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

by Wendy Jones

  ‘How long have you been married?’

  ‘Three weeks.’

  Wilfred suddenly felt his tongue, which had been tense and swollen in his mouth, begin to say the words that had been locked inside him.

  ‘I was foolish. So foolish.’ He tried to put into order all that had happened. ‘I was sweet on her and I proposed, out of the blue. Just said it, like that, stupidly. Then she said yes. But I told her, I told her plain as day that I didn’t want to get married. I didn’t mean it when I proposed. And that was that. Then her father came and told me I was marrying her. She’s expecting.’ He felt Flora flinch in his arms.

  ‘No. No. It’s not like that. I didn’t know. She wasn’t expecting when I proposed – or perhaps she was. But it wasn’t me. It wasn’t anything to do with me. And her father and her mother, ruddy Mrs Reece – everybody thinks it’s me because I was her fiancé, and it isn’t, and the only person who knows it wasn’t me is me. And Grace. And now you.’

  As all the words poured out, Wilfred felt his mind and body unwind, as if he had been clockwork, wound up so tightly that he might have popped and unravelled with a ping and a clatter of metal cogs and wheels. Now it was as if he was allowed to uncoil and express himself.

  ‘I haven’t even seen a woman naked, not a real, live one. I had never even kissed a woman before, never mind had sexual relations. I was once sweet on her at a picnic, that’s all.’ He paused and stroked Flora’s hair. ‘If I told everyone it wasn’t me, no one would believe me because I was her fiancé for a few weeks. It would have to be me, but they would be wrong. It wasn’t me and I don’t know who it was. I’ve racked my brains but it must be someone because Grace is hardly the Virgin Mary and Narberth isn’t Bethlehem.’

  Wilfred reached out and leaned over Flora. He could feel she was alert and listening intently, like a deer aware of her surroundings.

  ‘So I went to the wedding in the register office, and I’ve done so many funerals and buried so many people, and that day felt more like a funeral than any funeral I’ve ever been to. I felt as if I was burying myself alive and no one was noticing.

  ‘And there’s my da … My ma died four days after I was born and my da brought me up. And if I hadn’t married Grace I would have had to leave Narberth, because no one would have let me bury their next-of-kin if they thought I’d left Grace in the lurch and abandoned a baby. And for how many years would they remember what I’d done? I’d have no work and I wouldn’t be able to care for my da. It’s because of my da. I am his world and we are everything to each other, and if I left Narberth, what would happen to him? Who would look after him? He needs me and I need him.’ He looked into Flora’s brown eyes. ‘And where would I go? I thought of the Army but I don’t want to fight or kill. I don’t want to kill people; I only want to bury them. And I couldn’t leave Narberth because my da is here and my da will never leave Narberth because my ma is here, buried in the graveyard. And my da sits with my ma every day. No, I couldn’t leave, not after all my da is to me. Not ever.’

  He pulled Flora to him and rubbed her along the length of her back.

  ‘And if I didn’t marry her and I stayed in Narberth, no woman would ever marry me. What woman would marry a man who they thought had left their child? What woman would love a man who had been so cruel?’ Wilfred buried his face into the thickness of Flora’s hair.

  Wilfred, saying it all for the first time, realized that he had thought his life was his own, but it wasn’t; he knew now that it belonged as well to his da and to the people of Narberth, and by loving his father and by living in Narberth, his life belonged, in part, to them.

  Wilfred could feel the sweat trickling from his forehead as he spoke, seeping out from under his arms and damp on the hair on his chest. Flora was absolutely still in his arms; it was as if she was absorbing Wilfred’s words, and he could feel she was utterly attentive.

  ‘So it was because I was bullied and panicked, and because I love my da and because I fancied a woman once at a picnic. And because she was expecting, and because I was stupid and unlucky. And then I met you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then your da … your da … it was your father and he’d passed away and I buried him and I liked you from those first few moments, when you were beautiful and sad and elegant, and I thought you looked like a deer, a graceful, vulnerable, startled deer and I wanted you, this, here, for ever.’ Wilfred heard Flora breathe in.

  ‘I planned to take you for tea, and when your mam said no, I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to think. Then I got your postcard – only I didn’t know it was from you, and I came here and it was you.’

