by Emlyn Rees
‘Miles …’ I begin, before correcting myself. ‘My father’, I try again, ‘was cremated here in nineteen eighty-five and I’ve driven down from London today, because I wanted to see where he was buried, only now I’m here I’ve realised how stupid I’m being, because obviously, there wouldn’t have been any remains left to bury after he was bur— after he was cremated.’ I realise from her expression that I’m speaking too quickly and I take a breath before continuing, ‘I was wondering if you could tell me what happened to his ashes. I know my mother hasn’t got them. We didn’t take anything back with us after the service, and …’
But there my steam runs out. My head drops and I find myself staring at my darkened, blurred reflection in the varnished wooden counter. Internally, I kick myself for being so short-sighted. I should have known there was nothing for me here.
‘We have a garden of remembrance,’ Mrs Philips explains. ‘Some of our clients opt to have their relatives’ ashes placed there. Do you know if your mother –’
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘I doubt Mum would have …’
‘In that case …’ Mrs Philips says a little awkwardly. ‘If we receive no instructions to the contrary, it’s our policy to scatter the ashes in the woods behind the crematorium. It’s a very peaceful place,’ she adds with a kindly smile.
‘Thank you,’ I say, turning to leave. ‘I’ll go there.’
‘Before you do,’ Mrs Philips says, causing me to turn back to face her. ‘Why don’t you let me just check?’ She gets to her feet.
‘Really,’ I say, ‘there’s no need. I’ll just …’
But she’s insistent. ‘You never know,’ she tells me, ‘your father might be in the garden after all and it would be a shame not to see him after travelling all this way.’
I’m about to thank her for her offer, but decline her help. (I can’t imagine Mum having wanted Miles remembered by anyone.) But it’s too late. Mrs Philips is already disappearing through the swing doors that separate this room from whatever lies behind. I gaze down at my wet shoes and become uncomfortably aware of the glow of sweat permeating my rain-spattered face. There’s a swishing of doors and, looking up, I see Mrs Philips returning with a heavy, leather-bound ledger in her hands.
She places it on the counter between us and opens it up. ‘Nineteen eighty-five, you say …’
‘June,’ I confirm, suddenly nervous of the question that I know will come next.
‘And the name?’ she duly asks.
‘Roper,’ I tell her. ‘Miles Roper.’
I watch her intently, but she doesn’t display even a trace of reaction to my words. Quite the contrary, I hear her muttering them as she flicks over the pages, running her finger down the columns of the deceased as she reads.
‘Here we are,’ she says brightly, turning the ledger round to face me and pointing at Miles’s name next to a grid reference. ‘Aren’t you glad we looked now?’
‘You mean he has got a place in the garden?’ I ask, looking up from the ledger in disbelief.
‘Absolutely,’ she states. ‘Row twenty-seven, plot sixteen.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Philips,’ I tell her.
‘My pleasure, Mr Roper,’ she says and then, no doubt registering the consternation in my face, she asks, ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yes,’ I tell her, feeling my facial muscles relaxing. ‘I think it really is.’
Outside, the rain has diminished somewhat and now drifts noiselessly down, like dust. As I walk back past the crematorium, I can hear from within the swell of an organ and the sound of muffled voices singing along to the tune of ‘The Lord’s my shepherd’. As instructed by Mrs Philips, I follow the white metal signs to the Garden of Remembrance, which lies to the right of the crematorium. It covers a couple of acres, no more, and as I navigate my way through the rows of plots I wonder at how little we all come to in the end.
Row twenty-seven is down near the woods. Walking along it with my head bowed low, I feel weak with apprehension, almost as if I’m about to see Miles in person. What would I say to him, I wonder, if I were to find him now, sitting there on one of these meagre plots of earth, smoking a cigarette and looking up at me with those cool, assessing eyes? Would I read repentance in them, or innocence? Not, of course, that he’d be anything like how I remember him. Fifteen years have passed since his death, which would make him fifty-three years old now, instead of the thirty-eight at which he lies frozen in my mind. He was only thirty-eight, less than ten years older than I am now.
