Mr Toppit

by Charles Elton

  Outside it was drizzling. Lila and I waited in the porch for the taxi to come. She was leaning on her stick. Her hat was back on, and she was clutching her bag.

  “Your mother is a saint. I worry sometimes. She has so much on her plate now. You must take some of her burdens, Luke. You are the man of the family now. She will need a lot of help. Thank God she has friends. Good friends. We will rally round, all of us.”

  The taxi was coming up the drive. There was a strange expression on Lila’s face. She grasped my arm. “Luke, you must be careful.” She was surprisingly strong. Her fingers were digging into me. “That woman is a swashbuckler.”

  “A what?”

  “You know nothing about her, where she comes from, what she is.”

  “Lila, she was with Arthur when he was run over.”

  “That’s what she says. That’s her story. You must not leave her alone. You have so many beautiful things in the house.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to steal anything.”

  “Luke, you have no idea what people are like. One thing I know is danger. I have lived with it.”

  That I didn’t doubt. Her parents, her brother Thomas, who was studying to be a doctor, and her grandparents had died in a concentration camp. Her brother had looked just like her. I had seen their pictures in her other Big Book—the BBL, The Big Book of Löwenstein.

  Tears were rolling down her cheeks. “You won’t let me help you. You have that woman now. I expect she is sleeping in my bed. Oh, Luke, you know how much I love you all.” She gazed up at the sky. “Arthur was everything to me. Everything. I don’t know what I shall do. The next book was going to reveal so much. Mr. Toppit? We’ll never know. So sad.”

  I didn’t sleep well. As soon as I got up I had a bath. I shaved, which wasn’t really necessary, then rubbed Rachel’s deodorant under my arms and also put a bit round my crotch, which probably wasn’t necessary either. It just didn’t seem to be a day to take chances.

  Downstairs, the hall was being rearranged so there would be room for people to come back to the house after the funeral. Doreen had come in early to help with the flowers. She had been with us forever and Martha spent a great deal of time complaining about her.

  Jack, her son, who was a year older than me, was moving chairs against the wall so there would be more space in the center of the hall. He glanced at me when I came in, then looked awkwardly away. As a little boy he had had a thin, feral face. He had filled out and put on some weight. He used to remind me of a rat; now he resembled a hamster storing food in his cheeks. When we were small, Doreen had always brought him with her to the house and we had to play together. The truth was that we had never liked each other much.

  “Hello, Jack,” I said.

  He mumbled something. It might have been “Sorry about your dad.” His eyes were on the floor.

  “Do you want a hand with the chairs?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Got your dad’s book out last night, the one he wrote in,” he said, and nodded a couple of times to confirm it.

  I nodded back. “Good,” I said, for want of anything better. He had a little walk-on part in the first book as Luke’s friend Jack—another of the many inaccuracies in The Hayseed Chronicles—from whom Luke steals a bicycle to chase Mr. Toppit. Arthur had signed a copy for him.

  Martha was in the sitting room. She seemed smaller than usual, or maybe the room appeared bigger, and rather forlorn. She was smoking a cigarette in the corner by the window and her hand was trembling. She wasn’t in black: she wore a gray dress that might have been silk—it had a sort of sheen. She adjusted my tie, and got the collar of my shirt to turn down properly. In the harsh sunlight, her skin was dry and papery.

  She looked me up and down. “Everybody looks better in a suit.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She sniffed. “Are you wearing scent?”

  I blushed. “Of course not.”

  “Tell Doreen you like her flowers. They’re hideous.”

  In the kitchen, Doreen was helping Laurie organize the food. Laurie had already made the connection between sparky little Jack from the first book and the lumpy adolescent carting furniture in the hall. “You must be proud of him being in the books,” she said.

  “He’s a good lad,” Doreen said. “No trouble. Mr. Hayman was always kind to him. Gave him a signed copy.”

  “He should look after it,” Laurie said.

  Doreen gave a grim laugh. “Worth a bit now, I should think, with Mr. Hayman having passed away.”

