by Pat Barker
Walking into church behind the coffin, shuffling slowly along, he’s aware of faces. No more than three rows full in the front of the church, but then, leaving a respectful gap between themselves and the family, come the packed rows of neighbours, and friends from the British Legion: the seventy- and eighty-year-olds for whom he’d been a kind of mascot, presiding, ramrod straight, over their increasingly stooped and bowed gatherings.
I know that my redeemer liveth and that he shall stand in the last day upon the earth.
Following the coffin down the aisle, Nick wonders whether Geordie had believed anything so grand. Somehow the subject of religion never came up. He’d not been able to answer any of the Vicar’s questions about Geordie’s beliefs. They file into the pew. Nick’s relieved when the intoning of these certainties is over, and the hymn begins. In the choice of hymns they’d been on firmer ground. Geordie was a great singer of hymns in the bath, and the more sonorous and resounding they were the better.
Oh God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
He’d have approved of that. As does the congregation, whose, for the most part, frail and quavery voices are buoyed up by the familiar tune.
Beneath the shadow of Thy Throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine Arm alone,
And our defence is sure.
Among the memorial tablets lining the north wall is one belonging to a man who’d have gone bankrupt if his contemporaries had believed the last verse. Nick’s surprised to see the name Fanshawe, until he reflects that while they lived at Lob’s Hill this would have been their parish church, just as now it’s his.
Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
An odd thought for a funeral, when everybody’s promising to remember for ever, but then again he hears Geordie say: ‘I am in hell.’ Present tense, the tense in which his memories of the war went on happening. A recognized symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, a term Geordie probably never knew. Though he knew the symptoms well enough, he knew what it did to the perception of time. The present – remote, unreal; the past, in memory, nightmare, hallucination, re-enactment, becoming the present. I am in hell.
But suddenly, as the congregation thunders out the final verse, Nick begins to feel angry on Geordie’s behalf. It’s too easy to dismiss somebody else’s lived experience as a symptom of this, that, or the other pathology: to label it, disinfect it, store it away neatly in slim buff files and prevent it making dangerous contact with the experience of normal people. But suppose, Nick wants to shout at rows of faceless white-coats, suppose you’re wrong and he was right. Suppose time can slow down. Suppose it’s not an ever rolling stream, but something altogether more viscous and unpredictable, like blood. Suppose it coagulates around terrible events, clots over them, stops the flow. Suppose Geordie experienced time differently, because, for him, time was different? It’s nonsense, of course. And just as well, because if true, it would be a far more terrible truth than anything the passage of time can deliver. Recovery, rehabilitation, regeneration, redemption, resurrection, remembrance itself, all meaningless, because they all depend on that constantly flowing stream. But then Geordie’s truth had been terrible. Ultimately, for him, all those big words had meant nothing. Neither speech nor silence had saved him. I am in hell.
… And our eternal home. Amen. With a rustling of thin paper, an epidemic of emphysemic coughs, the congregation sits down, and listens to the Vicar doing his creditable best to speak poignantly and justly about a man he had never known.
Afterwards Helen reads the beatitudes, and then they follow the coffin out into the churchyard, and stand around the open grave, the hot sun beating down on to the backs of their necks. Nick’s funeral suit is made of winter-weight wool. Within a few minutes he’s feeling queasy and wishing the Vicar would hurry up. Miranda’s wearing a short black dress. Fran’s outrageously bright in raspberry pink, but what can she do? She has no black maternity wear, and it’s too close to the birth to buy a new dress. Gareth looks bored, though he wanted to come, apparently. Frieda, perfectly turned out, black from head to toe, looks satisfied and anxious, which means it’s gone all right so far, but there’s still the tea to come.
The grave’s lined with plastic grass, and he’s sorry for that. When the time comes he picks up a handful of earth and throws it on to the coffin lid. He sees Geordie’s face lifted up as the clods of earth land a few inches from his nose. Don’t say it, Nick pleads. Silence. Perhaps he’s appeased at last, or merely waiting some more opportune time.
Then it’s over. They can go home.
