The Sleep of Reason

38: The Cost of Mr Pateman

YOU’VE got to forget it, Denis Geary had said, that night in his house after the trial. But, for at least a couple of prosaic reasons, it wouldn’t have been easy, even if we had been different people: one of those reasons was the result of some activities of Denis himself. He had duly paid his call on George Passant, who had mentioned that, once he left the country — which he did within a week — there was no one to visit Cora. Perhaps it might be arranged for me to do so? It was the most off-hand of legacies. I did not hear a word from George direct, although he had passed on a poste restante address.

I got in touch with Holloway prison, and was told that Cora was totally uninterested: she was, by her own choice, living in solitary confinement, and would scarcely speak to the doctors or prison officers. A few weeks later, I had a telephone call from the governor. “Now she says that she wouldn’t mind seeing you some day. It won’t be pleasant for you, but I expect you must be prepared for that.”

It was a bright afternoon late in May as I drove through the low indistinguishable North London streets, which after living in the town so long I had never seen: betting shops, little shabby cafés with chalk scrawls on blackboards outside, two-storey terrace after two-storey terrace, then porticoed houses, oddly prosperous, in sight of the pastiche castle itself. In a public garden the candles stood bright on the flowering chestnuts, but when I got out of the car in front of the jail the air blew bitterly cold from the Arctic, the late spring cold that we were getting used to.

As I was signing my name in the visitors’ book, I should have been glad to get as used to prisons, hospitals, any institutions where the claustral dread seized hold of me: even now, I couldn’t get rid of that meaningless anxiety. The corridors, the stone, the smells: the sight of other visitors taken passively off. By a mistake of my own, I was led to the wrong reception room, something like a café, plastic-topped tables with trolleys pushing between them. It was a general visiting day, the tables were already full, I was wondering if I could have picked out prisoners from the relations who came to see them. Some wearing their remand dresses, blue and pink, as Cora had done in the local jail. As I waited, standing in the corner, I noticed one woman chain-smoking, with a packet of cigarettes in front of her. It looked as though she was determined to get through it before the hour was up.

In a few minutes one of the staff had found me.

“Oh no,” she said, with a commanding smile, like a hospital nurse’s, “we couldn’t let her in here. It wouldn’t be safe.”

With anyone inside for her kind of crime, she was explaining, the other prisoners would try to ‘do’ her. It was as Maxwell had said. Cora was making a rational choice in opting for solitary. It showed that she had thought out how to preserve her own life.

“It’s a headache for us,” said the deputy. “And it’s going to be a headache as long as she’s here.”

Each time they took her out for exercise, it meant a security operation; to the same extent, but in exact reverse, as if she were a prisoner about whom plans were being made for an escape. As for herself, she gave no trouble. She didn’t grumble, her cell was immaculate. Apart from what they had on paper, the prison staff knew nothing more about her.

The deputy, whose name was Mrs Bryden, took me to another block and opened the door of a very small room, perhaps ten feet by six: inside were a table and two chairs, the backs of both chairs almost touching the walls, which were papered but had no decorations of any kind. On the table, curiously dominant, the only other object in the room, stood a single ashtray. “You’ve an hour to yourself,” said Mrs Bryden. “Two officers will be waiting in the corridor outside to take her back.”

The door opened again, and, one of those officers on either side of her, Cora stood in the doorway. She was wearing one of her own dresses, one which she had worn on the first day of the trial. She nodded as Mrs Bryden greeted her and said goodbye to me.

As the two of us sat there alone, I offered her a cigarette, grateful right at the beginning — as in a hospital visit — for anything which got some seconds ticked away.

I had to break the silence.

“You know George has gone away?” My voice sounded loud and brusque.

Again she nodded.

While I was thinking of another opening, she said: “I liked George.”

“He’ll come back some time.”

“Will he?” she said, without reaction.

Another interval. My tongue wouldn’t work any better — maybe worse — than when I saw her before the trial.

“What’s it like in here?”

Her glance met mine, slid viscously away, pale-eyed in the heavy handsome face. She gave a contemptuous shrug.

“What do you think it’s like?” she said. Then her tone became a violent mutter: “There’s the soap.”

“What?”

“The soap. It’s diabolical. Every morning when I go to wash, it makes me want to throw up.”

I listened to a long, unyielding, gravelly complaint about the soap. It sounded as though she had a sensitive nose. Against my will, I felt a kind of sympathy.

“Why don’t you tell them?”

“They wouldn’t care.”

She gave up complaining, and sank into muteness again. Inventing one or two questions, I got nothing but nods. Calmly she asked: “Will they let me see her?”

“I don’t know.” I did know: but it wasn’t for me to tell her, or at least I rationalised it so.

Another patch of muteness. Again calmly, she said: “What’s the position about letting us out?”

I said, surely her solicitors had told her already. She said yes, and then, with implacable repetitive calm and obstinacy, asked the question once more.

Well, it spun the time out to explain. The sentence, as she knew, I said, was a statutory one: but, as she also knew, it didn’t mean what it said. In some years, no one could tell quite when, the authorities would be reviewing their cases: if there was thought to be no danger, then they might be released.

“How long?”

“In some cases, it’s quite a short time.”

“They won’t do that for us. People will be watching what happens to us.”

That was more realistic than anything I had heard from her before. Raising her voice, she asked: “I want to know, how long do you think they’ll keep us in?”

I thought it was a time to speak straight. “If they’re sure there’s no danger, my guess would be something like ten years.”

“What are you talking about, danger?”

“They’ll need to be sure you won’t do anything of the same kind again.”

