‘You didn’t really like her, did you?’ Stephen was saying to Esmeralda.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ replied Esmeralda. ‘She wasn’t an easy person. I don’t think I’m a particularly easy person. It’s just that I can’t really think of anything but George at the moment.’
‘Yes yes yes,’ said Stephen, sounding as if he meant it for a change. ‘I understand that.’
They were coming into Hornbeam Crescent now. Home. The Range Rover juddered over the speed bumps. At number thirty-four Mr Longly was snipping at his privet hedge. The little girl opposite was playing with her brother in the front garden of number nineteen. She threw a pebble. He went to fetch it. She threw another. He did the same. They seemed to be enjoying it. Then there were the white walls and iron railings of number twenty-four and, after that, the battered white picket fence that marked the boundary of number twenty-two.
Stephen pulled the car slowly into its berth. George sat there for a while after his wife and brother had gone back into the house for which he would never have to provide another parking permit. Perhaps he would not be able to slide through the doors of the car. Perhaps he was trapped. Perhaps he would stay in this big, expensive car, smelling of new leather, for all eternity. Perhaps this was his own private hell. He thought he didn’t really care. In the house opposite, the little girl threw another pebble and this time her brother said he wasn’t going to fetch it. There was silence.
Chapter Fifteen
George was not quite clear how he got inside the house. Being dead, he had now decided, was a bit like being very drunk. One minute you were in the thick of conversation and the next minute you were flat on your back in the gutter in a street you couldn’t even recognize. It was actually worse than being drunk. Sometimes you weren’t flat on your back but hanging upside down, like a bat, from a lamppost. On one occasion he had found himself swimming through a small bowl of gazpacho in a tapas bar in Putney High Street. On this occasion he seemed, briefly, to be in the attic, surrounded by old suitcases and the complete set of Star Wars figures he had been hoarding ever since the children were small.
He didn’t stay there long. He became aware that some force was drawing him, against his will, out on to the upper landing of his former house, down the stairs and into the front room, where Stephen and Esmeralda were sitting on the sofa with the resigned air of passengers waiting for a long overdue train. The force wasn’t like the drag of a magnet or an alien hand pulling him through the air. It was a pulse in the atmosphere, a sound wave that seemed to pick him up and twist him round it so that he was dragged to the heart of the noise, like a minor instrument in an orchestra, unable to hear quite how his tune blended into the ensemble.
The noise, he suddenly realized, as he came to rest outside the living room, was Stephen’s voice. He couldn’t hear what his brother was saying but he knew, even before he had identified a single word or phrase, that Stephen was gearing himself up to pronounce the magic words ‘I think I should be in charge of this.’
They were very familiar words to George. It might not have been the first sentence Stephen had uttered but, from about the age of two, it pretty well summed up his general drift. He had, somehow, managed to be in charge of everything, from Monopoly to games of cricket in the garden. He had been in charge of who sat where in the back of the car. He had been in charge of who pretended to be whom when they played Cowboys and Indians, which was what, unbelievably, they had played back in 1956. Frigga was always the squaw and usually ended up tied to a tree with washing line, while Stephen and George pounded round her in a circle, hollering war cries devised, inevitably, by Stephen.
George was never quite sure how he had achieved this. Stephen was the youngest, wasn’t he? But he had managed, from day one, to behave as if he was the eldest. Stephen, of course, had always had certainty. He had thought he was right. George had never been sure he was right. A lot of what passed as tolerance in him was actually the inability to make up his mind about anything. He had watched his younger brother forge his media career with the bear-like puzzlement accorded by the less successful to those who become masters of the universe in business, culture or politics. George had never thought he minded. It was only now he was dead that he realized quite how much he had minded, how much it had cost him to be the amiable one. Because he hadn’t been quite as amiable as all that, had he? He had taken the credit for being a good older brother. He had, if he was honest, worked quietly against Lulu being accepted into the family. He had been quite happy to see Stephen fall out with his mother over her, exactly as Stephen had once enjoyed the conflict between George and his parents over Esmeralda. In the end he had taken back what was his.