I keep walking, concentrating on the tiny brass plates in the ground at my side, and the plastic and fresh flowers that have been placed beside them. As I pass plot fifteen, I feel my guts lurch and then, as I reach plot seventeen, I come to a halt. I knew Mum wouldn’t have done this. I knew she’d have rather had Miles scattered to the winds. Mrs Philips’s ledger must have been mistaken.
But then, just as I’m about to leave, something catches my eye and I stare down at the tangle of weeds between the two plots. Kneeling down, careless of the cold and wet which filters through my trousers to my skin, I claw at the dock leaves and thistles, and there I see a lacklustre brass plate which reads:
Miles Stanley Roper
1947–1985
O Saviour Christ, our woes dispel;
For some are sick, and some are sad,
And some have never loved thee well,
And some have lost the love they had.
I run through these words, chosen by my mother, over and over again, and then I stare up at the bleak sky.
No, Miles never did love Christ, or God for that matter, either. Miles always lived by his own rules and, somehow, I doubt he’s been bent towards anyone else’s, even now. The brass plate has the dull glow of a distant fire and I trace my finger over his name, but there’s no warmth to be felt there on this cold day.
So much of Miles’s life and, indeed, his death remains veiled in mystery. Was he involved in Carl’s murder? And if so, did he pull the trigger himself? The police certainly believed that the answer to both these questions was an emphatic yes, although of course he’d never gone to trial, or even been interviewed by them.
Tony Hall had been the one who’d told them all this, just like, after his falling out with Miles, he’d been the one who’d told them where to find the body. Miles had never had an opportunity to give his side of the story. Tony had told the police that Miles had boasted to him about killing Carl after an argument over the signing of some papers concerning Clan’s ownership. That had been enough for them and, following Miles’s death, the case of Carl’s murder had been left officially open, but unofficially all lines of further enquiry had ceased.
Tony the Crony, whatever his own involvement might have been, had never been charged, and Clan itself had closed and never reopened. All the proceeds from the sale of the building and its contents had gone towards paying off the debts which Miles had left behind.
As for me, I don’t think Miles was guilty of murder. This was my gut reaction at the time as his son, but over the years it’s something I’ve stuck with, not for my self-protection so much, as because I just don’t think murder was something he was capable of. He was a rogue. I don’t deny that. He wasn’t a good man, in the same way that he wasn’t a good husband or a good father. But he wasn’t evil. He was ambitious and greedy and, at times, uncaring and selfish, but never evil. I don’t think he had the necessary callousness to put a gun to the back of someone’s head and pull the trigger. That was always far more Tony’s style. That said, I do believe Miles might have known; there was nothing, I don’t think, that went on in Clan that he didn’t know about. It’s possible that he might have persuaded Tony to do it for him. That would have been far more his style and would have explained why it was he’d then chosen to run.
Or maybe … maybe I’m wrong … maybe Miles did do it. Maybe he shot Carl with the same pistol I shot Jimmy Dughead’s bull. Because that’s the other thing I still believe about Miles: with him, anything
and everything was always possible.
I gaze across the garden at the crematorium. It reminds me of the nuclear bunkers I used cut out of magazines in the Seventies, to show Miles in the hope that he’d build us a shelter in our back garden. ‘Rushton isn’t a military target,’ I remember him telling me. ‘But you’re Britain’s best secret agent,’ I told him back. ‘Of course the Russians are going to want to kill you first,’ I explained. ‘You’re the one who knows all the secrets.’
And nothing there, at least, has changed. Whatever secrets he had are with him now.
I reach inside my coat pocket and take out the sunglasses that Mickey and I buried with the rest of our treasure in the field on Jimmy Dughead’s land. I think back to almost a quarter of a century ago, to the night of my seventh birthday, when Miles first slipped them on to my face as he carried me up the stairs to bed. ‘They’re Government issue,’ I remember him explaining. ‘One hundred per cent Carnage-proof. Nothing evil can hurt you when you’re wearing them.’ Unfolding the sunglasses’ arms, I lean forward and push them into the soft earth, so that the dark lenses stare up at me from below the brass plate. ‘Goodbye, Dad,’ I say, getting to my feet, and turning and heading back to the car.