She gave a short despising laugh.

“They needn’t worry themselves. We shan’t do anything like that again.”

For an instant I recalled that colleague of Hankins, too clever by half, making bright remarks before the verdict. Then, more sharply, Mrs Pateman talking of her daughter.

“We shan’t do anything like that again,” said Cora.

She added: “Why should we?”

I couldn’t reply. Not through horror (which at that moment, and in fact through that interview, I didn’t feel): through something like loneliness, or even a sense of mystification that led into nothing. It was a relief to ask her commonplace questions — after all, if my guess was right, when she came out she’d still be a young woman, wouldn’t she? Not much over thirty, perhaps? What did she intend to do?

“I haven’t got as far as that,” she said.

But she had. It came out — she wasn’t unwilling to let it — that she had been making plans. The plans were down-to-earth. They would go and live somewhere else, in a large town, perhaps London. They would change their names. They might try to change their appearance, certainly they would dye their hair. They wouldn’t have much difficulty, if the labour market hadn’t altered, in getting jobs. They would have to cover up for not having employment cards, but still they’d manage. In all she said, there was no vestige of a sign that she was thinking of reshaping her life — no more than George ever had, though about that I had once believed otherwise. She had no thought of finding another way to live. I was listening for it, but there was none at all. All she foresaw, or wanted to foresee, was picking up where she had left off.

Throughout she had been using the word ‘we’. It was ‘we’ who were going to find another place to settle in. Was that going to happen in ten years’ time? How would she endure it, if it didn’t happen? It was difficult to have any prevision of what Kitty would be like. She might be imagining a different kind of life. If she were capable of that, when the time came she would throw Cora away as though she didn’t recognise her face.

The hour wore on. I was trying, when she dropped her chin, to catch a glance at my wristwatch below the table.

“I don’t know how to pass the time,” she said. She hadn’t observed me: she was saying it — not as a complaint, but as a matter of fact — about herself. What did she do all day? I couldn’t make out. Sometimes ‘they’ let her listen to the radio.

“It’s all right for her,” she said, once more as a matter of fact, without envy. “She’ll be doing a lot of reading.”

She repeated: “I don’t know how to pass the time. She’ll be learning things.”

She seemed to be thinking of tomorrow and the next day, not of the stretch of years.

My time, not hers, was nearly up. I said that I should have to go. As though she were imitating the judge after he had sentenced them, she gave me a dismissive nod.

Meanwhile, I had been having another reminder, which, except by disconnecting the telephone, I could not escape. I had told Mr Pateman — in his frenetic state, when his wife led me to him — that he was at liberty to talk to me. He took me at my word. When we had returned to London, on the first evening, the telephone rang. A personal call: would I accept it, and reverse the charges? Mr Pateman’s grinding voice: “I can’t let it go at this.” His daughter was ill. They hadn’t listened to what the doctors said. They were behaving like rats in mazes. Something must be done about his daughter. Something must be done about people in her condition. What about the authorities ‘high up’: when could I get them moving? Patiently that first night, I said that neither I nor any other private citizen could do anything at all: this was a matter of law — “I can’t be expected to be satisfied with that.” When should I be coming to the town again, so that he could explain his ‘point of view’? Not for some time, I had no engagement there: in any case, I said, I knew very well how he felt. No, he had to explain exactly.

The conversation was not conclusive. Three or four times a week the call came through: reverse the charges? The same voice, the same statements, often identically the same words. Rats in mazes. Authorities high up. His point of view. He wasn’t rude, he wasn’t even angry, he just went grinding on. Once he had found words which contented him, he felt no need to change them.

It was no use Margaret answering the telephone, and saying that I was out. He was ready to ring up again at midnight, 1 a.m., or very early the following morning. We thought of refusing to accept the calls: but that we couldn’t bring ourselves to do. Whatever his wife had feared, whether it was that he might become clinically deranged, seemed not to be happening to him now. In hectoring me, in grating on with this ritual, he had found an activity which obsessed and satisfied him. He might even have lost contact with what the object of it was. Over the telephone I couldn’t see — and didn’t want to see — his face. I suspected that he was beginning to look as when I had first seen him, the dislocation going, the confidence of folie de grandeur flooding back.

Yet each night we became fretted as we waited for the telephone to ring. And, there was no denying it, we found ourselves showing a streak of miserliness, as though we were being infected from the other end of the line. It was ridiculous. Margaret had never counted shillings in her life. We spent more on cigarettes in a week than those reverse charges could possibly amount to. Nevertheless, with the experience of the trial only a few weeks behind us, we scrutinised our telephone bill with indignation, calculating what was the cost of Mr Pateman.

39: A Young Man on His Own

A few days after my visit to the prison, Charles and I were sitting under a weeping willow on the riverbank. It was a fine afternoon, and I had gone down to his school to settle what he should do during the next academic year. Not that there was much to settle, for he had made up his mind months before. He had cleared off all the examinations, and it was time to go. The only issue remaining was not when, but where. He wouldn’t be seventeen for a good many months, and he had to fill in three terms before he went to the university. He was taking the chance to start off on his travels, and it was some of those plans that we had been discussing.

“You might even write a letter occasionally,” I said.

He grinned.

It would have seemed strange in my time, I said, to be going off on one’s own at his age. In fact, among my friends, it would have been not only strange, but unimaginable. Of course, we didn’t have the money–

“Do we really grow up faster, do you think?”

“In some ways, yes, you do.”

I added: “But, for what it’s worth, I wanted to get married before I was twenty.”

“Who to?”