You could tell Stephen was about to propose himself as group leader of something or other by the way he stood as the two of them rose to go through to the kitchen. He made way for her as she headed for the hall but allowed his right hand, protruding as stiffly as a penguin’s flipper, to seem to usher her through a house that had become, by some miracle, his. The way he looked at the ground, sideways, in the carefully concocted imitation of modesty practised by big executives, the way he pursed his lips as he followed Esmeralda into the hall or the keen, far-sighted way he scanned his phone as he sat heavily in the chair with the arms at the dining-table (the chair that always used to be George’s) suggested a man who was about to propose himself for a job for which he and he alone was qualified.
It was with a sinking of his absent heart that George realized the thing of which Stephen wanted to be in charge was nothing other than his brother’s funeral.
He let Esmeralda know that this was what he intended by putting in a phone call to his wife. There was nothing Stephen enjoyed more than making people watch him on the telephone. ‘Hello, darling,’ he said, understandably pleased that he had managed to get in two words without his phone interrupting – even if it was to Lulu’s voicemail. ‘I’m with Esmeralda. We’re discussing funerals. Did you get the messages I left? Frigga is dead. That’s the upshot. Are you in Basingstoke? Was it Basingstoke you were going to be in? I’m not sure. Let me know anyway. Where you are. Where you’re going to. And when you’ll be back. Goodbye now.’
Esmeralda was staring at him. What, her expression seemed to say, is this clown doing in my kitchen? And why is he talking about funerals? One of which will be for a man I loved. Why is he talking about this to a woman I absolutely loathe? The only funeral on the agenda if he carries on like this for much longer will be his own.
Suddenly Stephen’s phone, clearly feeling it was time to get back into the conversation, said, ‘Lulu is not in Basingstoke.’
Stephen paid no attention to this. He continued to talk. ‘She was hanged. Pretty grim. Anyway. She is as dead as a doornail.’
‘Lulu,’ said his phone, ‘is not dead. She is on the Upper Richmond Road.’
Stephen studied his phone. Instead of answering directly he began to prod wildly at its keys.
This, thought George, was probably a wise move. His phone was more a master of conversation than its owner. It had a proven talent for twisting any social encounter in the way it wanted it to go. George floated over in his direction and saw that his brother was looking at a Google Earth map of Putney. A small red dot appeared to be moving along the Upper Richmond Road, immediately west of East Sheen. Was it Lulu? Stephen did not wait to find out. Once again, he seemed, George thought, frightened of something. He pressed a button on his phone and a map of Barbados appeared.
‘Barbados,’ said his phone, ‘has not experienced a hurricane since 1955.’
Stephen’s new tactic of ignoring his phone seemed to be working. George had the impression that the phone was slightly rattled, as it added, in sultry tones, ‘Would you like me to book you a flight to Bridgetown, Barbados?’ Stephen did not respond. After a pause, his phone added, sounding slightly petulant, ‘Stephen?’ Still, Stephen did not respond. If only, thought George, he had used more of this kind of tactic on his wife.
‘Or, if you want,’ went on his phone, ‘I could book you a massage at the Oriental Spa in Harwich. It has a full staff of qualified health professionals and a large salad bar looking out over a gymnasium that has received rave reviews for its equipment.’
Stephen started to dial again. His phone made a sort of croaking noise, as if it suspected it might not have long to live. He continued to ignore it.
Esmeralda did not watch or listen to this for long. She did the only thing a red-blooded woman could do under such circumstances. She made a phone call of her own. She tucked her small Nokia into her palm, left a message for Barry and another for Maurice. She asked them to come over as quickly as possible. ‘Stephen,’ she said, in an ominous voice, ‘seems to want to talk about your father’s funeral.’ Then she folded her hands over her stomach and glared implacably at her brother-in-law.
