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

by Wendy Jones

  ‘What will the explanation be, I wonder?’ her father said aloud. ‘What could it be?’

  It was now late Thursday afternoon, lunch with her parents and without Wilfred was over, and the light was fading. Grace was watching Mrs Hilda Prout who, with a sense of ceremony, drew the heavy, tasselled drapes.

  ‘Not a soul must see,’ Mrs Prout mouthed, opening a portmanteau and taking from it an engraved box. Grace had heard rumours that Mrs Hilda Prout kept a crystal ball though no one Grace knew had ever actually seen it. Motes of dust leaped in the air as she opened the box and unwrapped a crimson scarf. Grace was surprised at how large the crystal ball was.

  ‘There were whispers you had a crystal ball,’ she remarked, crossing Mrs Prout’s palm with silver. Mrs Prout held the ball in both hands as if it were a divine entity.

  ‘I have had it since I was a small child – not that I used it then. My grandmother taught me to keep it hidden from human eyes and never gaze into it until I could endure a mystery. Until then, all one can see in a crystal ball is empty glass, fingerprints or nightmares …’

  Mrs Hilda Prout put her face close to the ball, then closer still until her eyeball was against it. Grace winced squeamishly. Was Mrs Hilda Prout not right in the head? Many people came to visit her because she was a charmer and known in Narberth for curing warts by rubbing them with a live black snail while murmuring her rhyme,

  Wart begone on this snail’s back,

  Go and never more come back.

  Not that there was anything at all unusual about being a charmer. But crystal balls? They were for gypsies, not Welsh women who read the Bible and attended the Bethesda Chapel. Somewhere a door banged. Grace felt uneasy.

  ‘I see you are now woman enough to keep a secret,’ Mrs Hilda Prout stated, staring Grace straight in the eye, and Grace very slightly flinched.

  This afternoon in Mrs Prout’s darkened parlour with its wallpaper of trellis roses and the ornate Victorian furniture, Grace didn’t think about what the Revd Waldo Williams would say. Grace wanted answers, certainty, and her future known. And she wanted normality. Mrs Prout had said she would marry Wilfred, and she wanted to hear her say it again – reassure her in clear, certain, straightforward words that she was loved by Wilfred and would be married to Wilfred; to know that everything somehow would be all right.

  Mrs Prout rolled the ball in her hand until it was smudged and greasy with fingerprints. Did Mrs Hilda Prout already know about Grace’s life and was now seeing some unknown future world with Grace in it, without Grace saying a word? Were there people who could grasp the truth, guess it, divine it, without being told?

  Mrs Prout was hidden away from the bright world of science and modern medicine with its new vitamins and vaccines, and she earned her living charming shingles, warts, jaundice and dropsy. This was the ancient custom and it went unremarked upon and accepted in Narberth.

  Grace asked self-consciously, ‘What do you see?’

  Mrs Hilda Prout ignored her and gazed into the depths of the ball, then blinked tightly.

  ‘I was hoping to ask you about Wilfred Price …’

  ‘Ah … your affianced. “There is a willow grows aslant a brook”.’

  ‘Pardon?’ asked Grace, not understanding. ‘A willow? I don’t understand.’

  Mrs Prout stared intently at her. ‘Were you expecting to understand?’ she asked harshly, brushing her brittle grey hair back into its bun.

  Grace didn’t want riddles; she wanted a fact about the future, something she could hold on to, pin her hopes on.

  Mrs Prout turned her back on Grace, wrapped the translucent orb in the scarf as if wrapping the relic of a saint, and locked it away in its case. She tucked the key down her bosom, drew back the curtains then sat down opposite the girl, saying nothing.

  ‘I didn’t hear from Wilfred … and …’ Grace desperately tried to explain. ‘You said I would marry him.’ There was a quivering note of panic in her voice but Mrs Prout ignored her.

  ‘There’s rain coming. I saw that.’

  Grace didn’t know how to respond. Is that all? she thought.

  ‘Take your brolly. Don’t forget.’

  ‘Did you see anything in the crystal ball that might … help me?’ Near-hysteria was welling within her as her hopes were dashed.

  ‘Yes, but there is very little to say about what I saw,’ said Mrs Hilda Prout, ‘except to say that all mothers are healers.’