“My first wife.”

“You didn’t marry her for six — or was it seven — years afterwards, did you?”

“No.”

“If it had happened when you were twenty — what would it have been like?”

“It couldn’t have been worse than it turned out.”

Charles gave a grim, saga-like smile, similar to his uncle’s. But I was thinking that, though he knew the facts of my life with extreme accuracy, he didn’t know how torn about I’d been. He wouldn’t have believed that I had gone through that long drawn out and crippling love. He saw me as balanced and calm, a comparatively sensible ageing man. Sometimes I was amused. I permitted myself to say: “You haven’t got the monopoly of temperament in this family, you know.”

It was easy to talk to him, as to Martin, on the plane of sarcasm. As we sat there, I mentioned the telephonic activities of Mr Pateman. “You’ve brought it on yourself,” said Charles, operating on the same plane. An acquaintance of his sculled by, and Charles gave an amiable wave — rather like, since he was leaving so soon, Robin Hood gazing on the exploits of the budding archers. When the swell had passed, the river was mirror-calm, the willow leaves meeting their reflections in the water. It was something like an afternoon with C L Dodgson, I said to Charles, and went on to tell him that I had talked to Cora Ross in Holloway.

“Haven’t you packed all that up by now?”

“Not quite.” I added, sometimes it seemed that I never should.

He leaned forward, confronting me.

“I think you’re wrong.”

“What do you mean, I’m wrong?”

“This is an incident. If it hadn’t been for sheer blind chance, it wouldn’t have been an incident that mattered to you. All along, you’ve given it a significance that it doesn’t possess.” He was speaking lucidly, articulately, but with force and something like antagonism.

“I could have found other incidents, you know. Which would have affected me in the same fashion.”

“That’s because you are looking for them,” said Charles. “Do you remember, that weekend I was at home, you were breathing hellfire and damnation about Auschwitz? I disagreed with you then. You noticed that, did you? And I still disagree with you.”

“Auschwitz happened.”

“Many other things have happened. Remember, Auschwitz happened years before I was born. I’m bound to be interested in what’s happening now—”

“That’s fair enough.”

“Of course there are awful things. Here and now. But I want to find them out for myself.”

“Retracing all our mistakes in the process.”

“That’s not fair enough.” He said it politely, but as though he had been thinking it out alone and his mind had hardened. “I don’t think I’m easily taken in. My generation isn’t, you know. We’ve had to learn a fair amount.”

“It’s curious how you talk about ‘your generation’,” I said. “We never did.”

He wasn’t distracted. “Perhaps that’s because we know that we have a difficult job to do. You don’t deny that, do you?”

I said, that would be the last thing I intended.

He was referring to his friends by name. As a group, they were abler, very much abler, than those I had known as a boy. Some of them would take the world as they found it: become academics, conventional politicians, civil servants: that was easy enough, they had no problem there. But one or two, like himself, were not so content. Then what do you do? “We should like to find something useful. Perhaps I ought to lower my sights, but I don’t feel inclined to, until I’ve had a shot. And I don’t think it would be very different, even if I hadn’t got you on my back—”

He threw in that remark quite gently. I said that he could forget me.

He said, still gently but with a flick of sarcasm, that he would do his best to. That was the object of the exercise.

No, not really the object, just the first condition, he corrected himself. He wanted to throw in his weight where it would be useful: and he wanted to be sure it was his weight and no one else’s.

It had the ring of a youth’s ambition, at the same time arrogant and idealistic, mixed up with dreams of happiness. Some of it sounded as though it had been talked out with friends. Most of it, I thought, was solitary. He seemed spontaneous and easy-natured, but he kept his secrets.

He said that he had no more use for “doctrines of individual salvation” than I had. (I wondered where they had picked up that expression?) Any of those doctrines was dangerous, he said: they nearly always meant that, either actively or passively, one wished harm on to the world. Of course, he wanted for himself anything that came. What did he want? He was imagining something, but kept it to himself. He returned to saying that, whatever he found to do, it was going to be hard enough: so he couldn’t afford to carry any excess luggage with him.

“I want everything as open-ended as it can be, isn’t that right?” he said. “I don’t want to set limits yet awhile. Limits about people, I mean. So that’s why I can’t take this trouble of yours as tragically as you do. Do you mind that?”

All I could answer was to shake my head. I was sure by now that he had come to this meeting resolved to make his declaration: once he had got it over, he was in high spirits. Cheerfully he stretched himself, sucking a stem of grass. It was almost time, he said, for us to move off into the town for tea. “Tea’s not much good to you, is it?” he said. “Well, afterwards we’ll go to a hotel and I’ll stand you a Scotch. Just to celebrate the fact that this is the last time you’ll have to come down to this establishment—” he spread out a hand towards the river, the fields, the distant towers across the meadows.

I asked whether he would miss it at all: but I guessed the answer, for here we were very much alike.

“Who knows?” he said.

Yes, I knew, the places, the times, one was nostalgic for were not the obvious ones, not even the happy ones.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I can always send them home thoughts from abroad.”

A moment later he said: “It will be good to be on the move.”

Then, before we stirred ourselves, he enquired about how we should be getting on at home. Maurice would presumably still be round: he was close to his mother, and that was fine. “He’s very sweet,” said Charles, who, like others of what he called his generation, wasn’t ashamed of what mine would have considered saccharine expressions. He was fond of his half-brother, and sometimes, I thought, envied him, just because he seemed so untainted by the world. What would happen to him? “I wish,” said Charles, “that he could get through his damned examinations.” Was there nothing we could do?