That glare – George knew it well – was quite a glare. It was usually enough to send him whimpering from the room. It had, of course, no effect whatsoever on Stephen. Which seemed to sum up the problem of the in-law relationship. You couldn’t explain things like Esmeralda’s glare to your brother. He would probably think of it as an example of her bossiness but, of course, for George it was far, far more complicated than that. It wasn’t anything as simple as him enjoying taking orders from her (a handy stereotype for examining Stephen’s own relationship with Lulu) but, much more, that when she dished out a glare he knew what was behind it.
‘Let’s hope to God,’ said Esmeralda, ‘that Barry’s father-in-law doesn’t want to come over too. I think he may be staying with them.’
George thought, briefly, of Barry’s father-in-law. He thought of the man’s ears. His fondness for cider. His long, long anecdotes about his pet lizard. Sometimes there was an upside to being dead.
‘We must get this funeral thing sorted,’ Stephen was saying, as he finished dialling a very long number on his now submissive phone. ‘Three people have died. My brother has died. My mother has died. My sister has died.’ He ticked these items off on his fingers, then looked around wildly in case he had forgotten any other recent fatalities among his near relatives. ‘It will take a lot of planning. Funerals require an immense amount of planning.’
‘I don’t think,’ said Esmeralda, in a small voice, ‘that I can really bear to talk about the funeral.’
Stephen looked at her. ‘Funerals,’ he said, ‘Funeralzzz.’ He studied his phone. ‘Nobody is in China!’ he said irritably. ‘It is,’ he went on, in a voice that suggested it was nothing of the kind, ‘absolutely unbearable. A double wedding is bad enough. But a triple funeral. My God! It will be a nightmare.’
Esmeralda goggled at him. It was clear, from the expression on her face, that a triple funeral was not what she had in mind. Not, of course, that anyone was going to consult George on the issue. He had made a habit, when alive, of ending all discussions about what kind of funeral he wanted with the line ‘Oh, just sling me on the nearest rubbish tip. That’ll do me.’ This did not quite reflect his current view. In fact, since he’d been dead he had grown increasingly interested in his funeral, and on one issue he was absolutely clear. He had no wish to be featured in a triple burial.
He had always hoped that his funeral would be about him. He wasn’t asking for Westminster Abbey. How could he compete with a woman who had brought Britain the Falklands War, the destruction of the coal mines and the largest, most corrupt financial centre in the Western world? But a well-thought-out funeral service, along the lines of what they’d got up for Queen Mary in 1695, and nine or ten people saying what a great bloke they thought he was, did not seem a lot to ask.
The idea of sharing the occasion with his mother was bad enough. The funeral of a ninety-nine-year-old, while not being exactly a cause for celebration, was hardly the kind of thing at which you would expect too much sobbing and moaning. The majority of the punters would be too busy contemplating the possibility that they were going to be rather more than spectators at some very similar function in the near future. But to be in the box next to Frigga’s? Jesus! Even if anyone could be found to say nice things about his sister, the obvious untruthfulness of their remarks was bound to make George’s eulogies sound distinctly insincere. No one had liked Frigga. No one had really known Frigga, apart, possibly, from the woman who had gone with her to the Canary Islands – George couldn’t even remember her name. He had the vague idea that, whoever she was, she had topped herself many years ago. From what Frigga had said she had come pretty close to it on the holiday – a tactic with which George, who had once spent two weeks with Frigga on the Brittany coast, had some sympathy.
‘I’m not sure I…’ Esmeralda’s voice sounded smaller than ever. She had told George once that when she was a teacher, in the early years of their marriage, she had stood up in front of her class, started to tell them something about Wordsworth and suddenly found that no words would come out of her mouth. She had walked out of the school and never gone back. After that, of course, the boys had been born. She’d had plenty of other things to do.
