The Graveyard Position

by Robert Barnard

  “Squash would be fine if you have some,” said Merlyn, smiling at him. “I need to keep my wits about me, don’t I?”

  Barnett had turned to the unopened bottle of orange squash, his expression quizzical.

  “And why would you need to keep your wits about you?”

  Merlyn smiled, this time an ingenuous, young man’s smile.

  “All these relatives. Everyone’s changed after twenty or so years away, as I have myself. But they’ll feel insulted if I get their names wrong, won’t they? How is Rosalind?”

  Rosalind had slipped across the room, and was now talking to her cousin Caroline and her two small children. Barnett sloshed water from a jug into the glass and merely said, “Mostly she keeps well.”

  Then he turned to Cousin Francis to signify that this conversation was at an end and Merlyn—if it was he—was now at the mercy of the lions.

  Merlyn turned to Cousin Malachi, geniality itself.

  “Cousin Malachi! Good to see you again. You know when I was a child I accepted that Malachi was the most normal name in the world. Children do, don’t they—accept whatever they find around them, I mean? Now I wonder how you got it.”

  “My father was going through a phase with the Peculiar People,” said Malachi, delighted to be singled out. “He was a bit of an oddball, as Clarissa was in her way.”

  “Yes—she was something else I just accepted.”

  “So how are you, Merlyn?” asked Malachi affably and apparently unsuspiciously. “What have you been doing? We’ve just been saying you’ve probably been around the world. I think the last we heard you were in India. I should think that must be a wonderful place. Full of mystery, Eastern wisdom, that sort of thing.”

  “I expect you’re right,” said Merlyn. “I’ve never been there.” He patted Malachi on the shoulder. “Don’t believe everything you hear. It’s not only Peculiar People who swallow tall stories.”

  He turned around, his quick eyes taking in the collection of family and friends. He immediately discarded the odd reporter and the lady from the Leeds Society of Spiritualists and focused on the figures that mattered, the family. He made a surprising choice and went over to shake hands with Caroline, his cousin as well as Rosalind’s, with her two children keeping close to her in the unfamiliar surroundings. As an introductory gesture he mussed the hair of the smallest of them.

  “Well, it has been a long time, Caroline,” he said. “And what lovely little girls! They remind me of you at the same age.”

  “I was a bit older than Angela when you…went away,” said Caroline, who was fair, with a face lacking in firm contours. She said the words with a faint trace of a simper, which reminded Merlyn of figures on chocolate boxes. “I regarded you with awe and longing. I cried for weeks when people said you must be dead.”

  “People say what they want to believe half the time, don’t they?” said Merlyn.

  “Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t want…” mumbled Caroline, fading into silence. She attempted to retrieve the situation. “Did I hear you say you didn’t go to India after all?”

  “Never been near it. Never been to Asia, come to that, unless you count Istanbul. Was that one of my ambitions twenty-odd years ago? Some kind of backwash of the Beatles, I suppose. Some nonsense of George Harrison’s, probably.”

  “It’s disappointing in a way,” Caroline said, pouting. “I imagined you in an ashram, in a loincloth, with your feet tucked up under you, thinking holy thoughts for hours on end.”

  “Sorry! I’ve hardly had a single holy thought in my life…. Did you ever marry, Caroline?”

  “Yes—I mean—” She gestured at the children. “For three or four years…”

  “I expect that doused your overheated imagination,” said Merlyn.

  “He still sees the children,” said Caroline inconsequentially.

  “But we all go through it, don’t we?” said Merlyn, ignoring her. “Imagining we’re in love. Imagining nobody’s ever been quite as much in love before.”

  “I don’t know that I—”

  “Mine was in Verona.”

  “Verona? That was—”

  “Appropriate. Yes, it was. Her name wasn’t Juliet, but she did have a balcony. She lived in a modern block of flats on the Piazza Simoni, but each flat had a balcony, so I used to moon around the streets nearby, imagining her letting down a rope of knotted sheets, and me shinnying up it and enjoying her in her little bedroom. I suppose it was more Errol Flynn than Shakespeare.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of—”

  “Errol Flynn? You should watch the old daytime movies. A hundred times more erotic than the sweaty late-night ones. They really knew about titillation in those days. Anyway, Cecilia was the love of my life. It overwhelmed me for six months. Every hour of the day, including working hours, I was thinking of Cecilia Carteri. And she was thinking of me. I know she was. I was the love of her life, as she was of mine…Damned horrible thing, life, isn’t it? If only those emotions could last…. At least you have these two to remind you.” Hebent down and looked into their faces. “Now, you’re Angela, I’m told. Lovely name, that…And what are you called?”