  There. It was said. He was spent. The truth was between them like a cloth laid out – she would do with it as she would. He had spoken the truth and he could do no other. Suddenly a gasp escaped from him and the muscles of his face crumpled. Wilfred cried – loud, jerky sobs that wrenched the silence of the cottage. He cried in an unpractised way, as if he didn’t know how to cry, and Flora held him in his gaucheness.

  When Wilfred’s crying had subsided, Flora pulled back.

  ‘Shall I tell you?’ she asked.

  ‘About yourself?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ Wilfred said. This was what he wanted, the truth of her.

  ‘Well, there was Albert and we were engaged and I loved him like it’s possible to love when your heart hasn’t been broken. But it was the war and he went … and he never came back. When I saw the telegram, it felt as if a bomb had exploded in my heart. Sometimes I think I died with him at the Battle of the Sambre as he went over the trench. And for a long while, I wanted to die with him. But there were years of life without Albert, numb, flat years where all I wanted was the life I’d thought I was going to have with him. Other men came along but I couldn’t love them because my heart was too fractured; there wasn’t enough of it left to love. Then my father, like that, gone. Nothing is as sudden as death.

  ‘At the funeral it seemed that you knew what to do in the face of death, knew almost how to organize and command it, how to cope with it and still breathe and walk and talk. I had only known how to die when death came near. But you were businesslike about mortality and it was an answer.’

  She covered herself in the tablecloth.

  ‘At the funeral I felt your warmth for me and it melted something deep inside me that had frozen, and when my mam said I couldn’t have tea with you, I knew that was my life now and that it belonged to me, and that I want to live it before I die, not spend it grieving.

  ‘And there was something else.’ She smoothed her hair away from her eyes. ‘When I saw my father laid out in his coffin, he looked perfect and dead. His skin was cool and even, his face set peacefully, not strained. And he was lying so still in an immaculate white shroud. He was perfect: perfectly still, perfectly composed, and perfectly serene. I realized then, that the only thing in the world that is perfect is death. Life is like this, here, now – not perfect, not still, not calm, not over. Like us. So I opened up, I reached out, I sent the postcard, and you came and you’re married. And I …’

  She didn’t finish the sentence but Wilfred sensed she wanted to say something else.

  ‘And I want to be here with you,’ she added. Wilfred put his hand to Flora’s face, stroked her cheek and took a piece of grass from her hair.

  There was a peace between them born of release, a silence without secrets. The moon was reflecting its pure light on to the cove. Wilfred looked over Flora’s shoulder and out of the window, and saw that the sky had darkened somewhat and the stars were emerging, bright and far away, peppering the night with their beads of light. The wind moved in the trees and bats swished across the sky. The tablecloth they were wrapped in was muddy, stained with earth, damp from tears and warmed by their sunburned skin. Wilfred put a hand to Flora’s narrow shoulder.

  ‘What will you do?’ Flora asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  Wilfred and Flora wal
ked silently from the cove through fields of green wheat, Wilfred carrying his bike, to the low hedge at the back of White Hook. At the bottom of the garden Wilfred picked Flora up in his arms and lifted her over the hawthorn. They parted silently. Wilfred went to kiss her on the lips but Flora turned her face away.

  There was a light on in the house, Flora saw – her mam was still up and waiting for her. It was past midnight and her mam must have feared the worst. For the last few weeks Flora had told her she was going for a bicycle ride when she had been cycling to the cove most days to take photographs but then she hadn’t returned. Night had come. It was dark and silent by the time Flora pushed open the door and walked through the porch into the kitchen.

  Her mam was at the round kitchen table, a lamp burning intensely beside her, sitting mutely, waiting modestly. The fire was low and a breeze was disturbing the green curtains hanging at the kitchen window. Flora stayed still for a few seconds and then she walked across the floor, sat down on the slate tiles, put her head on her mam’s knees and cried.

  Her mam sat upright, as she had been taught to do in her childhood, and put her now weathered hand on her daughter’s head while Flora wept. Mrs Edwards was mature enough to say nothing. She didn’t ask where her daughter’s clothes were, or why she was in her undergarments, nor why she was wearing the old green tablecloth across her shoulders – the one from her own wedding day almost thirty years ago. She saw the sizeable bruise on Flora’s wrist, which must surely be hurting. It looked like fingerprints, but how had she come to get a bruise like that? Her daughter had been somewhere – she didn’t know where – and had returned bruised, almost naked and alone in the early hours. Her daughter had returned, her mam acknowledged, but it was as if she had left for good. A moth flew into the lamp, beating its wings against the glass, threatening to burn itself.