  “Oh, no—he mustn’t let it go! It’s like a little nugget of history.” Laurie sounded horrified.

  “You want cling-film over the green stuff?”

  “Guacamole. It’s avocados.”

  “Not too partial to them myself. It’s the texture,” said Doreen, grumpily.

  I went into the garden. It had rained in the night, but now the sun was out. It was probably the kind of day you wanted for a funeral. I could see Rachel sitting on the swing. That was a surprise: she never got up early.

  “I feel so much better,” she said unexpectedly. “I feel Arthur’s like a bird and I’ve been able to release him.” She made a flying gesture with her hands. Her eyes were shining. “Laurie told me everything he said to her after the accident.”

  “Do you remember when we first met her?” I asked. “Did she say anything about having talked to Arthur?”

  “I think I’ve blotted everything out about that day.”

  I tried to keep my tone neutral. “So, what exactly did she say?”

  “Did you know she worked in a hospital? Oh, he wasn’t in any pain, that’s the main thing. She said how proud he was of us.” She sniffed, but she didn’t look unhappy. “She told me that’s how she got interested in the books, because he was telling her about Mr. Toppit. Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that so like Arthur? Run over by a truck and still talking about Hayseed.” She was laughing through her tears. At least she had stopped calling him “Daddy.”

  “But he never talked about the books,” I said.

  “She said he kept saying our names. Over and over, she said. Isn’t that nice?”

  “Nothing else?”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry I’ve been so stroppy. I’ve just felt so awful about Arthur. I mean, I still do, but I feel different.” She gave a hiccupy laugh. “Some of it’s even quite funny. Like the hospital mixing up his stuff with some other dead person’s.”

  “What did Laurie say about that?”

  “She said, ‘Shit happens,’ and that I shouldn’t blame the hospital. She’s right.”

  At the bottom of the drive, two big old-fashioned, black cars were turning in slowly from the road and came up to park in front of the house. Both drivers got out, grown-up versions of me: dark suits, white shirts, and black ties, but just so it didn’t get too confusing they were wearing black peaked caps as well. Rachel and I caught each other’s eye: everything was a bit unreal.

  It was something of a mystery why there were two cars to drive us to the church in the first place. Even Martha seemed uncertain, and she had been the one who had made the arrangements. I offered to go in one with Laurie, but Rachel thought I should be with her and Martha. Laurie seemed quite happy for us to be in one car and for her to be on her own in the other, but Martha didn’t like the sound of that. I suggested that Martha, as the widow and principal mourner, should go on her own in the first car and the rest of us should follow behind, but nobody went for that either. It was like one of those brainteasers you find on the back of matchboxes: how to utilize both cars without dividing the family unit. In the end, we opted for the simplest solution: we all went in one car, and the other followed empty behind. The car was immaculate. It was old, but it had been polished to within an inch of its life and it smelled of air freshener inside—there was a dangly deodorant thing hanging off the driver’s mirror. Martha ignored the no-smoking sticker in the corner of the window and lit up as soon as she got in.

  The
hearse with the coffin inside was already waiting at the church. I thought I was going to be sick when I saw it. Everything was becoming very real. Of course I knew what pallbearers were, I just hadn’t connected them to Arthur’s funeral. I didn’t realize that Martha had had something so formal in mind. There were six to carry Arthur; with a lot of grunting and heaving they eased the coffin out, and then, at a prearranged signal, straightened up and raised it onto their shoulders.

  I read somewhere that during a total eclipse of the sun, all the birds and insects and animals stop making any noise. That was what it felt like as we slowly trailed after the coffin up the path: it was as if the whole world had vanished. When the doors opened it was a shock to see the church filled with people—like an unwelcome surprise party.

  There was a lot of subdued chattering as we came in, but as soon as the coffin was in view of the congregation, a hush came over the place and all you could hear was our echoing footsteps as we followed it up the aisle, preceded by the vicar. Although she had seemed fine during the walk up to the church, Martha turned and pulled me towards her, taking my arm so that I was walking alongside her. Lila was seated about halfway up the aisle beside Graham Carter. As we passed, she reached out to touch Martha’s arm. Her face wore one of those all-purpose solemn-but-intensely-moved expressions—which transformed itself quite quickly into something else when she saw that Laurie was part of our procession.

