Sidney Chambers and The Persistence of Love

by James Runcie

  Sidney was so distracted he was not sure if he could remember how to drive. What were all the other cars doing on the road? They were all in the way.

  He realised that he was going in the wrong direction. He had automatically taken the route to Canonry House. They had almost arrived by the time Anna reminded him. What was he doing?

  He tried to remember how to get to the funeral parlour. He had been there often enough. Up Back Hill, straight on into Lynn Road, right into Nutholt Lane, left into New Barns Road, left into Deacons Lane just before the cemetery. It wasn’t that hard.

  He braked at a red light. At least he remembered to do that. But what was the point of traffic lights? Why were they holding him up? Was this a deliberate attempt to keep him from his wife?

  They weren’t quite ready. The undertaker sat Anna down and told her what to expect: the dark room, the casket (he didn’t say coffin), the white silk lining, the candles. She would see her mother and yet, at the same time, the body was not as her mother had once been. Anna shouldn’t be surprised or alarmed, because Hildegard was at peace: that was why they called it a Chapel of Rest; her vital spirit had passed on.

  ‘Like a car without a driver?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Can I see her, then?’

  After twenty minutes she was shown into a small vaulted room at the back that smelt of bleach and air freshener. The coffin was raised and so, on entering the room, it wasn’t immediately possible to see who was in it. This was, Sidney supposed, to give people time to adjust to the atmosphere, to delay the inevitable.

  Hildegard was in the Chinese nightdress, her ash-blonde hair had been swept back and she wore a necklace of pearls that Sidney hadn’t remembered providing. He had forgotten about earrings. He would have to go back home and get some. She looked like a dead bride.

  At first Anna was scared to go near, frightened of the stillness. She was wearing her uniform. Somehow it didn’t seem right, as if her mother’s death was some kind of school project.

  She leant over to see and her breathing changed. It was somewhere between a sigh and a great exhalation, an involuntary attempt to breathe life back into her mother.

  My breath is your breath. You gave me life. Let me give it back to you.

  She touched her mother’s cheek. It was over made-up with a blusher Hildegard would never have used, covering the yellowing skin beneath. The undertaker had warned her about the cold but Anna shrank at the sensation. She stroked her mother’s hand with her right hand. She started to cry but couldn’t finish. Instead, she fainted.

  Sidney just missed her as she fell to the floor.

  When Anna came round she said she couldn’t move. She wanted to stay there for ever, alone with her mother.

  The undertaker brought her a glass of water. She wanted to wait until her mother started to breathe again, she said. If they stayed long enough, and if they prayed hard enough, surely they could force a miracle?

  They remained for another hour until there was nothing left to do or say. Anna thought it was wrong to leave. Sidney promised his daughter she could return whenever she liked.

  How long would her mother be there? He didn’t know, he couldn’t be sure, a week perhaps.

  They drove home. Could Sidney get his daughter something to eat? No, she couldn’t face anything. She felt sick. She went up to her room and closed the door.

  Sidney put the kettle on. This was the start of all the things that he had to do alone since Hildegard had died: the first time he made a cup of tea for one, the first night he went to bed on his own, the first Christmas without her name on the cards or her place by his side. It was the beginning of imaginary rather than real conversations.

  He knew he had to inform his family, Hildegard’s sister Trudi (she would tell her mother in Leipzig), Geordie, Amanda, Leonard, Malcolm and Helena.

  He phoned his sister first. She couldn’t believe what he was saying.

  ‘Please don’t make me repeat it.’

  ‘Hildegard’s dead? But how?’

  How many more times was he going to have to say this? Already he imagined social situations, services, receptions, parties.

  I see you haven’t brought your wife.

  That’s because she’s dead.

  Jennifer said that she would tell as many people as possible, even Amanda if he liked.

  Yes, he did want that.

  The only person he should ring, she said, was their father. He would need to hear the news from Sidney directly. Then she and the Church could do the rest, although he should also telephone Leonard, he had always been such a friend, and Geordie just in case.

  ‘Just in case what?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘No, Jennifer, I don’t know.’

  ‘Just in case anyone thinks there’s anything odd about it.’

  ‘Why would they think that?’

  ‘She’s so young.’

  ‘People die young.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘You think . . .’

  ‘I don’t think anything, Sidney. Other people do.’

  ‘Are you saying that it’s possible this might be treated as something suspicious?’

  ‘You’ve been involved in a lot of difficult situations. You don’t want people to think . . .’

  ‘Oh, let them think it.’

  Sidney put the phone down. As soon as he did so it rang again. It didn’t stop ringing. He couldn’t ignore it. The news was out.

  Sophie’s mother arrived. ‘We tried phoning but we couldn’t get through. The headmistress told us. So kind of her. Such a shock. We didn’t even know Hildegard had been ill.’

  ‘She hadn’t. The doctor thinks it was an aneurysm.’ And then, because Sophie’s mother appeared not to know what that was, he explained. ‘A brain haemorrhage. It’s more common than people think.’

