only love.’

  Mrs Hilda Prout clamped the Bible shut with a flat thud.

  ‘Step back,’ she snapped. ‘Ask the key your question.’ Grace did as she was told. She spoke faintly but felt bold. She waited. Then slowly, almost achingly so, the key began to move, twisting itself over. Grace was transfixed. She chilled. It wasn’t right, keys weren’t supposed to turn on their own, not when no one was touching them. How could a key twist in a Bible by itself? It was unnatural. Now the key lay stock-still. It was over. But then it turned again.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Prout said, unsurprised as if she had known the answer all along. ‘You’ll marry him.’

  ‘Yes?’ Grace exclaimed. ‘Yes, I knew it would be yes! Oh, thank you, Mrs Prout.’ Her anxiety melted within her.

  ‘Don’t thank me; thank Jeremiah,’ Mrs Prout stated flatly. ‘And how is your brother Madoc? He had a bad war, didn’t he?’

  ‘He’s well, thank you.’

  ‘But he wanted to stay in the Army?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has he gone back yet?’

  ‘Not yet. Before long. I’ll go now, Mrs Prout.’ Grace opened her purse and handed over a neatly folded shilling note. ‘I can see myself out.’

  ‘Aye, aye,’ murmured Mrs Hilda Prout, ‘and take this key. Lock the back door with it before you leave.’

  Grace felt confident now she had spoken to Mrs Prout, now she knew what would happen.

  Wilfred had to do something about Grace. He scratched the remains of a couple of dead flies from the window screen, lifted up the wipers and sloshed the glass with water before wiping it dry. The Super Ford hearse needed to be clean and ready for the chap he was burying soon: Mr James L. Davies of Dourigan House, Templeton. The newspaper was right; twenty-four was an early age. No wonder there was quite a gloom over Templeton. Deep sympathy is evinced with the bereaved at their loss it said in the obituary.

  He knew he would be expected to call on Grace. Wilfred began cleaning the top of the car, leaning over to reach the middle. He had proposed to her. He put the chamois in the bucket of cold water, swirled it about, wrung it out and went back to wiping under the wheel hub, where there was a lot of grit. Wilfred then wiped the mud from the numberplate. How was he going to break it off? He put some more wax on the chamois and gave the headlights a rub.

  It was no good being this worried about the predicament with Grace; he couldn’t go around worrying about it all the time – and now he had a rash on his forearms that itched at night. And his stomach was in knots. Wilfred opened the car door and stroked the dashboard – it was varnished burlwood – then wiped away some fingerprints. His Super Ford hearse was six years old so needed very careful handling. Wilfred tried to imagine what his apprentice-master, Mr Ogmore Auden, would have advised him to do about Grace. Certainly, when Wilfred was an apprentice, Mr Auden absolutely forbade what he called ‘fancy business with the ladies’, and consequently, Wilfred had had none during his apprenticeship. He had been very shy around girls; he knew next to nothing about them and now he was an undertaker, he still didn’t know very much about ladies.

  He put some more wax on the chamois and gave the headlights a rub. It was a beautiful motorcar, sleek as a cat, and age and careful polishing had given it even more grace than when it was completely new. The car was solid, square, dependable. It didn’t break down, didn’t get lost but took his passengers inevitably and elegantly to the place they least wanted to go: the freshly dug grave of a loved one.

  At any rate, Wilfred decided, standing back and admiring the car, it was clean enough for a superior funeral. He was the proud owner – very proud owner – of a Super Ford hearse. With a motorized hearse, despite the cost, all that polishing and the occasional temperamental behaviour from the engine, Wilfred was on to a winner. He was fond of his motorcar. Could he say that he loved his Super Ford hearse? He wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Could a man love a car? He put the silver key in the ignition. Did he love his car in the way he had thought, in that disastrous moment, that he loved Grace? Did he love Grace? he asked himself. No.

  He looked up through the skylight in the garage roof and thought how the sky went on for ever. There must be an answer to every question out there, somewhere. Questions must have answers. His father found answers in the graves and in the stars, by digging into the dark earth and by looking up into the lights in the heavens. And then Wilfred realized, looking at the gleaming metal and glass, that his father might have an answer.

  ‘Da?’ Wilfred called, putting his head around the kitchen door. His father often sat peacefully at the small kitchen table, drinking tea from his blue teacup, but now the cup was standing empty on the table. It was really Wilfred’s cup but his father had appropriated it. The cup had been a present from Auntie Blodwen to Wilfred: she’d gone to Tenby for the day on her honeymoon and brought it back for him. Printed on it in red ink was a rhyme that Wilfred knew by heart:

  However far we wander

  Wherever we may roam,

  Our thoughts are always turning

  To those we love at home!