  Flora’s mam knew that something had happened – something profound, perhaps even violent – but she sensed it was best not to ask; sensed that one question, just one, would make her daughter get up and walk away, not merely upstairs to her bed, but to walk away inside herself and never open up to her again.

  Earlier tonight, sitting at the pine table, Mrs Melbourne Edwards had felt utter terror that she had lost her daughter as well as her husband, both within the tiny span of a few days. She had sat alone in the family home without her family and felt as if winter had come for ever. Her daughter had gone into the day and she had thought she would never return. Something had happened: her daughter was different, that was plain. Her daughter held something new, unsaid, something unsayable within her, something she would never tell her mam, and something her mam knew she must never ask about. So they sat there until Flora, spent with crying, took her head from her mam’s lap, lay down on the slate floor by her mam’s feet, curled up and fell into an exhausted sleep.

  It was well past midnight when Wilfred left Flora and began cycling back down the silent lanes towards Narberth. When he was just past the turning at Peter’s Finger he heard a car engine approaching so he pushed through the hedge beside the road, disturbing a sett of bustling badgers, and lay low in a muddy cornfield until the car passed. It was nearing one o’clock when he arrived at Narberth. Instead of cycling down the High Street he trundled his bike through the cow fields encircling the town and then sprinted down Church Street, into Water Street and straight through the back door. That way he had been able to get home, a near-naked cyclist in only his underwear, without anyone seeing him.

  His da was in bed, wouldn’t have waited up for Wilfred, thinking he would be staying at Dr Reece’s, where he was supposed to live now. But no. Wilfred was back in his bedroom and there was his bed. It was with a sense of relief and exhaustion that he took off his tattered underpants, got in between the crumpled sheets and found the worn, almost threadbare, patch where his feet rested on the flannelette. This was Wilfred’s own bed where he slept on his back and spread himself out. He hadn’t extended his limbs in bed like this, flexed his feet, tossed or turned for many nights. It is good to feel free in bed, Wilfred thought: this is my bed and this is my home.

  He could hear his da harrumphing from next door. His da always snored easily and mightily, often waking Wilfred up.

  ‘Shut up, Da!’ he’d shout, banging on the stone wall between the two rooms. ‘Stop snoring!’

  ‘Eh?’ his father would grunt. ‘I’m not snoring. I don’t snore,’ he’d retort, seemingly awake but still wrapped in sleep.

  As much as his da’s constant snoring had woken him through the nights when Wilfred was young, it had also reassured him and, until he got married, it was all he knew of the presence of another in the night. Lying awake in the nights of his childhood and youth, frustrated by the snoring, a pillow over his head to muffle the noise, he was also reassured, thinking, It is the night, but my da is here.

  10

  Wallpaper’s All the Rage

  ‘The parlour, Da, we’ll have that now as a paint and wallpaper shop,’ Wilfred announced the following morning. He was frying black pudding, sausages and Specials for them both in the cast-iron frying pan.

  ‘Wallpaper’s all the rage,’ he continued, turning the sausages over. ‘Very fashionable it is, Da, mark my words. Especially the Paisley prints. And Mrs Bell Evans of Sheep Street was asking after some floral paper – orchids or sweet peas, I know that for a fact.’ Wilfred cracked an egg against the wall and plopped the contents into the sizzling pan. And if his da wondered why Wilfred had slept at home and not at Grace’s, he said nothing.

  ‘Double yolk in the pan! I reckon if we have a wallpaper shop we’ll have them coming to Narberth from as far away as Carmarthen to buy the stuff. By damn, I could see it working, Da.’ Wilfred lifted two enamel plates from the sink and plonked them on the table.

  ‘Well, Wilfred,’ his father replied cautiously, ‘I don’t know about wallpaper. Houses in Narberth don’t have straight walls. There’ll be no pasting wallpaper on a lopsided surface.’

