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

by Wendy Jones

  ‘Eat up, Wilfred, lad,’ his da encouraged, but Wilfred was pushing the black pudding around his plate, his body slumped, his head resting in his hands. He wasn’t even reading the Undertaker’s Journal in front of him.

  ‘Wilf, you’ll be a bag of bones if you don’t eat. And no good to anyone. You’ll make yourself ill, now.’ Wilfred’s da could have added, ‘Think of your wife,’ but he knew well enough that thinking about his wife was the reason Wilfred couldn’t eat.

  ‘Don’t you want to eat breakfast at the Reeces’?’ his da asked gently. ‘Mrs Reece is a tidy cook.’ Wilfred pushed the leftover Specials to the side of his plate.

  This was the first time Wilfred’s da had ever known his son not to speak. Wilfred liked to talk, always about his work. He could talk for Narberth, could Wilfred. If it wasn’t making chitchat about his funerals he was wanting a conversation about the wallpaper shop and paper-hanging. Wilfred was even more of a talker since he’d been reading the dictionary every day, had even more to say for himself. What was that he’d said to him now the other day? He wanted to ‘augment’ the funeral business with a wallpaper shop. Augment, by damn. Well, there wasn’t much augmenting going on for Wilfred now, his da thought, whatever augmenting was.

  Wilfred would have to say something soon, it was his way. Wilfred’s da knew his son was a thoughtful young man who was eager for his life to happen; no, he wouldn’t be able to keep quiet for long.

  ‘Eat up, boyo,’ his da said again. ‘There’s a good lad.’

  Wilfred had been in his workshop for the last four days. He’d started making the coffin the day after the wedding even though it was the Sabbath and the day of rest. It was a standard size of 28-inch width and 84-inch length for a large man, around 6 foot and 12 stone, about the same size as himself. Not that there was anyone specific he could think of who might die soon, but he would keep the casket ready and waiting for one of the whiskery old men of Narberth to kick the bucket. It would save him making one in a rush.

  ‘You’ve been in that workshop for days, Wilfred,’ his da had said. ‘What are you doing in there? Anyone would think you were making a coffin for Tutankhamun.’

  He was filling time, staying in his workshop because it was familiar, safe, the place where he had spent the last seven years working. He looked around him – the sawing had created a lot of sawdust, which lay like a thick yellow blanket on the tins of varnish, over the boxes of coffin handles, his dictionary and in the furrow of his workbench where he kept his tools. He should sweep, but what was the point of making the workshop spick and span when he felt so dejected and old, as if life itself was over? The tin dustpan and brush in the corner remained unused. He remembered that Mr Ogmore Auden had been clear:

  ‘Sweep up, boyo. Sweep as if your life depends on it.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Auden,’ Wilfred would reply immediately and dutifully. Indeed, sweeping the workshop floorboards had been his very first task on that first awe-inspiring day of his apprenticeship.

  ‘Brush up that sawdust,’ Mr Auden had said on that first morning. ‘And you’ll be sweeping up too, every day, at least three times a day, for the next four years.’

  Mr Auden hadn’t been kidding. In the first year Wilfred thought all he was ever going to learn was how to use a dustpan and brush, and that the nearest he’d ever get to an actual corpse was getting down on his hands and knees and sweeping up the shavings beneath a coffin. But as Wilfred proved himself capable and assiduous at keeping the floorboards spotless, Mr Auden responded by giving him more challenging tasks until Wilfred came to understand that the more thoroughly he swept, the more real work Mr Auden would give him. With time, Wilfred began what he thought of as his proper apprenticeship, beginning with how to identify wood by colour, from white and pale yellow to red, purple and black, and by open or closed grain, and also by pattern – the stripes, the circles, the waves and the curls, ripples and eyes. He learned that the preparation he needed to be a funeral director depended on how enthusiastically and humbly he swept the floor.

  ‘One spark on all that sawdust and we’ll be up in flames – indeed, in-double-deed. We purvey other people’s funerals, Wilfred, not arrange our own. You sweep up those wood chippings, there’s a good lad, and mind you do it properly now. No cheating or we’ll all be down the crematorium and it won’t be me who’ll be driving the hearse.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Auden,’ Wilfred had said. ‘Yes, Mr Auden,’ were the words he said most frequently over those four years of his apprenticeship, and as Wilfred’s respect for and obedience to Mr Ogmore Auden grew, the more he meant it when he said, ‘Yes, Mr Auden.’