  “I’m Jacqueline,” said the blonde five-year-old.

  “We call her Jackie,” said her mother.

  “I suppose you would. But Jacqueline is a lovely name too.” He straightened up. “Well, I hope we’ll meet again soon. I’d really like to make these family get-togethers a regular thing. We could meet up here—don’t you think so, Caroline?”

  Caroline nodded dumbly. She was not one of those who had expectations from Aunt Clarissa’s will. She had thought her a charlatan, or “an old fraud,” as she put it to her friends, and she had taken Clarrie’s kindness in return as condescension. But she knew perfectly well that many of the others in the room had been banking on a substantial remembrance coming to themselves, and she knew that Merlyn’s proprietorial tone, as if he were already in a position to invite people to his house, would arouse fierce antagonism among the family. She cast a quiet glance at Rosalind, and saw fierce antagonism at its most naked.

  Merlyn had wandered, as if at random, over to where Cousin Francis was standing on his own, perhaps having been cast into the wilderness even by his brother for his late and conspicuous arrival at the service. His appearance was shambolic, as if he had dressed with boxing gloves on—his shirt buttoned only halfway down, revealing a neat little paunch, his tie failing to conceal the top button. But there was about his manner a latent prissiness which seemed to proclaim that his inability to cope with traffic, the workings of cars, or even buttons was the outward sign of an inner closeness to some tremendous spiritual truths.

  “So glad you managed to be there for the service,” said Merlyn, holding out his hand. “The situation on the roads around Leeds seems a hundred times worse than when I left.”

  “It is,” said Francis. “Utterly unpredictable. Who would have thought there’d be a jam like that on a Tuesday morning? It got me one of Rosalind’s fiercest looks, but it wasn’t my fault—”

  “I expect you’ll survive. She’s not quite the dominatrix she thinks she is. Are you still at St. Clarence’s, Francis?”

  “St. Cuthbert’s. Yes. Another ten years before retirement. And every day a battle.” He sighed. “Boys—what horrible little creatures they are. Every one a Jack Russell. What I would do without my faith to hold me together I don’t know.”

  Merlyn looked at him quizzically, as if he thought Francis was held together more by bits of string than by faith. His cousin, however, seldom noticed anyone’s reactions.

  “I can understand why your faith is so important to you,” said Merlyn, who seemed to be leading everyone on in order to savor their peculiarities. “I once had the idea of entering the Catholic priesthood.”

  “Really? Did you? I considered going over myself when they let in…women. I never thought the Anglicans would be so perverse, not to say heretical. But in the end I didn’t, I don’t really kn
ow why.”

  “Couldn’t bear to lose all those C of E hymns, probably. It would have been a wrench for me. I suppose it was the attraction of the certainty of the Roman Catholics that made me want to cross the divide.”

  “I know! Such a wonderful comfort! And yet that very certainty could be a snare and a delusion, couldn’t it?”

  Merlyn seemed to feel his feet getting itchy as Cousin Francis showed his usual inability to hold fast to any consistent line of belief. Turning slightly, Merlyn hailed in her chair his aunt Marigold, now over seventy, but not apparently relaxing any part of her grip on life.

  “Wonderful to see you again, Auntie. It’s been much too long. And how have you been keeping?”

  He squatted down beside her chair, and the old lady, eyes gleaming maliciously at the sight of a captive audience, began to itemize her medical history of the last twenty-odd years. She seemed to be enjoying, in a heartless way, his inevitable boredom. Over by the wine and the sausage rolls and the prawn sandwiches, Rosalind regarded Merlyn. She had watched his every move around the room and had overheard a large part of his conversations.

  “Look at him! It’s disgraceful!” Getting no response from her husband, she became specific. “He’s worming his way in here!”

