Wearing Purple

Chapter 34

As I expected, the ‘call waiting’ signal which had bleeped while I was talking to Prim had been triggered by Mike Dylan. Over the next few days, and weeks, I found out what a good friend that loud-suited, loose-mouthed imitation of a detective could really be.

He picked me up next morning and took me straight to the Divisional police office in Baird Street, to meet the officers who were preparing the report on Jan’s death for submission to the Procurator Fiscal. He sat with me as I gave them a brief formal statement confirming that Jan had been in good health when I left for Spain, that we had lived in the flat for a few months and that we had never noticed any problems with the washing machine or with any other electrical appliance. They asked me for the address of the previous owner, which I couldn’t give them, so instead I pointed them in the direction of the selling solicitor.

Next Mike drove me to the Fiscal’s Office, where he had a pal, a guy he had known in Edinburgh who had been posted to Glasgow, like him. The file on Jan’s death was still empty of everything but the medical examiner’s report and a copy of the death certificate. Since both said clearly and unequivocally that death had been caused by cardiac arrest due to electric shock, Mike’s friend agreed that a post mortem examination would not be necessary and wrote a note instructing the mortuary that Jan’s body could be released to the next-of-kin.

Finally, he drove me to the District Registrar’s Office, and helped me through the unimaginably painful experience of registering my wife’s death. ‘Age?’ the assistant registrar asked. ‘Thirty,’ I said. In all my worst nightmares, in the most pessimistic of moments, not that I had many of either, I could never have dreamed up that scene.

And that was it. All of the death-related business which I had to do in Glasgow, was transacted in two hours. I packed a case, tidied up the flat and cleaned the bathroom and the kitchen; something Jan would have done, but not necessarily Oz. I was about to leave, when the phone rang. I thought that it would be my dad, but it wasn’t. It was Greg McPhillips; Everett had called to tell him what had happened, but somehow he needed to hear it from me before it could become reality. The poor sod was so distressed that I wound up comforting him. I thought this was strange at the time, but I was to find out over the next few days that it was par for the course.

I told Greg that I would be in touch with him after the funeral, said goodbye, and hung up. I was actually turning the door handle when the phone rang again. It wasn’t my dad this time either; instead it was a pushy, boyish-sounding reporter from a news agency, on the trail of a scoop. I confirmed that my wife had died in a domestic accident and told him that I had nothing more to say.

He wasn’t the sort to be put off that easily. ‘I understand from the police that Mrs Blackstone was electrocuted by a washing machine,’ he wheedled.

‘Yes that’s correct,’ I agreed.

‘What make was it?’ he went on, hungrily. ‘This could be a story for Watchdog.’

Suddenly I understood why Everett Davis was paranoid about the media. This bastard was excited by my wife’s death; he saw profit in it. Before my rage could overwhelm me, I hung up the phone and walked out of the door.

I dreaded the thought of returning to Anstruther: I dreaded the thought of confronting Mary’s grief; I dreaded the thought of trying to explain death to Jonathan, my nine-year-old nephew; I dreaded the conversations with the undertaker and the Minister; and I dreaded most of all the prospect of being chief mourner, the man in black in the front pew at an obscenely premature funeral. I dreaded them all, but I did them nonetheless.

I saw Mary and, with my dad, tried to show her — and numb-struck Ellie too, to whom Jan had been as a sister — that all we could do was to be good to each other, in her memory.

I took Jonathan to St Andrews, bought him an ice-cream from Janetta’s, then walked him through the ruined cathedral and into the cemetery, where I tried to explain to him that each of the headstones there told the story of a life which had come to an end, as had that of his Auntie Jan, and that while this was sad, it was also natural and inevitable, and had to be seen as a passage to something else. He looked at me with his old eyes, ‘Is there a Jesus, Uncle Oz?’ he asked.

‘It’s as good a name as any, my man,’ I told him, and we left it at that. There was nothing I could have said to wee Colin that he would have understood, so I left the comforting of him to his mother.

Jan’s funeral took place on the Friday following her death, in the Parish Church. The service was conducted by the Minister who had married us a few months before. Every pew was packed as our small family group filed in: me, in the lead, my dad and Mary next, Ellie and Allan Sinclair, her estranged husband, who had flown in from France the night before, and finally, Jan’s father and his second wife.

Believe me, in these circumstances, one does not scan the congregation for faces; but some things you can’t miss. I was immensely gratified to see on the left of the church towards the rear an enormous black figure, and frankly astonished when, a few rows further forward, the light glinted on a heavy, ornate gold chain, around the neck of a thick-set man.

The service was conventional, but rather than have Bible readings, my dad and I had decided that we would each read a poem. He chose ‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti. My selection was Jan’s favourite; a much more obscure work, in which a woman contemplates the future by declaring that when she grows old, she will rebel in her way, by wearing purple.

It’s about growing old together disgracefully, a prospect which had been far in the distance for Jan and me, yet which had been denied to her, and to us, by that bloody washing machine. Tears were blinding me by the time I reached the end, but I knew it by heart anyway. ‘Of course,’ I told the packed congregation after I had finished, ‘we all of us know that Jan had the courage to wear purple all her life.’

The morning rain had cleared when we buried her — dressed in her finest and wearing her wedding ring and a gold necklet I had bought her — in the cemetery nearby, in the lair next to my mother, west-facing so that every night the sun would go down on them both. We lowered her into the ground, me at her head, my dad at her feet, and six others. I have difficulty now in picturing the scene, but with an effort I can recall that Allan Sinclair, Greg McPhillips, my pal Ali the demon grocer, Mike Dylan, Johnny Wilson, our best childhood friend, and the mountainous Everett Davis all helped us in our task.

As the Minister spoke the words of the ritual, I took the red rose from my button-hole and dropped it into the grave. As I did, the rain began to fall again, lightly, onto the coffin and the brass plate with its inscription, ‘Janet Blackstone’.