  Wilfred looked around his workshop. There was at least an inch of sawdust and chippings on the pile of old copies of the Weekly News and he knew that Mr Auden would be appalled.

  ‘What are you doing here!’ Wilfred imagined him exclaiming. ‘Are you trying to kill us all? Hell’s bells, Wilfred. This’ll go up in a puff of smoke, just like that.’ Wilfred could hear Mr Auden click his fingers.

  Wilfred didn’t care. A quick fire, hot flames, death from the smoke; it wouldn’t matter to him now. He’d sweep up the dust, perhaps tomorrow.

  He heard Mr Ogmore Auden again: ‘A man needs something to look forward to.’ Mr Auden had always been clear on that. ‘Whatever happens, Wilfred, have a plan. Might not work out – poor bugger in the back there had a plan’ – they had been on their way to a funeral when his apprentice-master had delivered the homily – ‘but you’ve got to have something to aim for, especially when things turn out unexpectedly, as they do.’

  Wilfred knew he would keep going. Perhaps he’d keep reading the dictionary, though the last definition he’d read was Apillera: a pictorial Peruvian wall decoration stitched on to sacking backcloth – that wasn’t a very useful word. Maybe one day he would even finish turning the parlour into a wallpaper shop. But he couldn’t imagine ever feeling happy again. Would he ever adjust, get used to his new life? He brushed the dust off a wooden chair with the side of his hand and sat down. He’d spend his days in the workshop, and eat at home with his da as he had always done. At night he’d sleep at Dr Reece’s house. Life would go on, he’d go on, and then one day he, too, would be laid out here in his own workshop, in a coffin no doubt of his own making, and then this dreadful mess would be over

  For two weeks now Wilfred had clung to the very edge of the bed on what had become his side, the side by the door. He slept curled up. Grace hadn’t imagined he would be so unhappy that he would stay hunched up all night long; his legs tucked together, his hands held close to his broad chest. She had always thought of Wilfred as a confident young man about Narberth, able to ask for what he wanted. After all, he had asked her to marry him – he’d been confident and robust then. And he’d been almost brutal when he’d stated – or more like blurted out – that he didn’t want to marry her, that day when they’d been standing in the rain outside the Angel Inn. Grace had thought Wilfred was strong and quite unafraid to speak his mind. But in the dark, here, now, he lay tight, making himself smaller than he was.

  Lying in bed, awake and sleepless, she thought back to a vague memory of Wilfred as a young boy, running around the town moor, playing cricket on the cricket field with a band of boys, including Madoc and Sidney. That was a long time ago. She’d forgotten about the young Wilfred. But glancing at him, clasped, restrained, locked in his own world, she was reminded of him when he was much younger.

  He was, she thought, resolute, granite-like in his determination to sleep alone and untouched in this double bed under the eaves of the attic. He acted as if she wasn’t there. And day-by-day, as she got almost imperceptibly larger, he seemed to be getting smaller and tighter, almost as if he was diminishing. He was thinner than he’d been a fortnight ago, his neck was smaller and his face less square. Grace hadn’t seen him smile or heard him laugh, nor had he spoken to her since he’d pronounced his wedding vows, promising to stay with her until he died. It looked as if he was beginning to die alread
y.

  Did people die, rather than stay married, Grace wondered, actually let themselves fade away rather than live in wedlock? She had got married for the opposite reason: to stay alive. But Wilfred hadn’t fought, hadn’t said, ‘No, I do not take this woman, Grace Amelia Reece, as my lawful, wedded wife. I do not love her. I will not cherish her until death us do part.’ Wilfred had not spoken the truth at their wedding. He had lied, Grace realized. All his vows were a lie. He didn’t fight the vows and he didn’t fight the wedding because he knew he wouldn’t win, and now, here in their marriage bed, he was lying down as if some part of him was dying. Grace didn’t want him to die. Grace had wanted to live, but she didn’t want Wilfred to die in her place.