Charles was busy about others’ concerns, joyful, vigorous, since in independence he was setting off on his own. It would be good to be on the move, he had said. I wasn’t resenting the rapacity and self-absorption of his youth, perhaps one couldn’t in a son when the organic links were strong, when one had known in every cell of one’s body what that state was like. I should worry about his remaining alive, until I myself was dead. It was strange, though — not unpleasant, a kind of affirmation, but still strange — to see him sitting there, as much on his own as I was now or had ever been.

40: Death of an Old Man

AS Margaret and I sat over our breakfast, the telephone rang. Good God, I said, was it Mr Pateman again? — not so amused as Charles had been, hearing of this new addition to our timetable. Margaret answered, and as she stood there nodded ill-temperedly to me: it was a trunk call, from the usual place. Then her expression altered, and she replied in a grave and gentle tone. Yes, she would fetch me. For an instant she put a hand on mine, saying that it was about my father.

“This is Mr Sperry here.”

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you, I’m very sorry, I’m sure. Old Mr Eliot—”

“Yes?”

“Early this morning. He passed away.”

Again I said yes.

“I was with him when he went.”

Mr Sperry was asking me about the funeral. “I’m doing what I can,” he said. I replied that I would arrive at the house by lunchtime. Mr Sperry, sounding more than ever apologetic, said that he had a piece of business then. Could I wait till half past three or four? “It doesn’t matter to him now, does it? He was a fine old gentleman. I’m doing what I can.”

Returning to the breakfast table, I repeated all this to Margaret. She knew that she would be desolated by her own father’s death: she was tentative about commiserating with me about the death of mine. Somehow, even to her, it seemed like an act of nature. He was very old, she said: it sounded like a good way to die. It was a pity, though, that instead of having only his lodger with him, there was none of us. “I’m not sure that he even wanted that,” I said.

We found ourselves discussing what he would have wanted in the way of funerals. It was so long since I had talked to him seriously — I had talked to him seriously so seldom, even when I was a child — that I had no idea. I suspected that he wouldn’t have cared a damn. I forgot then, though later I remembered, that once he had expressed a surprisingly positive distaste for funerals in general, and his own in particular. He was rueful that if he died before his wife (he had outlived her by over forty years) she would insist on ‘making a fuss’. But I forgot that.

Neither Margaret nor I felt any of that singular necrophilic confidence with which one heard persons express certainty about what a dead relative would have ‘liked’. I had once stood with a party at Diana Skidmore’s having drinks round her husband’s grave, carefully placed near a summer house on his own estate. Diana had been positive that there was nothing he would have liked more than to have his friends enjoy themselves close by: she was equally positive that he would, curiously enough, have strongly disliked golf balls infringing the airspace over the grave.

Margaret and I had no such clear idea. My father must have a funeral. In church? Again we didn’t know. As one of his few gestures of marital independence, he had always refused to attend church with my mother, who was devout. I was pretty sure that he believed in nothing at all. Yet, for the sake of his choir practices, he had frequented church halls, church rooms, all his life. When I rang up Martin to tell him the news, I asked his opinion. Rather to my surprise, for Martin was a doctrinaire unbeliever, he thought that maybe we ought to have a service in the parish church. Quite why, he didn’t or couldn’t explain. Perhaps some strain of family piety, perhaps a memory of our mother, perhaps something more atavistic than that. Anyway, wherever his impulse came from, I was relieved, because I had it too.

This was a Wednesday, still mid-June. Martin’s family would all travel the next day, and so would Margaret and Charles. The funeral had better be on Friday, if I could arrange it. That was what I had to tell Mr Sperry, as we sat in Aunt Milly’s old ‘front room’ that afternoon — the room where, with indignant competence, she laid down the battle plans for the teetotal campaigns. But I couldn’t tell Mr Sperry about the funeral at once, for he had a good deal to tell me.

It was a dank close day, and when he opened the door he was in his shirt sleeves. As though he wouldn’t have considered it proper to speak of ‘the old gentleman’ dressed like that, he immediately put his jacket on. The Venetian blinds in the front room were lowered, a crepuscular light filtered through. Mr Sperry gazed at me with an expression that was sad and at the same time excited by the occasion.

“I’m very sorry, I’m sure,” he said, repeating his greeting at the door. I thanked him.

“Of course, it has to come to us all in the end, doesn’t it? He had a long innings, you’ve got to remember that.”

Yes, I said.

“Mind you, he’s been a bit poorly since the winter. But I didn’t expect him to go like this, and I wonder if the doctor really did, though he says it might have happened any time.”

From his first words, he had been speaking in a hushed whisper, the tone in which my mother always spoke of death. In the same whisper, he went on: “There was someone, though, who knew his time had come.”

He said: “The old gentleman did. Himself.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

He paused. Then, more hushed: “I was just getting in from a job, I had been looking after Mrs Buckley’s drainpipe, it must have been getting on for half past six, and I heard him call out, Mr Sperry, Mr Sperry. He had a good strong voice right up to the end. Of course I went in, he was lying on his sofa, it was made up to sleep in, you know, he said, Mr Sperry, I wonder if you’d mind staying with me tonight. I said, yes, Mr Eliot, of course I will if you want me to. I said, is there anything the matter? He said, yes, stay with me please, I think I’m going to die tonight. That’s what he said. So I said, do you mind if I go and get a bit to eat. He said, yes, you have your supper, and I went and had a bit of salmon, and came back as soon as I could. He said, I wonder if you’d mind holding my hand. So I stayed there all night. I kept asking him, do you want anything else, but he wouldn’t say.”