  TENBY

  If his father wasn’t in the kitchen having his Typhoo tea and browsing through the Narberth & Whitland Observer then Wilfred knew exactly where to find him. He marched out of the back gate, turned left and made the short walk along Church Street, past James Williams’s bottling factory to St Andrew’s Church. As he walked along he thought about his father – a good man who lived a simple life – and thought how a life well lived resonated peacefully. His da dug graves when he was required to, then in the day walked the countryside around Narberth picking mushrooms, fat hen, parsley and berries, or came here … Wilfred was right. There, sitting on the earth, his knees apart, was his father close by his mam’s gravestone.

  As Wilfred trudged over the lumpy grass with its coffin-shaped hummocks and the indents where other centuries-old boxes had c
ollapsed, he could see that his father was talking – he knew – to his mam. His father came here almost every day and the grass where he sat was constantly flattened. When he was younger Wilfred had thought his father was foolish for talking to someone who was dead, that it was a waste of time spending an afternoon in the graveyard of St Andrew’s, especially when it was sunny. But then, what was that verse in the Scriptures? For love is stronger than death.

  Wilfred saw his father reach out and put his arm around his mam’s humble gravestone and lean his head briefly against it. Is it foolish, Wilfred thought to himself, to cuddle a cold slab of white marble and pretend it is a person? He waved at his father and his father began to slowly, almost arthritically, get up to greet him.

  ‘What are you doing up here then, boy?’

  ‘I could ask the same of you, Da!’ Wilfred joined his father and they sat and rested peacefully, the three of them: Wilfred, his father and his mother.

  The awkwardness of unsaid words settled between them. Wilfred wanted to tell his father all about Grace; say: ‘I asked Doctor Reece’s daughter to marry me. I proposed. But I didn’t fall in love, I don’t love her and I don’t want to marry her. What shall I do? I don’t know what to do.’ He yearned to admit his vulnerability and uncertainty to his da, but he and his da didn’t talk about private matters so Wilfred said nothing. But it was as if his father had heard him.

  ‘There we are then, Wilfred, my son,’ he said. ‘There we are then.’ And with that he placed his weathered hand on the soft earth in which his wife was laid, and Wilfred understood.

  Ten days later, Wilfred was walking home when he jolted involuntarily. There was Grace, right in front of him, plain as day, a real, solid person, standing on the pavement in the High Street by the Angel public house. She was holding a wicker basket with jars of honey in it. For a split second he didn’t know what to do. Then he froze his face – put on his ‘funeral face’ as he called it, very serious, very formal – ‘as if you’ve never laughed or used the WC in your life,’ was how Mr Auden described it. Occasionally Wilfred used his funeral face when he wasn’t at a funeral. He straightened his necktie and began buttoning up his waistcoat.

  ‘Wilfred? Where have you been?’ Grace asked plaintively.

  Wilfred was at a loss. Grace … the proposal. His stomach turned. He felt a sense of dread. Suddenly it was easy to look serious.

  ‘I’ve … I’ve been busy, Grace, with a funeral. Young man over Loveston way, died of flu.’

  Grace was watching him intently. Grace always seemed to be watching intently. She had been watching like that at the picnic when he asked her to … He didn’t like how Grace looked at him, didn’t like the way she asked where he’d been. He didn’t like it at all; and then with a flush of realization – he didn’t like her at all!

  ‘Grace, I don’t want to marry you.’ There! He’d said it. He’d said he didn’t want to marry her. It was said. It was over now. He would never have to see her again.

  Grace was speechless.

  ‘Pardon, Wilfred?’ she said weakly.

  Wilfred knew he meant it. He would say it again with resolution – properly and slowly.

  ‘Grace, it is not,’ – how shall I put this, he thought – ‘I don’t, I think it’s best, I think, if we are no longer engaged.’

  ‘Pardon?’ The basket was hanging limply in her hand. A couple in tennis whites holding racquets strolled up to them; they wanted to go into the Angel Inn but Grace and Wilfred were standing in front of the doorway.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Wilfred, and he stepped aside, aware the couple were waiting.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the woman pleasantly.

  ‘Better get in before it starts to rain,’ the man added cheerfully, swinging his racquet and looking up at the gathering clouds, adding, ‘I expect Wimbledon’s been rained off.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wilfred, trying to sound perky. Grace was still blocking the entrance, dumbstruck and unaware of the tennis players waiting for her to move.

  ‘Excuse me, miss,’ the man said.

  ‘But, Wilfred, we are supposed to get married.’

  Wilfred noticed the couple looking on with interest, especially the chap: the moment they’d ordered their drinks they’d be talking about the to-do outside the Angel.

  ‘Please could you move so these people can get in?’ he said to Grace, but she stood there, stock-still. He took her arm and tried to move her to one side of the pub’s door as the first fat drops of rain began to splatter. She looked hurt, Wilfred could see.

  ‘Grace, come to one side,’ he said more gently, guiding her. Grace’s eyes had welled up and her face whitened.

  ‘But Wilfred …’ she said, blinking, two tears falling out of her eyes. ‘But Wilfred …’

  She was looking up at him with her watery blue eyes and had said his name as if it was an answer. She didn’t seem to realize she was crying. Wilfred knew he had to be brutal – swift and savage – in the way one had to be when one breaks an injured bird’s neck, smacking its small head down hard on a stone wall. He would say it again, here in the High Street, in front of the couple who wanted to go into the Angel, as it was beginning to rain. He spoke clearly and confidently.