  She reached out her hand across the bed, across the gap between them that had been maintained each and every night for the fourteen nights of the marriage, and touched his arm, leaving her hand there for a few seconds; it was a touch devoid of sexuality or passion, desire or wanting. It was the touch of one broken person reaching out, in recognition, to another.

  Wilfred was curled up on his side, looking at the bedroom door. Neither of them had moved into the middle of the bed. This is what they must mean by a no man’s land, Wilfred thought, a land no man wants to go into. In a normal marriage, the centre of the bed was where the coupling – the marriage – would take place, the space into which the man would invite the woman. Eventually, over years, the weight of both of their bodies caused the bed, its springs and lattices, to squeak and sigh as if it were aching along with the couple’s bodies. In the middle of the bed the marriage was made. But not in this bed. This was Dr and Mrs Reece’s old bed in Grace’s brother’s old room in Dr and Mrs Reece’s house at 32 High Street, Narberth, Pembrokeshire. That’s whose bed it was. Wilfred didn’t think of it as his wedding bed.

  Wilfred had once kissed Grace under the jasmine in the wood, before it flowered and when it was still in bud, and he had put his hand up her skirt and on to the velvety, fleshy pad of her thigh – and that had been the extent of it, that Good Friday, a few months back. He knew she would never let him touch her breasts, so, with some courage he had stooped to put his hand under her petticoat and along the ridge of her thigh. There she’d stopped him, put her fingers over his; her hand was over the cotton, and his hand was under it. Wilfred had understood, pulled his hand away and concentrated on touching her lip with his tongue. The embrace had taken minutes and it felt to Wilfred now as if in those minutes he had spent the whole of the rest of his life.

  But I didn’t do anything, Wilfred wanted to say. He hadn’t done anything, had he? He had thought about it, he remembered that quite clearly. But that wasn’t the same as actually doing anything. Had he? He had touched her leg, that time. Perhaps Grace had sat on a toilet seat. But everything was spotless in Mrs Reece’s house. Wilfred was at a loss. He didn’t know about these things, no one spoke plainly about them and there were no books that he knew of, not in Narberth. There were rumours that contradicted and left him confused and unclear. He’d kissed her, once, when they went for a walk – had that been it? No. You couldn’t make a girl pregnant from kissing her – that was a load of old nonsense, surely? I’m innocent, he thought. But, he realized, Grace wasn’t.

  But he hadn’t done that, hadn’t put himself there. Good God! If women got pregnant that easily, from men merely touching their legs, well, there would be babies everywhere and there would be millions, billions, of people in the world. Wilfred didn’t know much about these things but he guessed that what he used to hear in the Narberth Rugby Football Club bar was just about right, if a bit exaggerated. The rugby lads liked to exaggerate, especially when they had had a few pints, but he suspected they spoke something near the truth. A man could learn all he needed to know about women if he went to the Narberth Rugby Football Club bar for a drink and listened.

  Wilfred felt hot, almost fetid, between the flannelette sheets and beneath the weight of the heavy, woollen blankets. There was even an eiderdown on top. It looked like Mrs Reece had sewn it from exact triangles cut from her family’s old clothes. Wilfred felt smothered. He wanted to kick away the bedding and the blankets.

  It was as Wilfred was lying there perspiring, worrying, that he felt Grace’s hand rest on his forearm. It shocked him. He had never expected her to touch him; he didn’t want it, crimped himself up to the edge of the mattress every night to avoid it. It had been unthinkable that Grace would touch him. Now her touch felt like a taboo being broken. Didn’t she know that they weren’t married, not really? That he didn’t even want to be married? Didn’t they both know – and they were the only two people who did – that it wasn’t him? Well, another man knew, whoever he was. And everyone else had assumed it was him because he was married to her, but Wilfred and Grace alone knew. Between them, they knew.

  Grace, Wilfred had seen out of the corner of his eye, was wearing a long white nightdress. She had worn that bloody yellow dress on their wedding day. Both the nightdress and the dress left Wilfred cold. She had to wear something though, he supposed. Not that she’d worn any clothes with somebody! Wilfred was still shocked. She’d taken off all her clothes with someone. That was certain. But what Wilfred didn’t like to think about, couldn’t think about, lying in the double bed in the stuffy attic of Dr and Mrs Reece’s house, what he couldn’t even contemplate, because he knew it would cause him more pain than he could bear, was the thought of Flora.