I asked, was he in pain.

“He didn’t say much after I got back, he didn’t seem to want to. Sometimes he gave a kind of shout. I didn’t think he was going, but he did. I wish I’d sent for the doctor sooner, Mrs Sperry and me, we blame ourselves for that. His breathing began to make a noise, then the sun came up. I’m sorry to say—”

I said, “You did all that anyone could do.”

“It was full light before he went. The doctor got here a few minutes after.”

He added: “I got her (Mr Sperry didn’t explain who that was) to lay him out this morning. He didn’t look very nice before, and I didn’t think you’d want to see him like that.”

He said: “I never heard anyone say a bad word about him.”

That was a formal epitaph, such as I used to hear in my childhood in that road. But Mr Sperry, as well as keeping his sense of propriety about a death, had also been totally efficient. The death certificate had been signed: the undertaker would be calling to see me later that evening. At last I had the opportunity to tell Mr Sperry that we wanted a church service. Mr Sperry was ready to cope with that. It meant that I ought to go round to the vicar’s and fix a time, before the undertaker came. All the old gentleman’s “bits of things” had been sifted through and collected in his room. So far as Mr Sperry knew or could discover, he had not left a will.

“Why should he?” I asked. Yet, in fact, he owned the house: it was dilapidated now, not worth much, a thousand at most. Anyway, whatever arrangement Mr Sperry had with him (I later found that Mr Sperry was paying £2.2.6 a week), that must go on. Mr Sperry would not have brought up the subject — certainly not until after the funeral — but he was relieved.

He said: “Now you’d like to see him, I’m sure.”

He took me into the hall, opened the door of my father’s room, touched my sleeve, and left me alone. As I crossed the threshold into the half-dark, I had a sense, sudden, dominating, of déjà vu. I could just make out the short body lying on the sofa, then, though all the superstitious nerves held my fingers back, I switched on the light, and looked at him. Strangely, he appeared much more formidable than in life. His head had always been disproportionately larger than the rest of him: as it lay there above the sheets, it loomed strong and heavy, the clowning all gone now that the spectacles were off and the mild eyes closed. His moustache had been brushed and didn’t droop any more. It might have been the face of a stranger — no, of someone bearing a family resemblance, a distant relative whom I hadn’t often seen.

Standing by the sofa, I stayed and looked at him. It took an effort to move away, as I went to inspect the other side of the room, where Mr Sperry had neatly stacked my father’s “bits of things”. There were a couple of old suits: a bowler hat: a few shirts and pairs of long woollen pants: another nightshirt, as well as the one his body was dressed in. An umbrella, one or two other odds and ends. No papers or letters of any kind that I could see (he must have destroyed all our letters as soon as he read them). A couple of library books to be returned, but otherwise not a single book of his own. The two clocks — but they had not been moved, one still stood on the mantelpiece, presentation plaque gleaming, the other in the corner. That was all. He hadn’t liked possessions: but still, not many men had lived till nearly ninety and accumulated less.

I went back and looked at him. All of a sudden, I realised why I had had that overmastering sense of déjà vu. It wasn’t a freak, it was really something I had already seen. For it was in that room that, for the first time in my life, at the age of eight, I had seen a corpse. My grandfather, when he retired, had lived in this house with Aunt Milly, and he had died here (it was early in 1914). I had come along on an errand for my mother. I couldn’t find Aunt Milly, and I ran through the house searching for her and rushed into this room. Just as when I entered today, it was half-dark, chinks of light round the edges of the blinds: there lay my grandfather in his coffin. Before, afraid, I ran away, I saw, or thought I saw, the grey spade beard, the stern and massive face. He had been a man of powerful nature, and perhaps my father’s comic acts, which lasted all his life, had started in self-defence. And yet in death — if I had really seen my grandfather as I imagined — they looked very much the same.

When I put the room into darkness again, and rejoined Mr Sperry, he asked me: “How did you like him?”

“Thank you,” I replied.

Satisfied, he gave me the vicar’s address. They couldn’t afford to live in the vicarage nowadays, said Mr Sperry. That didn’t surprise me: the church had been built after I was born, the living had always been a poor one. The vicar I remembered must have been a man of private means: he and his wife had lived in some state, by the standards of the parish, and he shocked my mother, not only by his high church propensities (he’s getting higher every week, she used to whisper, as though the altitude of clergymen was something illimitable) but also by rumours of private goings on which at the time I did not begin to understand. Parties! Champagne, so the servants reported! Women present when his wife was away! My mother darkly suspected him of having what she called an ‘intrigue’ with one of the teachers at the little dame school which she sent me to. My mother was shrewd, but she had a romantic imagination, and that was one of the mysteries in which she was never certain of the truth.

There was nothing of all that about the present incumbent. He was living in a small house near the police station, and politely he asked me into a front room similar to Mr Sperry’s. He was a youngish, red-haired man with a smile that switched on and off, and a Tyneside accent.

I told him my name, and said that my father had died. At once, both with kindness and with the practice of one used to commiserating in the anonymous streets with persons he did not know, he gave me his sympathy. “It’s one of the great losses, when your parents go. Even when you’re not so young yourself. There’s a gap that no one’s going to fill.” He was looking at me with soft brown eyes. “But you’ve got to look at it this way. It’s sad for you, but it isn’t for him, you know. He’s just gone from a nasty day like this—” he pointed to the grey cloud-dark street — “and moved into a beautiful one. That’s what it means for him. If you think of him, there’s nothing to be sad about.”