  “Looks to me as if he’s already wormed,” said Barnett. Merlyn certainly was the center of everyone’s attention—indeed the only focus for it. Even the elderly maid looked at him rather than at the better-known family members. When he had listened to Aunt Marigold for twenty minutes—paying her account, to his credit, the sort of attention a medical specialist might have given to an exceptionally interesting case history—he stretched, kissed her, and with a wave of his hand wandered off.

  “Well, this has been interesting,” he said, coming to rest beside his aunt Emily. “Clarissa will have been watching us all, and been delighted. In fact, I’m not sure she isn’t actually with us at this moment—in spirit, of course.”

  “I never greatly liked that aspect of Clarissa’s life,” said Emily, with pursed lips, her sourness gaining the upper hand over her more feeble desire to appear welcoming. “After all, she was in many ways a very worldly woman.”

  “Not worldly, just interested in life,” said a spruce man, not much older than Merlyn himself, in a smart suit and a bow tie more suitable for a wedding. “By the way, I’m your cousin—”

  “Eddie. Of course I remember you,” said Merlyn, holding out his hand. Another bull’s-eye. Eddie looked gratified. “I think you’re right about Aunt Clarissa. All life was interesting for her. Probably that’s what made her such a good clairvoyant.”

  “Do you remember when I got hold of The Kama Sutra?” asked Eddie, sliding back effortlessly into his schoolboy persona. “Clarissa shrieked with laughter at all the pictures of the various positions. She thought the couples would need a pair of mechanics to disentangle them.”

  Merlyn laughed loudly.

  “Yes, she’d have loved the job of prizing them apart herself, wouldn’t she? She never had much personal interest in sex, but plenty in other people’s sexual habits…. Poor old Clarissa. And now she’s taken up the only position left to her, the graveyard one.”

  Aunt Emily, whose expression had been darkening with every exchange, turned away and stalked off. Merlyn and Eddie refrained from laughing at her back, but only just.

  “Don’t mind Mother,” said Eddie. “She has vinegar instead of blood. So what are you doing now?”

  “Doing?” said Merlyn carelessly. “Oh, you mean work. Paid employment. Well, my paid employment at the moment, and for the last few years, has been in Brussels, so you can guess who shells out my monthly bonanza.”

  Eddie was impressed.

  “The Common Market? Good Lord, you must be on to a good thing. The gravy train to end all gravy trains.”

  “People have an exaggerated idea of how much EU employees rake in,” claimed Merlyn. “Not much exaggerated, but slightly exaggerated. We do very nicely. It’s important work.”

  There seemed to be a suggestion of a wink in Merlyn’s eye, and Cousin Eddie felt empowered to ask, “So what do you do? Legislate about straight bananas or how to define chocolate?”

  “I presume you read the Sunday Telegraph,” Merlyn said, with a suddenly assumed lordly air. “Actually I’m one of the first secretaries in the Department of Economic Standardization, with special responsibility for Eastern Europe.”

  “Good Lord! What do you actually do?”

  Merlyn’s hauteur was shed instantly.

  “We’re still trying to define the department’s remit.”

  They laughed together, as in the old days.

  “And you’ll be going back there now?”

  “Oh dear me, no. I’ve got three months’ leave on three-quarters of my pay. Jolly nice of them, but they decided that the last three years have been exceptionally grueling for me, with all the old Communist-bloc countries having their applications vetted. And of course I pleaded special circumstances.”

  Cousin Eddie looked at him.

  “Clarissa’s death? I shouldn’t have thought that the death of an aunt warranted three months’ leave.”

  “You don’t know the EU. And of course I emphasized that Clarissa practically brought me up.”

  Eddie raised his eyebrows.

  “You stayed here with her for about eighteen months, so far as I remember.”

  “But several times earlier too. And she was always ringing up to see that I was all right before I, in the end, came up here to live for good.”

  “So what are you going to be doing?”

  “Establishing my identity, I suppose. I wasn’t expecting to have to, but—”

  He gestured toward Rosalind and Eddie’s mother.

  “So, another long-drawn-out claimant saga, then?”