  ‘Grace, bach,’ Dr Reece called gently that evening, knocking on his daughter’s bedroom door. Grace watched her father come in. He looked ill at ease, which was unusual; she almost never saw him like that. As the only doctor in Narberth he was always the more confident one, the one who wasn’t in pain, the one with all the answers. He never needed his patients the way his patients needed him.

  ‘Grace …?’

  Grace was waiting for his answer, which she knew – as was his habit – he would provide.

  ‘Would you take this?’ he asked soberly.

  There it was – the answer, Grace thought. He placed a blue bottle of medicine on her dressing-table, the bottle clanking loudly on the curved glass covering the dressing-table top. The bottle, with its viscous liquid, stood next to the gilded hand mirror her grandmother had given her when she was twelve. Dr Reece gently put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder and left it there for a few moments.

  ‘You may find it is of assistance,’ he continued, ‘for the heaviness you are experiencing.’ He avoided her eyes and Grace looked at her patchwork quilt. What did her father know? She crushed the thought.

  Once her father had left the room and she’d heard his solid footsteps on the stair linoleum, Grace picked up the bottle. It was unlabelled. Her father hadn’t said how much to take. She could ask him, but she knew she wouldn’t.

  Grace thought of Mrs Prout’s comment: she didn’t know if all mothers were healers. Her mother? Her accusing, rejecting mother? No. When she or Madoc had been ill in childhood it was their father who paid a visit to W. Palmer Morgan, the apothecary, who waited while the pills were made and then who dispensed – with exactitude – the treatment. It was true that very occasionally it had been her mother who had wrapped the laddered silk stocking around her or her brother’s neck when they had sore throats and who had lit the camphor lamp that burned through the night when Grace had tonsillitis, and had thrust teaspoons of Invalid Bovril into her mouth, but it had been at her father’s instruction.

  Mrs Hilda Prout was wrong – completely wrong. Her father, with his thick grey beard and piercing eyes, was the healer – not that he would have called himself such; he would think that word was mumbo-jumbo. A healer was what he would call ‘antediluvian’, whereas he, Dr M. H. Reece, MD, was a man of science, a man of rationality, a man of answers.

  Grace held the cold, glass bottle in her hands and thought of her bees. There were those people who believed bee stings were medicine, people who covered themselves, leaving only their arthritic knees exposed before annoying a hive. The bees landed on their bare skin, stung it, and the arthritis was improved, cured even. But that was old medicine, not the modern twentieth-century science her father practised. What her father knew came from books. This bee remedy was learned from the garden and the forest, among the green leaves and the seeds and flowers. Doctors who studied text books would never believe that the insects and the lavender, the birch trees and the roses had something to teach them. Her father would think it was all nonsense. He’d say, ‘It’s all medieval mumbo-jumbo left over from the Dark Ages and the time of Pwyll. These people live as if the Age of Enlightenment had never happened.’

  Grace didn’t have a teaspoon in her bedroom so she unplugged the cork and took a swig, almost desperately, like a drunk. It tasted so bitter she retched, then forced herself to swallow again. Her eyes watered and her stomach convulsed. Swallow. Just swallow, she told herself. Mrs Hilda Prout was right: Grace kept a secret. But mothers as healers, that was beyond her experience – for now.

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nbsp; 5

  The Cove

  Thursday morning was the first warm day of the year. No one had known where Flora was going. That was the joy of cycling away and not a soul in the whole world having a clue where she was. At the cove Flora could be silent and in solitude: there would only be the green sea and the endless parade of waves for company. Yes, she would bicycle to the cove and she would be restored.

  Flora freewheeled down the last hill before the cove, taking her feet off the rubber pedals, her tin mudguards rattling noisily, her camera in her basket. Most people preferred Saundersfoot to the cove for its promenade of beachfront shops with the Welsh Dresser Bakery and the Lollipop Sweetshop, the sound of the accordion player with the monkey chained to his epaulette rising up, and there was Saundersfoot harbour with the blue and white fishing boats bobbing but anchored. The cove, though, was much quieter and most often Flora would have the whole wide bay with its scalloped sea entirely to herself.