On Friday afternoon I leave work early and go back to the flat and collect my bags, before driving to Shotbury, where I book myself into my accommodation above the bar in the King’s Head Hotel.
It consists of a low-beamed spacious bedroom, with an en suite bathroom. The bedroom contains two single beds, one for my best man, Eddie, and one for myself. Eddie, who discovered yesterday afternoon that he’d have to cover for someone tonight at Nitrogene, will be unable to join me until much later. His plan is to drive here direct from the club after his shift ends, which means that it’s unlikely he’ll arrive much before four in the morning. His much-vaunted evening of drinking and reminiscing over the end of my bachelor days will therefore, I’m relieved to say, not be happening.
Checking the time, I work out that Rebecca will be flying back from Oslo, landing any minute now, and probably won’t reach Thorn House for another couple of hours. George called me at work this morning to check that everything was OK and to suggest meeting up with myself and Eddie for a couple of beers this evening. Thorn House, it seemed, had become too overrun with Rebecca’s bridesmaids and florists for George’s liking and any opportunity of restoring a balance of masculinity to the house was one he would have welcomed.
It was something I would have arranged anyway, a visit to Thorn House this evening, but when I told him about Eddie’s difficulties with Nitrogene, George insisted on my joining himself, Mary, Rebecca and the others for dinner later on. Either that, he said, or he could come down to meet me in the King’s Head bar. I told him dinner would be fine. Going to visit them was what I wanted. Besides, I knew it would be impossible for me to talk to him one on one right now.
Not bothering to hang up any of my clothes in the wardrobe or place my trousers in the press provided, I throw my bag on to Eddie’s empty bed and flop down on my own. Propping myself up with pillows and scanning through the TV channels with the remote control, I settle on a cartoon and watch a series of brightly coloured creatures cracking jokes in shrill voices and chasing one another endlessly around. Closing my eyes, I think of my mother, with Alan no doubt at her side, boarding the sleeper train in Scotland, in order that she’ll arrive here tomorrow morning in time to witness the marriage of her only son.
Thorn House is a whirl of activity by the time I pull into the driveway at just gone eight. Men and women in jeans and bright-red T-shirts are unloading boxes from a van into one of the outbuildings. As discussed with George less than two months ago, a fine-looking white marquee now stands on the front lawn, contrasting more heavily by the second with the crepuscular backdrop of the house itself. As I park my car in the drive alongside it and get out, I see Rebecca rushing out of the front door and across the grass to greet me. She reaches me and hugs me, and I stare over her shoulder and wonder how long this night will last.
‘Are you all right?’ she enquires, pulling back and resting her hands on my shoulders.
‘What makes you ask?’
‘You look …’ She peers searchingly into my eyes and I’m unable to hold her stare. ‘Fred,’ she says, her voice earnest, ‘are you OK? Nothing awful’s happened, has it?’
‘No,’ I tell her truthfully, ‘nothing awful at all.’
‘But something must … you seem so sad …’
I rack my brains for something to say. ‘Eddie …’ I begin as the thought occurs to me.
‘What?’ she interrupts.
‘He’s not going to be here till early in the morning,’ I continue.
‘Oh,’ she says, looking away from me, up towards the house, distracted by something I cannot see. I’m aware of her hands relaxing on my shoulders. ‘Is that all?’ she asks, turning back to me.
‘Yes.’
She smiles and slips her hand into mine, saying, ‘I’ve got so much to show you, darling. Mum and Dad have been organising stuff all week and it all looks …’ She tugs at my hand and starts to lead me across the lawn. ‘Come and see for yourself,’ she says.
Katie and Susan, Rebecca’s bridesmaids, are already inside the marquee and, together, the three of them excitedly explain the layout of the tables, pointing out where our various groups of guests will be sitting during the meal and speeches.
‘It’s going to be fabulous,’ Katie says, waving her arm across the vast space. ‘Imagine it once everyone’s here, with all the flower arrangements in place and the candles lit …’
‘You wait till you see Rebecca in her dress,’ Susan teases.