Frieda says, ‘It’s just as well we got that extra joint,’ and so it is, for once the first hush and nervousness are over, they’re a hungry as well as a noisy crowd. Miranda goes among them with a tray of drinks and soon port-wine complexions are turning an even richer hue, and the papery skins of old ladies are developing a hectic flush on a couple of glasses of sweet sherry.
Nick talks to some cousins he hasn’t seen for years and will probably not see again until Auntie Frieda goes, though Geoffrey, by the looks of him, might go before her. Geoffrey is Harry’s son, a frail old man, leaning on a stick. Looking at him, Nick sees a small boy emerging from the Scout Hut, his tummy stretched to bursting point with jelly and custard, boasting to his pal about how much he’s had to eat. ‘I’d rather have me dad.’ And little Geoffrey’s face falling, as, for the first time, he connected the treats with his missing father. ‘Never knew my father,’ he says to Nick, accepting a glass of beer instead of the wine that disagrees with his stomach. ‘So Uncle Geordie was always a bit of a hero to me.’
In the womb when Harry was killed. There must be hundreds, thousands, probably, like him, Nick thinks, white-haired sons and daughters of murdered children.
He stands and looks around, proud of his family, proud even of Gareth, who’s handing round miniature sausage rolls and politely answering questions from people who don’t know where he fits in.
But the heat of the room and the thick suit’s making Nick feel sick. He doesn’t feel he can remove his jacket, but surely now he’s entitled to slip out for a quick cigarette. The buzz of voices dies abruptly as he steps out of the french windows. Groping in his pocket for cigarettes and lighter, he goes round the side of the house where he’s least likely to be disturbed. Decaying cabbages, with their flabby, mysteriously runed stalks and thick yellow smell, line the path. He hears footsteps coming round the corner of the house, and braces himself for more condolences, but it’s only Miranda.
‘I’ve brought you this’ – handing him a glass of beer so cold the glass is sweating. ‘You looked boiled, Dad.’
‘I feel it.’ He doesn’t know what she looks like. In the past few days the long hair and skirts have gone. Instead, there’s a short, rather jagged hairstyle and what used to be called, in his younger days, a pussy pelmet. Eighteen, that’s what she looks like. ‘I’ll be glad when this is over.’
They sit together in silence for a while. Then: ‘I’m going home tomorrow,’ she says.
Home. It hurts. ‘You will ring me and let me know if there’s anything I can do?’
She smiles, irony just perceptible in the depths of her eyes, like the glint of a fish turning. He knows, she knows, there’s nothing he can do.
Upstairs, Gareth, who’s eaten a sausage roll, is flossing his teeth. As his fingers see-saw the thread between the difficult back teeth, he keeps his gaze fixed on his eyes in the glass. Hanging on a nail beside the toothbrushes, there’s Nick’s grandfather’s mirror, the one he used to use for shaving, though it’s made of steel, and makes your face look swollen and blurred. Last night, Nick was telling Gran about seeing Geordie’s body taken out in a body bag, and how horrible it was. When G
areth’s grandad died, he was sent upstairs out of the way, he wasn’t supposed to see anything, but he did. He looked out of the spare room window and saw them humping this black plastic sack, and Nick’s right, it was horrible. Gareth spits, and swirls away the pinky splat. Then he replaces his toothbrush, and reaches for Nick’s, intending to do the usual brisk rub round the lavatory bowl. Only he feels he can’t do that now. He looks at the toothbrush in his hand and returns it to the rack.
Downstairs, the chattering rises to a climax before at last the first few people begin to say goodbye. By responding very loudly, Frieda manages to indicate to everybody that it’s time they were off.
Nick follows Geoffrey out to his car, then copes with the rush of people who are suddenly leaving, wondering, as he shakes hands and thanks them for coming, whether all the funerals they attend are as cheerful as this. Probably not. Geordie’s death has convinced these seventy- and eighty-year-olds that there’s life in the old dog yet. He’d been twenty years older than any of them, and so the pretence of grief was rapidly abandoned. This wasn’t mourning for somebody who’d died so much as a celebration of somebody who’d gone on cheating death for years. He turns, hand outstretched, and it’s Helen. Kissing her, he’s aware of the scent of Antaeus, fading. Not on his chin either – somehow he doubts if he’ll ever finish the bottle. He watches her walk away, sifts through his mind for a trace of guilt or regret, finds none. At last, his arm around Fran’s shoulders, he can stand in the doorway and wave the last of them goodbye.