  She left her bicycle lying by the roadside, took her camera and clambered down the boulders on to the beach. This was perhaps the reason the cove was nearly always empty: it took balance and dexterity to climb over the great granite stones that lay between the road and the sand. Flora, though, was deft at moving across them; she had been doing so since she was a child, when she would come here with her father. As a small girl wearing galoshes she had played in the stream by the crumbly cliffs, filling her bucket with sand and building dams while the crystal-clear water babbled down from springs in the hills and filled her wellingtons with icy water.

  Flora began to walk across the cove towards Amroth, so as to forget the world, but inevitably she began to think of Albert. Most of the time she tried not to think of him and usually succeeded. But it was hard not to think of someone. When she told herself, ‘I won’t think of Albert,’ he appeared in her mind’s eye: his sandy hair with its attempt at a side-parting and the curls he tried to quash with hair oils. Albert in that spring and summer of 1918, when they were engaged, traipsing through fluid fields of grain before they were harvested, his trousers the same colour as the wheat. And his agility: walking backward, showing off, doing press-ups, jumping the stile. He climbed the Wych elm. He picked pears. Once she’d photographed him standing high in the branches of a cedar tree.

  She remembered Albert laughing when he was swinging exuberantly on a rope swing and her sandal had flung off, making a large arc and landing in a bush. They’d searched in the green hedge, laughing, Albert reaching in and getting it. She remembered being free and alive then, with her shoe curving through the air purposefully. That was Albert unbuttoned.

  Then there was her photograph of Albert holding his formal, military stance – but that was acquired, taught: Albert buttoned. She thought perhaps Mr and Mrs Bowen had been most proud of that Albert: backbone straight, unnaturally so, chest out, gold buttons arranged in groups of five on his uniform tunic, and the three-feathered plume in his bearskin cap. That was the young man she remembered from the silver-framed photograph, not the Albert she remembered from life. That young soldier hadn’t been the only Albert. It still made her chest feel tight. So she wouldn’t think about it.

  A seagull landed nearby, accompanying her a few steps before flying away. Flora watched it disappear into the distance, and began looking in the sand for shells that she could photograph. It had been six years now since the telegram with its three short sentences. Bang. Bang. Bang. Like bullets.

  Then there had been Christopher, Albert’s friend in the winter of 1918, only four months later, sitting in his Welsh Guards’ uniform on Mr and Mrs Bowen’s settee, the teacup clattering in his shaking hands. She had listened mutely, intently, as had Mr and Mrs Bowen. Christopher said it had gone in his side. It had been very sudden. They were crouching, almost standing really and getting ready to go over the top of the trench. Albert was crouched lower. It had been unforeseen and very quick. Oh yes, Christopher was certain of that. It had been over in a moment, Mr and Mrs Bowen, Christopher could tell. There had been no suffering at all. None.

  The room fell silent.

  ‘That is a comfort to Mrs Bowen,’ Mr Bowen said eventually.

  ‘Yes,’ Christopher replied. He stared into his teacup. He kept knocking the buttons of his uniform against the saucer with a clack. The Army doctor had said that the bullet had entered the liver and there could be ‘no hope’ – those were his words – ‘for a man with a bullet in his liver,’ Christopher said. Mr Bowen sat dumbly. Flora picked up the bone china teapot and offered Christopher more tea.

  ‘No, thank you kindly; I’ll be getting off now. Catching the train back to Swansea, you see. Got to get back before it’s too late.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course.’ They understood. It had been very kind, too kind to mention, Christopher coming all this way to tell them, so that they would know there had been no pain at the end.

  ‘A great reassurance,’ Mr Bowen had said.

  Flora sat on a rock, shook her hair and looked out at the still sea. She tried not to think about Albert and the life they would have had together, kept on trying to shake the shock and the sadness out of herself. For years it seemed as if her very bones had been glazed with grief, though she was becoming aware of a new warmth growing within her and the need to embrace life again.

  It was Thursday and Wilfred was spending the day in his workshop. What was it with his customers, he wondered. Mrs Howell-Thomas’s fingernails, poor bugger, hadn’t seen a nailbrush for a while. It was hard washing a corpse’s hand. Some cooperated but others lay there like a sack of potatoes with a look of consternation on their face, like a small child who didn’t like being washed. Wilfred went to the door of the workshop to get a couple of breaths of fresh air, feeling grateful for the business Mrs Howell-Thomas had provided.