  9

  The Sea

  Flora laughed. ‘On the back of your bicycle? It’ll buckle the wheel.’

  ‘Let’s go quickly. Hop on,’ Wilfred said. ‘I’ll cycle. The tide will be out soon.’

  Saturday had come again and Wilfred and Flora were outside the cottage door. Flora climbed carefully up on to the saddle and Wilfred stood on the pedals. They set off precariously, veering from side to side along the winding lane from the cottage.

  ‘Won’t someone see us?’ Flora asked.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Wilfred replied.

  ‘Mind the hydrangeas. Mind the hydran—’ Flora called. Wilfred steered the bicycle sharply to the left, just missing the bush, though a couple of the pink flowers brushed against them.

  ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Flora as the hydrangeas fluttered against her face and bare arm, pink petals scattering. She smiled.

  ‘Sorry, dear,’ Wilfred called over his shoulder.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Flora replied, her chin resting on his shoulder. ‘I like wild hydrangeas.’ He called me dear, she thought.

  It was sultry and would soon be scorching. The sky was utterly cloudless and a bold mid-blue. They were saved from the heat of the sun by the shade of the hawthorn and lime trees beside the path, but when they reached the sea road there would be no protection. Flora had an arm around Wilfred’s waist and with her other hand she was holding on to her cloche hat as the bike hurtled in the direction of the sea.

  ‘Slow down!’

  ‘No!’

  Flora stretched her legs out from the bicycle, asking, ‘Do you drive the hearse like you ride a bicycle?’

  ‘I never get any complaints from the passengers.’

  ‘You’re laughing,’ Flora said. She took her hat off, putting it under her arm, and wrapped both arms around Wilfred’s solid body, laid her head against his back and held on tightly.

  The bike clattered and bumped down the steep hill to the cove and Wilfred steered it skilfully, avoiding jagged flints and dry dips that had recently been puddles. They cycled over twigs that snapped sharply and the bicycle bell jingled and the mudguards rattled.

  ‘Yahoo!’ Wilfred shouted as they jolted over the lip of the road and freewheeled down the lane and round the corner. When they reached Heane Castle, Wilfred stopped the bike. ‘Off, my fair lady, while I make adjustments to our carriage.’

  ‘Is the wheel buckled?’ Flora asked.

  ‘No, Raleigh bikes are sturdy.’ Wilfred straightened up the handlebars, stepped over the bar, put his feet on the pedals and said to Flora, ‘Your ca
rriage awaits!’ He bowed down low and made a flourish with his hand.

  Flora had never seen Wilfred playful before. She’d seen him stiff and formal at her father’s funeral, seen him serious in the cottage – he had even held her as if it was a serious matter – but today he was different, free, light: it was almost, Flora thought, as if he was careless.

  ‘I shall lead my fine damsel to the enchanted forest. And away we go!’ Wilfred announced, cycling again.

  The road was flat and empty and they made slow progress now they were no longer going downhill. Wilfred worked hard cycling and Flora said sympathetically, ‘I’m trying not to weigh too much.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he replied. ‘I’m used to having corpses in the back; one elegant lady is no burden.’

  By the time they reached Amroth, the muscles in Wilfred’s legs were burning and his face was dripping with sweat. He took out a comb from his back trouser pocket and combed his hair to the side while Flora smoothed down her long hair hand and tucked her cotton blouse back into her skirt.

  ‘I think we might find the forest because the tide is so far out, the furthest I’ve ever seen it,’ Wilfred commented. It was getting hotter; it would soon be sweltering. He propped the bike against a large granite rock, adding, ‘Shoes off!’ While he untied the laces of his shoes, Flora unbuckled her sandals and then took her camera from the basket on the front of the bicycle.

  ‘To the sea!’ shouted Wilfred. He grabbed Flora’s hand and began running. They jogged towards the water for a quarter of a mile or so, their steps in rhythm. The sand was dry and the running arduous, and grains leaped up in their wake.