Now she was in the grip of a paralysis that matched her long-ago breakdown. George could see the immediate cause of it, which explained something he had never quite wanted to admit to himself. She had always found it impossible to say what she wanted to anyone she disliked, and now he saw very clearly that she really did dislike his brother. Had always disliked him. You were not supposed to say things like that when you were in the middle of the business of living. It was just another unpleasant fact that his death had made impossible to avoid.
‘We’ll have to get a moderator or something,’ Stephen was saying, ‘if we don’t get a vicar. You don’t go to church. I don’t go to church. Mother never went to church. Frigga was a committed pagan. George hated religion.’
As it happened, that was perfectly true. It did not, however, seem to affect George’s views on the subject of his funeral. He had not wanted to get married in a church but he was now very clear that he wished to get buried in one. It was, of course, a bit of a late discovery. He should really have thought about that before he’d started swigging cocktails of hemlock and parsnip wine.
He wasn’t, in any sense of the word, a Christian. He was fairly sure that not only was Christianity a justification, if not a cause, of much of the misery in the world but also for the self-righteous complacency of those who felt impelled to do anything about it. Wasn’t ordinary morality a matter of practical common sense? Why did people seem to need some absurd tale of a guy working miracles and coming back to life in order to justify behaving properly?
Had the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the rest of the bastards somehow managed to have the last laugh on George?
It was only now he was dead that he knew for sure that a churchyard was where he wanted to be and, if things continued to play out the way they seemed to be doing in 22 Hornbeam Crescent, the sooner he got down there the better, but there seemed little chance of his making it to that address. His own life seemed to preclude it.
‘He wasn’t religious,’ Esmeralda was saying quietly, ‘but he did like the music.’
Stephen looked up from his phone, his face blank. It was at this point that George’s wolfhound put his head round the door. As Partridge had been dead for eight years, no one, apart from George, paid him any attention.
‘Oh!’ said George. ‘It’s you again!’
‘It is,’ said Partridge. He had, to George’s surprise, a rather cultivated accent – and, for such a large, hairy dog, was very soft spoken. ‘There was something I wanted to tell you,’ he continued.
‘There was,’ said George.
Partridge looked out at him from under his fringe. He was clearly thinking as hard as he could, which was not, from George’s recollection of his dog, very hard at all.
‘It was to do with your murder,’ he said eventually.
‘Do you know something about it?’ said George.
There was a long, long silence.
‘I think I
do,’ said Partridge, sombrely.
‘I don’t suppose,’ said George, ‘that you can remember who it was by any chance? Did you … see who did it perhaps?’
‘Did I?’ said Partridge. ‘Did I? That … is the question…’
There was another long silence.
‘Does anyone care what I think? Or what I remember?’ said Partridge.
He was, George thought, looking sulky. It was the dog food with jelly. He had never liked it. George had given it to him anyway. He was only a dog. Well, now he was a dog with important information that he was withholding from George.
George was fairly sure the dog could remember whatever he had seen around the time of his murder. Partridge was tormenting him. That was all.
Partridge looked at Stephen. Then he looked at Esmeralda. ‘It’ll come back,’ he said. ‘I can’t think what it was for the moment. But I’ll try. It was very important.’
George nodded with what he hoped looked like tolerance and enthusiasm. ‘You do that, Partridge,’ he said. ‘You do that.’
‘Don’t patronize me,’ said the wolfhound, glumly, and padded, even more softly than usual, from the living room.
‘I think,’ Stephen was saying, ‘we should have open coffins!’
Stephen’s negotiating tactic, as always, was to start from the assumption that everyone was going to do as he wanted and then gradually, over hours or if necessary days, go a very small way to meeting what he had never allowed to be original demands, as if each grudging concession to anyone else’s point of view was a deviation from an earlier agreement. It had worked at his public school – Stephen had asked to be sent to boarding school at a very early age – and it had seemed to succeed in the media business he and Lulu had founded five years ago, which, Stephen was always telling George, was worth millions. Even though its assets only really consisted of him and Lulu making phone calls.
Waking Up Dead Page 20