I didn’t want to answer. The vicar was kind and full of faith. Young Charles, I was thinking, might have called him sweet.

I went on to say that, if it could be managed, we should like the funeral in two days’ time, on Friday. “Excuse me, sir,” said the vicar, “but could you say, have you any connection with this parish?”

That took me aback. Without thinking, I hadn’t been prepared for it. My mother, hanging on to the last thread of status after my father’s bankruptcy: her stall at the bazaar, her place at the mothers’ meeting: she had felt herself, and made others feel her, a figure in that church until she died. Yet that was long ago. He had never heard of her, or of any of us. When I mentioned my name, it had meant nothing at all.

Of course, he said (both of us embarrassed, as I began lamely to produce the family credentials) he would be glad to take the funeral. Was there anything special that I required? A musical service? An organist? Once more that day I found myself thinking, as simply as my mother would have done, of what the old man might have “liked”. He had loved music: yes, we would have an organist. In that case, said the vicar, the service couldn’t happen till early evening on Friday, when the “lady who plays the organ for us” got out of work. They couldn’t afford a regular organist nowadays, he said: the church was poorer than it had been when I lived here, not many people attended, there were no well-to-do members of his congregation. The only one in my time (at least he seemed well-to-do to us) would have been the local doctor. “The present doctors don’t come to church,” said the vicar, with his switched on, acceptant smile.

As I left his house, it was like walking home when I was a child. The church might have become poorer, but the houses — though many of them were the same houses — looked more prosperous: in front of several of them, cars were standing, which, when my mother and I walked that quarter of a mile from church, we never saw. One of my father’s neighbours was trimming the patch of grass between his front wall and the road. Others glanced at me from their windows: they must have known my father, at least by sight, but not me.

As soon as I got back to Mr Sperry, he asked me, in his obsessive, considerate fashion, what I would care to do until the undertaker came. Without knowing why, I said that perhaps I could sit in the garden for a few minutes. At once Mr Sperry let me out, past the barren plum tree which Charles had seen from his grandfather’s window, through the paved yard, down the steps into the garden. There, from a little shed, Mr Sperry brought out a deckchair, and said that he would call me when the undertaker arrived. For the second time, not exactly timidly but like one to whom physical contact didn’t come easy, he touched my arm.

I knew the geography of that garden as well as that of ours at home, which in fact I could see over a couple of low walls, not more than thirty yards away: the apple trees had been cut down, under whose shade I used to sit reading on summer nights like this. Aunt Milly’s garden had always been better kept than ours, thanks to the devotion of her husband. It was this one I had been reminding Martin of, when we returned to the Gearys’ after that lawyers’ dinner in the middle of the trial. It occurred to me that, since I ceased to be poor, I hadn’t had a garden of my own to sit in: that was a luxury (the thought might have pleased my mother) which I had enjoyed only in our bankrupt house.

In the moist air, the smells of the night stocks and roses were so dense that they seemed palpable. For, though Aunt Milly’s husband had been a conscientious gardener, Mr Sperry was a master: which, now I had watched him in action, didn’t surprise me. But I couldn’t remember seeing a garden of this size so rich. Phlox, lupins, delphiniums, pinks on the border, rambler roses on the wall: a syringa bush close to the bed of stocks. The scents hung all round me, like the scents of childhood.

From my chair, looking up at the house, I could see the French windows of my father’s room. They stood dark-faced, the curtains drawn since that morning. It was up the steps to those French windows that I had led Charles, over a year before. I should not go up that way again.

41: Another Funeral

SUNLIGHT shining on the lacquer, the empty hearse stood outside the church. Martin’s car, and the one that I had hired, were drawn up in line. We had arrived early, and had been waiting on the pavement, near the iron palings which guarded a yew tree and the 1908 red brick. Irene and her daughter were wearing black dresses, and Margaret was in grey: Martin, Pat, Charles and I had all put on black ties. The Sperrys, though, who had just walked slowly along the road from what used to be my father’s house, were in full mourning, or at least in clothes such as I remembered at funerals in this church, he in a black suit with an additional and almost indistinguishable armband, she in jet from her hat to her shoes. As they passed us, they said a few soft words.

One or two other people were approaching, perhaps members of his old choir, who had sent a wreath. The solitary cracked bell began to toll, and I took Margaret, our feet scuffling on the gravel (was that sensation familiar to Martin too?) towards the church door. The pitch pine. The smell of wax and hassocks. The varnished chairs. In my mother’s heyday, we used to stop at a row immediately behind the churchwardens’, which she had appropriated for her own. But we couldn’t now, since the church, small as it was, was full of empty space. There were the undertaker and his four bearers. The Sperrys. The seven of the family, walking up the aisle. Three others. I didn’t know, but it might have been about the size of the congregation on Sunday mornings nowadays. With the organ playing, we moved up to the second row: there, all of us except Margaret having been drilled in anglican customs, we pulled out the hassocks and went down on our knees. It was a long time since I had been to any kind of service, longer still to a church funeral. On its trestle behind the altar rails, the coffin rested, wreath-covered, brass-handled, short, unobtrusive.

While the organ went on playing, I glanced at the hymn board, record of last Sunday’s evensong, and began mechanically — as though the boyhood habit hadn’t been interrupted by a week, organ music booming on lulled but uncomprehending ears — juggling with the numbers in my head. Once that game had made the time go faster, helping on the benediction.

The vestry door had opened and shut: the vicar was standing in front of the altar. His voice was as strong as the Clerk of Assize’s at the trial, without effort filling the empty church.

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

At one time I knew those words by heart. I couldn’t have told whether I was listening now.