  “I don’t think so. Most of those were fraudulent, I seem to remember. Perkin Warbeck wasn’t one of the Princes in the Tower, and the Tichborne claimant wasn’t who he said he was. Nowadays it can all be done scientifically, so there is no doubt.”

  “So you’ll be staying on here?”

  “Yes, I’ll be around for a bit,” said Merlyn. “Taking an interest and settling up my affairs.”

  “But what—?” Again Cousin Eddie rethought, then decided to remain silent.

  “Which really means Aunt Clarissa’s affairs,” resumed Merlyn. “We must all decide about the inscription on the gravestone, mustn’t we?” he suggested, looking round at the assembled relatives, who were standing in an uneasy circle. “That shouldn’t be too controversial, I don’t imagine.”

  “I thought ‘After a long illness,’” suggested Malachi. “Vague but dignified.”

  “You mean not specifying whether the illness was physical or mental?” asked Merlyn.

  “Well, yes. They say she went a bit bonkers.”

  “I couldn’t understand why Clarissa specified she wanted to be buried,” said Caroline in her plaintive voice. “She was such a modern person for her age, and burial is so old-fashioned.”

  “Oh, that was her wish, was it?” said Merlyn. “There could be all sorts of reasons why she insisted on being buried.”

  The whole room fell silent at this, but Merlyn showed no sign of embarrassment. He looked at Rosalind, as if expecting her to make the next move. Tight-lipped, she obliged.

  “I think all this discussion about Aunt Clarissa is absolutely disgusting. I mean, at her funeral! Is there no shame? And what’s all this about her being mentally ill? Of course we all know she was flighty, had bees in her bonnet. But she’s not the first person who’s had a thing about the Other Side, and communicating with the dead. It doesn’t prove she was mentally ill by a long chalk. And she was no different when she died. She wasn’t senile or anything. Just a bit vague as time went by.”

  There was a little murmur of support, from Emily and others, but Barnett, who knew his wife’s real views about Clarissa, slipped out into the hall.

  “Well spoken,” said
Merlyn. “Since I hadn’t seen Clarissa for some time it’s good to know that she hadn’t essentially changed. Still, I’m not sure you’ll stick to that line, Rosalind…Oh look,” he broke off to say, looking out the large window. “There’s Mr. Robinson from number twenty. Doesn’t he look old? Those healthy people always age fast after fifty, don’t they?…No, Rosalind. I’m betting you’ll be quite anxious to claim Clarissa was mentally ill after you’ve seen the will.”

  Again, there was a moment or two of utter silence.

  “The will? What do you know about the will?” demanded Rosalind.

  “Oh, just what she told me on the phone two or three weeks ago,” said Merlyn. “And now I really must be going. Lots, absolutely lots to do. So kind of you to invite me, Cousin Rosalind. Good-bye for now!”

  He slipped out. In the hall Barnett Frere was having a quick and welcome cigarette. Merlyn raised his hand in farewell.

  “Thanks so much for inviting me,” he said.

  “Don’t take too much notice of Rosalind,” said her husband. “She was so fond of her father. Still is.”

  Merlyn paused for a moment, as if uncertain what relevance that had. Then he fled.

  The relatives, now the only ones left at the wake, looked at him bleakly as he escaped from the room, and followed him with their eyes as he left by the front door. He waved to them as he passed the bay window, and crossed the road to his car.

  “What a lot of nonsense he talked!” said Rosalind, attempting to rally the troops.

  “I don’t see why you call it nonsense,” said Cousin Francis. “He talked a lot of good sense, I thought.”

  “He just sucked up to you all,” insisted Rosalind. “Told you all what you wanted to hear. All that stuff about his beloved Cecilia and her balcony. Just the sort of romantic stuff that Caroline loves.”

  “How would he know what Caroline loves if he isn’t really Merlyn?” asked Eddie.

  “He looked in her face,” said Rosalind. “Just like Aunt Clarissa. Many of her best prophecies and character analyses were got by looking at people’s faces.”

  “I don’t think that I—” began Caroline, then stopped. Some of the family said her marriage had failed because her husband was aggravated beyond measure by her inability to finish a sentence. Others thought that was the only thing about her that left anything to the imagination.