  Was he now saying all this lest she think him a murderer?

  ‘Do you want us to look after Anna for a night or two?’ Sophie’s mother asked. ‘It’s no trouble.’

  ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’

  ‘Sophie will go up and ask, won’t you, Sophie?’

  Sidney had forgotten that her daughter was by her side. Sophie shook his hand and looked him in the eye. She said she was sorry. He wondered if her parents had told her that was what she had to do. They could even have rehearsed it.

  ‘You know the way.’

  They remained in the hall. Sophie’s mother was dressed with country practicality: a floral headscarf, Barbour gilet, jeans and flat rubber-soled shoes. The visit was an unexpected addition to the many chores of her day but it was one that she was sure to take in her stride.

  ‘I know from when my father died that there are so many things you have to do. Register the death, tell people over and over again. You never know what it’s like until it happens to you. It’ll be hard for you to look after Anna at the same time. That’s why you need us.’

  She was probably right. Some time away from home would spare his daughter the grim repetition of funeral preparation and his own desperate melancholy.

  Sophie’s parents were kind, practical and rich. There were ponies, brothers, sisters, distractions (numerous pets and ballet lessons), and he was grateful for the offer even though he couldn’t decide if he understood his daughter well enough to know whether this was something she would want to do or not. Under normal circumstances he would have asked Hildegard.

  ‘I don’t want her to feel abandoned.’

  ‘We’ll make her feel safe.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s best.’

  ‘I brought you a lasagne.’

  Sidney had not noticed that she was holding some Tupperware. Where had that come from? There was a Tesco polythene bag too.

  ‘You probably won’t want anything but you only have to heat it up. There’s a bottle of whisky as well. I know you probably shouldn’t but Giles said it might help. Not that anything will. I’m so sorry. You are r
eady for the fact that no one will know what to say? It’s normally you who provides the reassurance and now that it’s our turn I think we’ll all be guilty of letting you down.’

  ‘I think I’ll manage.’

  ‘Will you tell someone if you can’t?’

  Her daughter came down the stairs with Anna. ‘Can we go now?’ she asked.

  Finally alone, Sidney thought of his wife. It was impossible to concentrate on anything else: all the things they had said and not said, their cares and concerns, everything they had left unfinished.

  He tried to think back to when they had first met – as if, by doing so, he could relive their lives. He remembered her first husband’s funeral and the strange desolate calm he had felt in her presence afterwards. She was dressed in widow’s black, her face partly obscured by a veil, and she wore no lipstick. It was as if all her feelings had been washed away. He had liked her guarded stillness, her mouth, her green eyes. Then, during the investigation into Stephen Staunton’s death, they had spoken more and started to call each other by their Christian names. Hildegard had wept, Sidney had held her and he had done what he could as a priest and a friend. Then she sold her house and her piano and returned to Germany. He had thought that he would never see her again.

  But something would not let them separate – he couldn’t explain it, and Sidney had instinctively felt, not caring if it was true or not, that he would never be able to be himself if he remained far from her. So they had written and then he had gone to see her in West Germany. Afterwards, Hildegard had come back to Cambridge, seen him going about his detective work (a stupid investigation at Corpus – one Fellow electrocuting another in the bath), and she had forgiven him for the distraction because she too had decided that they were linked in a way that could not be dissolved.

  In 1961, after Sidney had been arrested in the DDR, he remembered how they had tried to get back to the West just as the Berlin Wall was going up, and how they had found themselves avoiding the checkpoints and barricades by half-swimming and half-wading through the River Spree. Hildegard had suddenly turned to him and asked: ‘You do love me, don’t you? I have to know if there’s something worth living for.’

  They had escaped through a park at night, found themselves in the English quarter and had gone to hear the Eric Dolphy Quintet. That was the day they had made love for the first time. It was all they could do to keep warm. It had been so inevitable they wondered why it had taken them so long.

  When Sidney came back to Grantchester and told his friends that he was going to marry Hildegard, they had asked if this love was as secure as he thought it was. Did he want their advice? He had then told them all – yes, even Amanda – that this was secure, and he could not imagine ever being with anyone else. His love for Hildegard had an overwhelming sense of completeness that was like faith but more companionable. It was tender, honest, fragile, brave.

  His friends had smiled and said that they hoped it was and they wished him well and he could still see the doubt in their eyes, but Sidney had no anxieties at all.

  He remembered their autumn wedding in Grantchester, with the leaves of the trees mixing dark cherry and burnt orange, and Orlando Richards choosing the German music – ‘Also heilig ist der Tag’, ‘Bist du bei Mir’ – and Leonard Graham preaching and telling them (he, who knew nothing of such things at the time) that marriage was like a garden that needed to be tended, and Hildegard was the rose in that garden.

  It was so long ago and, even though they had both been through the war, the beginning of their marriage had been a second innocence, when they had to learn both how to live with each other and how to love, differently and for each other. Sometimes Sidney had been scared of that love, he knew that now – frightened of its overwhelming intensity, fearing that if he lived entirely within it he would lose all sense of himself. And so, foolishly perhaps, he had been distracted by other things: by his work, his criminal investigations, his ambition, his love of novelty and his dread of boredom. How he regretted that now, the too many times he had absented himself from the only happiness he had ever known.