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord.

I couldn’t have told whether I was listening now. Even at Sheila’s funeral, my first wife’s, though I was ill with misery, I couldn’t concentrate, I was dissociated from the beautiful clerical voice — and yes, from the coffin resting there. Yet this time I half-heard, It is certain we can carry nothing out. Just for an instant, I had a thought about my father. I wondered if the same had come to Martin, whom I had told about his possessions. No one had had much less to carry out.

For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night.

In the morning it is green, and groweth up: but in the evening it is cut down, dried and withered.

For when thou art angry, all our days are gone: we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.

The days of our age are threescore years and ten: and though men be so strong, that they come to fourscore years: yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow, so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.

That was being said over my father in his late eighties. It must have been said also at the funeral of Eric Mawby, aged eight.

First Corinthians Fifteen. By this time I was scarcely trying to listen, or even to follow the words in my prayer book. At school I had studied Corinthians for an examination, and I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting to my father’s forebears, who had listened to that passage, there was no escaping it, generation after generation for hundreds of years.

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

Not my grandfather. That deep Victorian agnostic had never been inside a church after he left school at the age of ten. Yet — one couldn’t trust a child’s memory, I might be romanticising him, but I didn’t think so — he was pious as well as agnostic, he had a library of ninteenth-century religious controversy, and then decided, just as Martin might have done, that he didn’t believe where he couldn’t believe. He would have made a good nineteenth-century Russian. I was sure, and here I did trust my memory, that he was a clever man. He would have got on with his grandchildren and with Charles.

What advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

But his father and grandfather: they hadn’t had the education he had hacked out for himself. He believed, he told me when I was five and could read quite well, that that was more than they could do. So far as he knew, his grandfather could only make his mark. Yet, he insisted, they were strong, intelligent men. He was bitter about them, and the muteness from which they came. Small craftsmen one generation: then back to agricultural labourers (not peasants, for England had had no peasants for long enough), no history, no change, further back than the church registers went. There was none of the social moving, the ups-and-downs, that had happened on my mother’s side. The Eliot families must have gone to the funeral services in the village churches, and listened to this Pauline eloquence for at least a dozen generations. Some of that gene pool was in us. Gone stoically, most of them, I thought. As with us, phrases stuck in their memories. As with me as a child, the rabbinical argumentation washed over them.

Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is they sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin: and the strength of sin is the law.

How old was I, when I first became puzzled by that last gnomic phrase? We had all listened to it, the whole line of us, life after life, so many lives, lost and untraceable now.

The vicar led the way out of church; following him, the bearers’ shoulders were firm under the coffin. Margaret and I walked behind, then Martin and Irene, then the grandchildren. As the coffin was slid into the hearse, windows so clear that there might have been no glass there, the undertaker stood by, rubicund, content that all was in order, holding his top hat in a black gloved hand. “Easy on,” muttered one of the bearers at the last shove.

Slowly the little procession of cars drove down the side street into the main road. On the pavement people passed casually along, but one old man stopped in his walk and took off his hat. The parish church, being so new, had never had a graveyard: and in fact all the parish graveyards in the town had been full for years. My mother had been buried in the big municipal cemetery, and it was there, along the sunny bus route, cars rushing towards us and the suburbs, that we were driving. But my mother, as she had died young, had not arranged to reserve a grave beside her: and that was a matter to which my father would not have given a thought. So his coffin was carried to the opposite side of the great cemetery, new headstones glaring in the sun, flower vases twinkling, angels, crosses, such a profusion of the signs of death that it gave an extra anonymity to death itself: as in one of the wartime collective graves, where all that one took in was that the victims of a siege were buried here.

In a far corner, a neat rectangle had been marked out, and below the edge of turf, one could see the fresh brown earth. Wreaths away, coffin lowered (again one of the bearers muttered), and we stood round.

There were no prayer books to follow now. Rich voice in the hot evening.

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.

In the midst of life we are in death.

I had noticed which of the bearers was holding bits of earth in hand. At the end of the appeal he was waiting to hear suffer us not, at our last hours, for any pains of death, to fall from them. Promptly he stepped forward and, with a couple of flicks, threw down the earth upon the coffin.

Opposite to me, across the grave, Charles’ mouth suddenly tightened. He had not heard that final sound before.

For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother Herbert Edward here departed: we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life…the voice went on, it was soon all over, the collect and the blessing.

We were very near one entrance to the cemetery, and before long were standing there, shaking hands. Our voices, which had been so subdued as we waited for the bell to toll and on the road to the cemetery, suddenly became loud. I heard Martin’s, usually quiet, sound hearty as he thanked the vicar. I shook hands with the undertaker and the bearers, one of whom kept rubbing his hand on his trousers, as though he couldn’t get rid of the last particle of earth. Margaret was telling the Sperrys, once again, how grateful we were for their kindness.

Thanks given and regiven, we stood about, not knowing what to do. No one wanted to make a move. Pat’s face, more labile than any of ours, was suiting itself to sadness, just as it did to a party. Charles, tall by his cousin’s side, politely answered questions from Mr Sperry. The truth was, we were at a loss. I had made a mistake, or forgotten something. After funerals such as this, my mother and her friends had always departed to a meal, spending on it often much more than they could afford. Singular meals, so far as I remembered — ham, chicken (bought for this special occasion), blancmanges, jellies, cakes. Port wine. When I was Charles’ age, that seemed to me as naïve as it would to him. Yet maybe it was wise. It made an end. As we stood about at the cemetery gate, this was no sort of end.