Frieda’s playing with Jasper in the kitchen. They’ve become good friends in a short time, these two, and it’s just as well since she and Fran have arranged for her to move in at the time of the birth. Life’s sorting out, settling down, arranging itself into new patterns. Even Gareth seems happier, amazed to find that at his new school in York computers are on the timetable, in every classroom, one for each pupil.
But for Nick, among all the green shoots, there’s still the ache of loss. And so, when the dishwasher’s been loaded, the paper plates thrown away, leftovers wrapped in clingfilm and stored in the freezer, he says, if nobody minds, he thinks he’d like to go back to the church. He’s afraid Miranda might want to come with him, or Frieda, but Miranda’s got packing to do, and Frieda says she’s going to put her feet up and thinks Fran should do the same.
It’s not dark, or anywhere near dark, when he gets to the churchyard, but the sun’s moved round behind the church, and its shadow lies, thick and black, over the graveyard. Going straight to the grave, he’s surprised to find it already filled in, and wreaths piled on top to hide the raw earth. Damp moss, wrapped round the stalks of one bouquet, has dribbled wet through the cellophane of the dedication card, blurring the words: ‘In loving memory.’
Nick stands and looks down, then moves along to the grave, a few feet further on, where Grandad’s parents are buried, deriving some consolation from his family’s long attachment to this place. He finds himself looking for Harry’s name, and then remembers.
Restless, searching for some discharge of feeling, and not finding it, he goes into the church. He walks up to the altar steps, footsteps echoing across the marble floor, smelling dust, old hassocks, the odour of piety, but unable to feel anything except a kind of nostalgia for the certainties of faith, and even that’s false, for he never came any closer to faith than forced attendance at school assemblies, and those marred by an arrogant childish contempt for his father’s hypocrisy.
He goes to find the Fanshawe memorial.
In loving memory of Robert Fanshawe
Born October 11th 1893
Killed in action, July 1st 1916
Also of James Fanshawe
Born August 15th 1902
Died November 4th 1904
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied
A bitter epitaph, though there’s nothing surprising about that. Fanshawe had lost two sons, why wouldn’t he be bitter? What’s strange is the determined linking of the two deaths, the conviction of guilt for both. Unless, of course, he’s reading too much into it, and Fanshawe merely intended to endorse Rudyard Kipling’s call for more and better arms.
Six weeks since they’d uncovered the picture. Six weeks since Miranda stepped back and said, in that soft murmur that had raised the hairs on the nape of his neck, ‘It’s us.’ Not true, he thinks, even as the covered-up figures rise once again to the surface of his mind. He doesn’t regret not telling the family about the Fanshawe murder, because even now he doesn’t see how the knowledge would have helped them. It’s easy to let oneself be dazzled by false analogies – the past never threatens anything as simple, or as avoidable, as repetition.
On his way out, by the west door, he finds the Fanshawe graves, and pauses to decipher the eroded names. William, Isobel, Muriel, James. He finds himself searching for Robert, but then remembers that Robert, like Harry, isn’t here.
He wanders off down the path that leads round the outer perimeter of the churchyard, taking the long route back to Geordie. Some of the graves, here under the trees, are so old the names are hidden by moss. They’re forgotten, and the people who stood beside their graves and mourned for them are dead and forgotten in their turn. He remembers the trip to France with Geordie, the rows upon rows upon rows of white headstones, ageless graves for those who were never permitted to grow old. He’d walked round them with Geordie, marvelling at the carefully tended grass, the devotion that kept the graves young. But now, looking round this churchyard, at the gently decaying stones that line the path, he sees that there’s wisdom too in this: to let the innocent and the guilty, the murderers and the victims, lie together beneath their half-erased names, side by side, under the obliterating grass.