  He could still feel the jolt of joy when Hildegard had told him that she was pregnant at last. He said that he owed her the world and she had replied – he could hear her saying it now, he could see her tearful eyes – ‘I don’t need the world, Sidney. I just need you.’ He remembered Anna’s birth and the drama when Abigail Redmond’s baby John was snatched from the hospital at the same time and how he had almost missed the whole thing in order to sort out someone else’s problems, and then had to wait, more fearfully than he had ever waited for anything in his life, by the side of a mother-in-law he had never quite known how to speak to, for the miracle of creation and his wife’s words when he entered her hospital room: ‘Meet Anna.’

  Since then there had been trials and misunderstandings for which he had been so much to blame, vanities and self-indulgences. He thought of how much his wife had trusted him; how she had let him be free to go where sometimes he should not have gone, to find himself by being away from her, and how he had returned either wiser, chastened or filled with regret, knowing that surely, whatever happened, they would always love each other. He couldn’t imagine it being otherwise.

  But now here it was, in the midst of an alternative loneliness he had never dared to imagine. Hildegard, too, had been free to go and now she had gone: into an infinity of absence.

  What was left of all that they had shared? What made their love abiding? Sidney sought out the old reasons, the comforts that he had always given others; the fact that love remains: in memory, children and in our very identity. Now he would have to go on living – pretending, perhaps, that his wife was still alive, that she would come back home through the front door at any minute, for it was impossible to imagine anything other than that, even if it drove him mad, because he would rather be insane than cope with the desolation of solitude.

  In his bedroom that night he noticed that Hildegard’s dressing gown was gone. The undertaker’s wife hadn’t removed that as well, had she? Perhaps it was in the laundry basket; but no, it couldn’t be: Anna must have taken it with her, just wanting the smell of her mother, the warmth of her skin, the tone of her voice.

  In the subsequent days, people came round with soups, casseroles and simple suppers, anything Sidney or Anna could ‘just put in the oven’. The precentor’s wife was writing a recipe book, A Hundred Ways with Mince, and so she was quite in the swing of things, she said. All the troops were rallying round. Sidney only had to say what he wanted. Anything really, honestly, anything. It was no trouble.

  Then bring me back my wife.

  He remembered the Book of Lamentations: ‘Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow . . .’

  But there was. There was Anna’s grief too. How was he to assuage that? What could he say to persuade her that this was fate, chance and nobody’s fault and there was nothing they could have done? How could he explain, in the language of faith, or in any language, that her mother had been taken too early, before she was ready, without her knowledge and with no time to prepare? Someone had said that it was ‘an easy death’ and that it was ‘the best way to go’, but not so soon. The fact that Hildegard was at peace, that she had died in her sleep, was insufficient consolation to those that remained and missed her and could find no way of ordering themselves without her, apart from attempting to live by her example, imagining that she was still with them.

  She had stuck one of Anna’s old school projects to the fridge, an acrostic poem. ‘Describe me’.

  Adventurous

  Naughty

  Nice

  Artistic

  Charming!

  Happy

  Amazing

  Messy

  Bouncy

  Energetic

  Radiant

  Sparkling

  Sidney had advised and preached before on the resilience of children but now that he had experienced such
a loss himself it was hard not to think that everything he had ever said before had been a platitude. He would have to pray again, he knew, for guidance, help and humility, recognising that there was nothing he could do on his own. He needed the company of others: his friends, his colleagues, his daughter. Together they might eventually see this through, with patience, stoicism and an acknowledgement of the vanity of human wishes and the futility of earthly reward. Then life might yet have a purpose. But, for now, he wasn’t sure he could do that. For now, he craved solitude and the necessary selfishness of grief.

  He sat at his desk in his study, unable to work or concentrate, and gave himself over to the memory of his wife. He thought of everything she had meant to him and how much he could remember. They had known each other for twenty-two years, been married for nearly fourteen, and perhaps he could spend the next twenty-two remembering her, reliving their marriage but differently, as if he had behaved in a better way, acknowledging everything she had done for him, all her goodness and all her faults. He would not worship her, making her a much-missed saint, as Thomas Hardy had done to his wife (‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me’), but perhaps he would appreciate what he had been given in the first place: the fluke of their meeting and the depth of her love.

  He imagined Hildegard standing in the doorway, smaller than usual because she had taken her shoes off, asking if he wanted a cup of tea or if, perhaps, he had already helped himself to something stronger?

  He missed the way her voice dropped in tone when she spoke to him, as if their intimacy required a different register. He could still hear how she cut her laugh short, as if she had been caught enjoying herself when she should have been serious. He remembered her delight in Anna and her disbelief when either husband or daughter failed to behave in the way she had hoped, by being late, thoughtless, disrespectful, disobedient or unkind.