  ‘Grace, I am not going to marry you.’ Somewhere inside himself Wilfred heard a snap, like the fine neck of a small bird being broken.

  Grace stood facing the counter, her back to a wall of shelves lined with tins and with sweet jars.

  ‘Next time ring the bell – I didn’t know you were here!’ exclaimed Mrs Annie Evans. ‘Quiet as a mouse, you are. And you’re wet.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Grace, noticing the raindrops on her bare, goose-pimpled arms.

  ‘There’s rain we’ve been having now just. I was on the horse and trap this morning, delivering grocery to the farms in Lampeter Velfrey and got drenched. Oh, it never stops.’

  Grace smiled automatically.

  ‘Have you brought the honey? Your mother told me you would.’ Mrs Annie Evans shuffled behind the high counter in the middle of her small grocery shop.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Grace, though her voice sounded feeble to her, almost faint. She lifted the heavy basket on to the counter.

  ‘Well, I can’t keep myself from saying it. Your mother called three days ago – she bought Glitto polish and Nippy scouring powder – and told me all about you and Wilfred Price. Heck, you must be tickled pink.’

  Grace smiled. She placed the glass jars one by one on to the wooden counter.

  ‘It’ll be the summer wedding, won’t it? Nothing nicer than a summer wedding.’

  ‘Well …’ mumbled Grace. The air in the shop was cloying and she was aware of the slightly nauseous smell of camphor and sweetly ripe apples.

  ‘It’ll be the talk of the town. Will Madoc be able to get leave from the Army – he’ll be an usher, won’t he?’

  Grace looked down at her trembling hands.

  ‘And only last week I saw a pattern for a beauteous veil in Fancy Needlework Illustrated. It would go nicely with your fair hair. It will be your mother embroidering the veil, won’t it, now?’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘She’s nifty with the needle, your mam.’

  Grace noticed her fingers trembling.

  ‘By damn, it will be difficult for Wilfred to concentrate on funerals with a wedding on his mind.’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace murmured. She coloured.

  ‘Oh, you’re the image of the blushing bride!’ said Mrs Evans, unscrewing the lid on one of the jars and dipping her little finger in it. ‘Delicious. That’s three jars at a shilling each; I’ll be owing you three shillings now. And I’ll take it off your ma’s grocery bill as usual, shall I, Grace?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Evans.’

  ‘Well, mind you keep providing Conduit Stores with honey, marriage or no marriage. There’s a thing now: Grace Reece, Doctor Reece’s only daughter, getting married.’

  Grace felt a surge of anxiety.

  Later that afternoon,
back in his workshop, Wilfred’s relief was palpable. It was as if his body had shrunk with the reprieve; even his neck seemed smaller and his shirt collar looser now all the tension had left him. It was easy again, since he had refused Grace, to smooth a plank; he was more able to hold the tote and the handle to plane the plank along the grain. He used his strong nail to clean some sawdust stuck to the blade. When he was engaged to Grace, he couldn’t plane the wood well; he stuttered with the weighty cast-iron tool and sometimes nicked the plank. During the engagement, he couldn’t go with the grain in his carpentry and he couldn’t go with the grain in his life. Wilfred thought how these sayings – metaphors, he thought they might be called, he would check that in his red dictionary – were often true. But Grace was gone now. And he wouldn’t need to see her ever again.

  He cleared the sawdust from the beech he was shaping into a casket lid. He felt remorse. She was hurt. He, Wilfred, had hurt her feelings; she’d cried, and he regretted that. He hadn’t wanted to upset her in the same way that he hadn’t wanted to marry her. Now there was her father to contend with. Her father might be cross. Or he might not make it his business. And there would be gossip, though he wasn’t sure whom Grace had told; Wilfred had told no one. But there would still be gossip. He would be teased at the Rugby Club and talked about in the tearooms. To be born in Narberth was to be gossiped about. He would feel ashamed but he would survive it.

  He looked up at the glass roof of the workshop: the sawdust was shimmying in the spring sunlight that had come after the rain shower, and he breathed in the aroma of glue and freshly sawn wood. He had made a misjudgement, he knew, in asking Grace to marry him. But the bigger mistake, he told himself, would have been to marry her. They both would have been unhappy then. For ever.

  Wilfred dusted the plane with a piece of lint, which he took from his dungaree pocket, and looked for some fine sandpaper because the edges of the coffin lid needed smoothing. Imagine being unhappily married for eternity. He shuddered at the thought. It must be like … well, what would it be like? He remembered the sense of dismay he’d had when he was a schoolboy at Narberth Church School and was given hours of homework. He began sanding the bevelled edges of the lid. Being unhappily married might feel a lot like the dread of doing hours of prep – mathematics prep – algebra and logarithms, inescapable problems with no obvious answer, no solution he could ever find, every day for the rest of his life.