  ‘Nails are in a bit of a state here, Mrs Howell-Thomas. Not like you, what with you keeping your house so spick and span.’

  Mrs Howell-Thomas was certainly proving less compliant in death than she ever was in life. But it was like that. These elderly Welsh ladies who spent their life distributing hymn books at the door of the Bethesda Chapel and making lemon curd for the Harvest Festival – as soon as they popped their clogs, that was it, couldn’t get them to do anything you wanted. Christian values went out the window once they’d kicked the bucket.

  And what was he going to do about that ring? It wouldn’t budge. The rigor mortis had faded and all the fluids had sunk to the bottom of the body, turning Mrs Howell-Thomas the usual waxy colour associated with the recently deceased. It was a pleasant shade of mushroomy-white and the colour that meant that, when the family saw the departed, they were under no illusion that their dearly departed had indeed departed. It was the colour that proclaimed ‘dead’.

  ‘Daughter coming this afternoon, Mrs Howell-Thomas,’ Wilfred said slowly and loudly, as if the deceased were deaf. ‘We want you to look nice for her.’

  The air was getting a bit rich in here; he’d have to get the viewing done early this afternoon, then nail down the lid as soon as he could. He opened the workshop window.

  ‘Bit hot in here today, isn’t it?’ he remarked.

  Hopefully after the viewing the family would say that the deceased ‘looked at peace’. ‘Indeed, indeed,’ Wilfred would answer meaningfully. It was essential for business, Wilfred knew, that the dead must look at peace, rather than rotting. So he ‘did the necessary’, as Mr Auden delicately phrased it. It meant the deceased didn’t smell and the coffin didn’t leak. A dab of face power, sometimes a shave, even a smear of lipstick – and dentures; dentures were always essential – and the faces of most were palatable. An undertaker was in the business of lying about death. Even the poor devils who had passed away in great pain from cancer looked at peace once Wilfred had finished with them. Those corpses smelled – especially the ladies with tumours on their breasts, like a bunch of big, black grapes. Of course, nobody, least of all the undertaker, ever revealed that a person had passed away with cancer. It was a terrible sec
ret, because if the neighbours knew they would be terrified of catching it.

  Peering into Mrs Howell-Thomas’s coffin, he realised he wasn’t going to be able to get that damn ring off. He looked more closely at her fingers which were already purple and bloated, and wondered if Howard Carter had had this problem with Tutankhamun.

  ‘There was a tomb that Tutankhamun had!’ he remarked to Mrs Howell-Thomas. ‘Absolutely magnificent!’

  ‘What are you talking about in there, Wilfred?’ said his da, who was sitting on the flowerbed wall, drinking his tea. ‘Are you talking to a corpse again?’

  ‘Oh! Da … Just about to touch up the coffin with some varnish. Just thinking about how magnificent it will look … when the varnish is on,’ Wilfred said, poking his head out of the workshop door.

  ‘There we are then,’ said his da, somewhat sceptically.

  ‘Varnish is magnificent,’ Wilfred added self-consciously.

  ‘Oh yes. It is.’ There was a pause.

  ‘Better be getting on,’ said Wilfred.

  He leaned on the coffin, stumped as to what to do with the ring. It was on his mind that he had to go to lunch at the Reeces’ on Saturday. He would call around and speak to Dr Reece later and explain the engagement was off. Grace must have been, understandably, too frightened to explain to her mother and father what had happened. She no doubt felt humiliated – no one ever liked being unwanted. He sighed. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but it must be done. In fact, he was dreading it, which was why he’d procrastinated. It would be that much easier all round to send a note. Grace wouldn’t have to see him and have the rejection compounded; a visit might add insult to injury. Perhaps he would pop a note through the door this evening. Wilfred knew he would have to act soon.

  He looked at Mrs Howell-Thomas’s wedding ring. It was made of reddish Welsh gold and half a century of wearing had scratched and rubbed it smooth. It was part of Mrs Howell-Thomas’s body now, like her marriage had been part of her life, and it belonged to her and was with her in death and, as in life, she would not forsake or relinquish her husband. It was often like this with old ladies, that he couldn’t remove the thin, clogau gold band that had been given to them on their wedding day, at some point in the last century. They had put it on as a quivering and smooth-skinned maiden standing at the altar, and they had never, ever taken it off again.