  ‘Da,’ Wilfred said, slipping some Specials out of the frying pan and on to the plates, ‘don’t be daft. You can hang wallpaper on anything. Only need a dab of that Henkel wallpaper paste – it’s got potato flour in it that sticks it to the wall. You know Margaret White in Green Grove Farm up by Lampeter Velfrey, well, she apparently has even wallpapered the door in her water closet.’

  Wilfred rubbed the forks clean on the dishcloth. ‘The salt’s on the chair, Da. And there’s more black pudding in the pan.’ Wilfred was ravenous. He’d slept deeply, ‘like a stone,’ his father would say, and woken with a raging appetite. He ate his breakfast with his face low and close to his plate.

  ‘And don’t be worrying about what’ll happen to the furniture in the parlour. It will all just about fit in the workshop behind the coffins.’ Wilfred’s knife and fork clinked and tinged on the plate as he cut a sausage in half.

  ‘Why would you want to turn the parlour into a paint and wallpaper shop when only seven years ago you’s turned the back yard into a workshop for coffins?’ his da asked, slicing the double yolk of his fried egg with a fork and dipping a Special in it. ‘It’s damp as anything round here. The wallpaper will be hanging off bedroom walls after a few weeks, and nobody will want that. It might be all right in Carmarthen or London, where people like something altogether a bit different and fancy and the houses are built of bricks, but around here? It’ll be a sight.’

  Wilfred had to concede his da had a point. Suddenly he felt weary, exhausted. He watched an ant walk briskly across the table and around the tin of Saxa salt. Wallpapering lumpy walls would be difficult. And if he couldn’t get paper to stick on a wall, how could he ever … He felt too dispirited even to try and put into words the ways in which his life was wrong.

  ‘Is there a knife anywhere?’ his da asked. ‘Can’t eat an egg with a fork.’

  ‘There’s a butter knife in the butter, Da,’ Wilfred replied, still thinking about wallpaper. To stick wallpaper on the ancient walls of Narberth homes would require s
trong glue. And to leave the situation he was in with Grace would also need strength. He ate the last of his black pudding, lost in his thoughts, while his da rinsed the butter knife under the tap. Lies had got him into this mess, but the truth would get him out. Yesterday he had spoken truthfully to Flora; now he would speak honestly to his Grace.

  ‘You’s been talking to those travelling wallpaper salesmen,’ his da commented. ‘Tasty breakfast, Wilfred. It’s filling a hole nicely.’

  What was that phrase? Wilfred thought. ‘Wallpapering over the cracks’. He might one day have a sideline to his undertaking business, decorating for the more fashionable ladies in Narberth and the surrounds, but it wouldn’t do to wallpaper over the cracks in the walls. To do so would be bad for business. Wilfred placed his knife and fork together on his plate. No, he would only wallpaper on strong plaster and a well-held wall. And nor, he decided, would he wallpaper over the cracks in his life.

  Grace felt flushed and somewhat uncomfortable in the armchair where she was dozing. Her lower back and hips ached and her limbs felt heavy and swollen. She saw her reflection in the tainted mirror above Madoc’s chest of drawers. Her fingers, holding the book, were bloated, and the skin under her chin was fuller. She was getting fatter and she felt a sense of panic. She picked at some lint on her skirt. She had been sitting all morning in the armchair in the attic reading, biding time. That’s what she did these days, bide her time, engage with time and forwardness: relentless and ruthless time. Pregnancy was showing her that – that life went one way and one way only. And it took a woman with it. Life was absolute in its forwardness.

  Before all this – she looked down at her body – she’d thought her life was fine, good; now that old life, the one where she used to have garden picnics, sing in St Andrew’s Church choir and tend her brother’s bees, that life had an innocence to it, a perfect wholeness it would never have again. Now her life was formed and set and she was married. There would be the … baby, her baby, though it didn’t feel like hers. It was a baby that was forced into her, against her wishes. If she had struggled she would have been forced violently. So she hadn’t struggled. She had frozen instead. So she had been forced to acquiesce, silently, mutely. I won’t think about it. Don’t think about it, she told herself. She had promised herself she wouldn’t think about it. But her body ached. What had happened was with her now – had taken over her life and was taking over her body. Wilfred hated her, her mother was enraged with her, her father was stone cold towards her, and she hated it growing within her. 32 High Street was a house of contempt. It was as if she had been filled up with hatred, and now that hatred was seeping out of her and contaminating the circle of people surrounding her.