Glancing round with bright, apprehensive eyes (the same treacle-brown eyes that one could see in her son and daughter), Irene said: “Well, perhaps we ought to be thinking of—” her voice trailed off.

Martin, once more over-hearty, was saying to the Sperrys: “Now are you all right for transport? Are you sure you’re all right? Or else I can get you home—” The vicar and the undertaker assured him that they had room for the Sperrys.

More thanks. At last that party moved towards the hearse, and we to our own cars. My niece said to me, through the hair which obscured half her face: “That’s over, isn’t it, Uncle Lewis?” She might have said it by way of comfort. Charles, who was walking with her, flashed me a hard and searching look, as though I had mismanaged things.

42: A Bit of News

WE were all staying at the hotel which Martin had used during the trial. There were too many of us to go to friends: and in fact, we shouldn’t have chosen to. Without a word passed between us, Martin and I hadn’t wanted to see a person we knew on this last family occasion in the town. Let it be as obscure as the old occasions. The local paper had printed a one-inch paragraph about our father’s death, and that was all.

As our party was walking past the reception desk towards the lifts, Martin hung behind.

“Get down before the rest, for a few minutes,” he said to me, very quietly.

“Where?”

“Oh, the old bar.”

It was the bar, aquarium-lit, in which he had spoken to me with pain and ruthlessness in the middle of the trial. I was down a little before him, and when he entered and we looked at each other, I hadn’t forgotten and knew that nor had he. This time the bar was emptier: it was later, the pre-dinner drinkers had sifted away. Just one single acquaintance called out to Martin: “You here again?” Here again, Martin, affably, impersonally, called back.

The alcove, where we had talked before, was vacant. We sat ourselves there, and I asked him what he would drink. No, he said, the drinks were on him. As he carried them to our table, I watched his face, set, controlled: yet somehow, as I had seen once or twice in his life, it was illuminated from within, like one of the turnip heads in which we used to place candles when we were boys.

“I have a bit of news,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Pat is going to get married.”

“Is he, by God?”

Then I asked, who to: but I thought I knew.

“Muriel. Roy Calvert’s Muriel.”

Martin was so happy that I had to be happy for him. I said, using our own cipher, well, Pat might have done worse.

“He might have done worse,” said Martin, all cautiousness gone. It would have seemed strange thirty years before, I said, to think of his son marrying Roy Calvert’s daughter. Actually (though I didn’t bring it back to mind) he and Roy had never been more than acquaintances. If Roy were alive now, he would have been fifty-three.

“It’s hard to imagine him like that, isn’t it?” said Martin.

“Anyway, you’re obviously glad.”

“I’m very glad.”

The engagement would be announced the following Monday, he said. He didn’t want any mention of it at dinner that night.

“Why ever not?”

He shook his head.

“Whatever could be more natural?” I meant, an old man dies, his grandson gets married: after all that we had said, and felt, in this alcove a few weeks before, we were back in the flow of things. It mightn’t be very grand: there was the splendid, of which we had seen a little, there was the hideous, of which we had seen enough: yet this was neither, it was what we lived in, in order to endure.

“I don’t think Irene would like it,” he said.

Well, I said, he knew his wife better than I did. But didn’t he remember her at the Christmas Eve party, shouting out birth, copulation, children, death, as though that was the biography of us all?

“At that party,” Martin broke in, “you knew what we were in for? About the trial?”

“I had an idea.”

“I only realised later that you must have done.”

He went back to talking of Irene.

“She’s more conventional than I am, you know.”

That sounded strange, after the life she had led. But he was certain. She wouldn’t consider it proper to celebrate an engagement on the day that we had buried our father.

“Also,” he added, “I don’t think she’s too happy about the marriage, anyway.”

In that case, I said, she was pretty hard to please. The girl was attractive: she was said to be clever, not surprising for Roy’s daughter: she had a small fortune of her own. They wouldn’t have to support Pat any further, presumably. Martin, with a brotherly grin, said he had thought of that.

“To be perfectly honest,” I said, “I’m surprised you didn’t get more obstruction from the other side.”

“The young woman,” said Martin, “made up her mind.”

He added: “But still, Irene doesn’t really like it.” He shrugged. “That doesn’t count. It’s going to happen soon.”

“When?”

“Very soon. In about a month.”

“What’s the hurry?”

Martin smiled. After a moment, he said, off-hand: “Oh, the good old-fashioned reason.” His smile spread, masculine, lubricous, paternal. He gazed across the table. “In any case, it’s time there was another generation.”

He explained, he explained with elaborate detail, that they had been planning to marry weeks before she became pregnant — they were already planning it when we sat in the Gearys’ garden and he warned me about Vicky (whose name had not been mentioned in our alcove that night), and some time before that. All the while Pat had been in some sort of conflict with his father, and still so intimate that Martin knew it all. Again, I thought, it takes two to make a possessive love. Pat might be one of the more undesirable sons, but he wanted his father. Whereas, if Martin had had Charles for a son, he would have been spared most of the suffering, and found that the son had slipped away.

That night in the Gearys’ garden, Martin had — in the midst of all that had gone wrong — been sustained by a kind of content. Talking to me in the alcove, the night after the funeral, he felt more than content, he felt sheer simple joy.

“It will be the making of him,” he repeated. No one could have thought Martin a simple man. What he had been saying to me, over the past weeks, wasn’t simple: it wasn’t comfortable, it didn’t leave him much, or me either. He meant it, he continued to believe it, it was what he had to say. Yet that night he was full of joy, because of one of the simplest of all things.