  The odd thing was that it could have been anybody’s funeral. Of course, there’s something quite tear-jerking about hearing a lot of people singing hymns in a sad way—the moment the first one started Rachel took up residence in Laurie’s arms—but none of it felt specific to Arthur. That was why I was looking forward to Terry Tringham’s address because at least that would be about him. Terry was sitting in the pew behind us. He was an old friend but I didn’t know him very well. All I remembered were things Martha and Arthur had said to us about him, or things I had overheard them say to each other when they thought we weren’t listening, stories that tended to start with a small crisis involving one of a set of interchangeable but consistent elements—money, drink, wives, unfeasibly large restaurant bills, troublesome children, bank managers, films that had run out of money mid-production, girls who might or might not have been under age, bailiffs—and ended with a bigger crisis that brought into play several of the other elements. Our favorite story involved one of his wives throwing his false teeth out of a porthole during a row on a Mediterranean cruise.

  When Terry’s moment came, there was a lot of coughing and shuffling as everybody sat down and tried to get comfortable. Terry eased himself out of his pew and headed towards the pulpit. I hadn’t realized he would be climbing into it, and he handled the stairs rather awkwardly. It made me think of someone scrambling up to a tree house. In the Rule Book for Death, someone should point out that black is not a good color unless you’re scrupulously clean: Terry’s black tie had a number of milky stains on it and the shoulders of his crumpled suit were speckled with dandruff. “I hope he’s up to this,” Martha whispered portentously.

  “My name is Terence Tringham,” he began confidently. “If I were a drinking man”—he gave an ironic guffaw—“and we were not in a holy place, I would ask everyone to charge their glasses and toast the late great Arthur Hayman. I first met Arthur when he was eighteen. You should have seen him then, fresh up from the country, shining like a flaming torch, waiting to taste everything life had to offer.” He paused. “So different from his later years.” I wasn’t absolutely sure that hit quite the right note for a funeral address, but Terry plowed on, shuffling bits of paper and, once in a while, patting his pocket uncertainly to check if some part of his speech had gone astray.

  “We were the envy of the world, those of us privileged to be part of the British film industry in the early years. A volcano of talent was erupting on our doorstep! Elstree Studios, where Arthur and I started our careers, was like Paddington station in the rush hour. How lucky we were! Our lives intersected with those of the truly great—the Hitchcocks, the Michael Powells, the Wally Carters. Of course, our lives did not all have the same trajectory as Wally’s. It was a tragedy that Arthur’s magnificent little film Love’s Captive had problems with the studio and did not get wider distribution. Made for the masses, seen by the privileged few: how painful Arthur found that. In the fifties, some of us became the forgotten men of celluloid but, happily for Arthur, he managed to use his talents in his lovely children’s books. And by then, of course, he had found Martha, who was not just a wife but a woman with the strength of ten men, an ally, a friend, a fellow intellectual. It was Wally, of course, who brought her into Arthur’s life when he whisked her away from the groves of academe. Silver-tongued devil that he is, he got her to interrupt her PhD to research his crusader film, and do you know what? She’s still working on the PhD! It’s never too late, that’s what I say!” I could feel Martha stiffen beside me.

  Terry was a bit tearful now. There were long pauses. He was scrunching his handkerchief in his palm and blowing his nose with increasing frequency. He wanted to “spool back,” he told us. He wanted to talk about “the early days” when he and Arthur and Wally Carter were “the Three Musketeers of the Elstree sound stages.” People were getting restless, but he seemed oblivious.

  “Anyone could have guessed that if Lady Luck’s light was to shine on one of us, it would be on Wally, our loyal compadre. What a talent! And still working! Which is why he can’t be with us today. But, typically generous, he’s always acknowledged the inspiration we gave him in those heady days when everything seemed possible. It wasn’t enough for him to scale the Chiltern Hills of Pinewood, he had his sights set on the Everest of the film world: the Hills of Beverly.”