I look at my bride-to-be, beautiful and gazing serenely at the top table where tomorrow she’ll be sitting as a wedded woman, next to me, a married man.
‘Forget the dress.’ Susan laughs. ‘He’s more interested in the underwear – aren’t you, Fred?’
I nod my head in agreement, but my face remains impassive. I like Katie and Susan, but I wish they weren’t here. I need to speak to Rebecca and I need to do it alone.
The evening doesn’t play out that way, though. After the marquee come the kitchens, and a half-hour discussion with Mary and George about the order in which the food, champagne and wine are to be served. The more I hear, the more distant I feel myself becoming. I crave simplicity and normality over this. The money they’ve spent sickens me to my core. I can’t help thinking of where Mum lives in Scotland and how she’s my only relative invited to this event, and how different I really am from Rebecca’s family. And, of course, I think of Mickey and what happened at her parents’ house last weekend, and how right her reaction was, but still, how intrinsically wrong everything here still feels. Mary’s and George’s voices fade further and further out in my mind until I’m barely listening to them at all. I observe them, as detached as if I were watching a silent movie. But I can’t change the channel. I can’t turn it off and walk away.
It’s not until after dinner that I get an opportunity to speak to Rebecca alone.
‘I know you’re not meant to on the night before your wedding,’ she whispers into my ear as we’re walking between the dining room and the sitting room, ‘but I’ve never really been one for believing in luck …’
‘What?’ I ask her, stopping where I am, and watching George, Mary and the girls disappearing one by one through the sitting-room door.
‘Just a quickie,’ she says, pulling me towards the stairs. ‘No one will notice. They’re all drunk.’
Her last assumption is correct. Of the six of us who sat down to dinner, I’m the only sober one remaining, having used the presence of my car and my need to meet Eddie back at the King’s Head later on as an excuse not to indulge in the tasting of tomorrow’s wines that George instigated the moment we sat down to eat. ‘OK,’ I say, adding, ‘so long as it’s somewhere private. I don’t want anyone walking in on us.’
‘No problem,’ she says with a grin, b
efore hurrying up the stairs without another word.
I follow the intricate floral design of her dress to the second landing and then on down a corridor with which I’m unfamiliar. As I traipse along behind her, it strikes me that she’s had her hair cut shorter than I’ve ever seen it before and the soft skin of her neck is now clearly visible at the back.
She stumbles round a corner and then comes to a halt at a closed door. Turning, she grins drunkenly at me. ‘Daddy’s study,’ she says. ‘With a nice big desk … What a naughty girl I am …’
‘But mightn’t he –’ I start to ask.
She shakes her head with exaggerated movement, swinging her fringe back and forth across her forehead. ‘Too drunk,’ she tells me. ‘And too excited. Believe me, the last thing that’s going to be on his mind at the moment is work …’
She opens the door and I follow her inside. The smell of cigar smoke hangs heavy in the air. The room is of modest proportions and bookcases are lined along its walls. Opposite the door, which I close behind me as Rebecca walks over to the desk and switches on the lamp there, is a window which overlooks the gardens. I think of my unpacked bag lying there on Eddie’s bed in the King’s Head. Rebecca turns to face me and, hitching up her dress, she starts to pull her knickers down.
‘No,’ I say, making no move to join her.
‘What do you mean?’ she asks, glancing up in agitation.
I lean back against the door. ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about,’ I say.
Straightening, she pulls up her knickers and lets her dress fall back down over her legs. ‘Well?’ she asks, folding her arms across her chest. ‘I’m listening.’
‘It’s about us. It’s about us as a couple.’
I pause, searching for the right words, and she prompts, ‘What about us?’
‘It’s about the fact that we’re going to be getting married tomorrow,’ I say, ‘and we’re going to be making vows to each other in front of our friends and families. And if we don’t mean what we’re saying, then we shouldn’t be there saying it in the first place.’ My face is beginning to burn as the torment inside searches for an outlet. I lift my hand to my face and slowly massage my brow. ‘It’s about the truth, Rebecca. It’s about being honest with one another. And it’s about being honest with ourselves.’