  As Terry was rambling on, a strange thing happened: Martha stood up and moved out of the pew into the aisle. I knew, because I was sitting next to her, of course, but it took the rest of the congregation longer to realize that something was going on. Her face was expressionless, and she walked in slow, measured steps. Terry slowed to a halt and he looked around him in a panicky way, as if a fire might have broken out that he hadn’t noticed. Martha headed towards the pulpit. She didn’t attempt to climb into, but waited patiently, looking up at Terry. There was a moment’s silence. Finally, he began to descend the stairs. When he reached the bottom, Martha whispered something in his ear, then retraced her steps back to our pew.

  Terry scuttled up into the pulpit again and rustled through bits of paper on its ledge. He took several sheets off the top, stuffed them into his pocket and began to speak again, rather quicker than before. “In later years, many of his old friends did not see him as often as we would have liked. What an extraordinary talent! What an extraordinary man! All of us here were privileged to know him and love him. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  Almost immediately, the organ began the next hymn and everybody was on their feet. Terry rattled down the aisle past our pew, his eyes firmly on the ground. When the hymn was over and everyone had fallen to their knees for a prayer, I asked Martha in a whisper what had happened.

  “I told him that if he went on spooling back and mentioned Wally Carter one more time I was going to slit my throat and drink my own blood,” she said, and turned back to her prayer book.

  At the end of the service, the pallbearers reappeared to take the coffin out of the church to the graveyard where Arthur was to be buried. We followed it, Martha hanging on to me and Rachel hanging on to Laurie. The big double doors at the end had been opened and a wide shaft of sunlight streamed in. A figure was standing there, silhouetted against the light. It took me a moment to realize it was Lila.

  She wore a nervous smile and was holding a stack of pamphlets. By her feet there was a large pile. “Please don’t be cross with me, Martha,” she said. “This is my surprise.” Printed on the front, there was a pastiche of a Victorian playbill she had drawn. In bold, blocky lettering it said: A SELECTION FROM MR. ARTHUR HAYMAN’S FAMOUS HAYSEED BOOKS,
and, in smaller lettering underneath, WITH THE ILLUSTRATIVE ASSISTANCE OF MISS LILA LÖWENSTEIN. There was a bizarre little caricature of Arthur and Lila in the bottom right-hand corner: he was dressed in a cape and a top hat, taking a bow; she was next to him in a ballgown, doing a curtsy.

  “I had two hundred printed,” Lila said. “You never know how many people will turn up to a funeral.” I had rarely seen Martha lost for words. She was flicking through the pamphlet. “I hope you approve of the selection. So many bits I could have included.”

  Tears were rolling down Martha’s cheeks. “But why?” she said.

  “For you, Martha. And for my poor Arthur,” Lila said. “And for the children, of course.” She handed one to me and one to Rachel.

  Laurie took one from her. “Oh, this is beautiful,” she said. “It’s like a collector’s item. Could I have another?”

  Lila moved the pile of pamphlets under her arm. “I’m afraid there’s only a limited number.”

  “But, Lila, this must have been so expensive,” Martha said.

  “The only thing it cost was my time. That I was happy to give. We have a little printing press at the school. My girls helped me.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it.”

  “It’s my gift to you, Martha.”

  Martha glanced over her shoulder. By now, a mass of people was in the aisle behind us, waiting to get out of the church. “We’ve got to get on,” she said desperately, and almost dragged us after her in the direction the coffin had gone.

  What was meant to happen was that everyone would come out of the church and go straight to the grave. Because Lila had positioned herself so that nobody could get past her without being given a pamphlet, it took them about fifteen minutes to get there. The pallbearers stood by the hole as people straggled round the side of the church in dribs and drabs. Martha moved to the head of the grave and stood there on her own with her back to us. Finally, when everyone was there, Lila came slowly round the corner and called, in a ringing tone, “The church is empty now! I think we can start.”