by P. D. James
It was to be the first of all the rejections that followed. She remembered the noises as the paramedics worked on him; his head turned from her as they bore him past covered in a red blanket; the sound of someone sobbing, someone who could have been herself; the emptiness of the office, empty, as it was in the morning when she arrived before him, or as it was at night when he left first, but now everlastingly, permanently empty of everything that had given it meaning. She had never seen him again. She had wanted to visit him in hospital and had asked Frances Peverell what time would be convenient, only to be told: ‘He’s still in intensive care. Only family and the partners are allowed to visit. I’m sorry, Blackie.’
The news had at first been reassuring. He was better, much better. They hoped he would soon be out of the intensive-care unit. And then, four days after the first, he had suffered a second, massive, heart attack and had died. At the cremation she had sat in the chapel three pews back, among other members of the staff. No one had consoled her; why should they? She wasn’t one of the officially bereaved, not one of the family. When, outside the chapel, inspecting the wreaths of the mourners, unable to help herself she had broken down, Claudia Etienne had looked briefly at her with a mixture of wonder and irritation, as if to say, ‘If his daughter and his friends can control themselves, why can’t you?’ The grief had been made to seem in bad taste, as presumptuous as was her wreath, ostentatious among the family’s simple cut flowers. She had remembered overhearing Gerard Etienne’s comment made to his sister. ‘God, Blackie’s overdone it. That wreath wouldn’t disgrace a New York Mafia funeral. What’s she trying to do, making everyone think she was his mistress?’
And next day, at a small private ceremony, the five partners had thrown his ashes into the Thames from the terrace of Innocent House. She hadn’t been asked to take part but Frances Peverell had come into her office and said: ‘You might like to join us on the terrace, Blackie. I think my father would have liked you to be there.’ She had stood well back, careful not to be in their way. They had stood a little distanced from each other, close to the edge of the terrace. The white ground bones which were all that remained of Henry Peverell were in a tin which looked to her curiously like a biscuit tin. They passed it from hand to hand, took out a fistful of the grains and dropped or flung them into the Thames. She remembered that it had been high tide with a fresh breeze blowing. The river, ochre-brown, had slapped against the jetty walls, sending out small droplets of spray. Frances Peverell’s hands had been damp; the fragments of bone had stuck to them and afterwards she had wiped her hands surreptitiously against her skirt. She had been perfectly calm as she had spoken by heart the words from Cymbeline, beginning:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.
It seemed to Blackie that they had forgotten to decide on the order of speaking and there was a short silence before James de Witt moved closer to the edge of the terrace and spoke words from the Apocrypha. ‘The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and there shall no torment touch them.’ Afterwards he had let his portion of ashes trickle from his hands as if counting every separate grain.
Gabriel Dauntsey had read a poem by Wilfred Owen which was unfamiliar to her, but afterwards she had looked it up and had wondered a little at his choice.
I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.
Along the wharves by the water-house,
And through the cavernous slaughter-house,
I am the shadow that walks there.
Yet I have flesh both firm and cool,
And eyes tumultuous as the gems
Of moons and lamps in the full Thames
When dusk sails wavering down the Pool.
Claudia Etienne had been the briefest, with just two lines:
The worst that can befall us, measured right,
Is a long slumber and a long goodnight.
She had spoken them loudly but rather fast with a fierce intensity which gave the impression that she disapproved of the whole charade. After her had come Jean-Philippe Etienne. He hadn’t been seen at Innocent House since his retirement a year earlier and had been driven up from his remote house on the Essex coast by his chauffeur, arriving just before the ceremony was due to begin and leaving immediately afterwards without sharing the buffet lunch prepared in the boardroom. But his passage had been the longest and he had read it in a flat voice, holding on to one of the finials of the railings for support. De Witt had told her afterwards that it was from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius but at the time only a brief passage impressed itself on Blackie’s mind:
In a word all the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapour; and life is a warfare and a pilgrim’s sojourn, and fame after death is only forgetfulness.
Gerard Etienne had been last. He had flung the ground bones from him as if shaking off all the past, and had spoken words from Ecclesiastes:
For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope; for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.
Afterwards they had turned away silently and gone up to the boardroom to their cold luncheon and wine. And at two o’clock precisely Gerard Etienne had walked without speaking through Blackie’s room to the office beyond and had seated himself for the first time in Henry Peverell’s chair. The lion was dead and the living dog had taken over.
7
After Sonia Clements’ cremation James de Witt declined the invitation of Frances to join her and Gabriel in their taxi, saying instead that he felt in need of a walk and would take the tube from Golders Green Station. The walk from the crematorium was longer than he had expected, but he was glad to be alone. The rest of the Peverell Press staff had been driven home in the undertaker’s cars and he couldn’t decide which would have been worse, to contemplate Frances’s taut, unhappy face with no hope of comforting her or to be crushed in an over-full, ostentatious car with a gaggle of junior staff who had preferred a funeral to an afternoon’s work and whose tongues, released after the spurious solemnity of the funeral, would have been inhibited by his presence. Even the temp, Mandy Price, had been there. But that was reasonable enough; after all, she had been present at the finding of the body.
The cremation had been a grim affair and for that he blamed himself. He always did blame himself, and sometimes reflected that to have so lively a sense of sin without the religion which could assuage it by absolution was an uncomfortable idiosyncrasy. Miss Clements’ sister, the nun, had been at the funeral, appearing as if by magic at the last moment to take her seat at the back, and disappearing again with equal speed at the end, pausing only to shake hands with those of the Peverell Press staff who pressed forward to mutter their condolences. She had previously written to Claudia requesting the firm to make all the funeral arrangements and they should have done better. He should have taken more interest instead of leaving it all to Claudia, which in effect had meant leaving it to Claudia’s secretary.
There should, he thought, be a service designed for those without a religion. Probably there was and they could have discovered it if they had taken the trouble. It might be an interesting, and possibly even lucrative, publishing venture, a book of alternative funeral rites for humanists, atheists and agnostics, a formal ceremony of remembrance, a celebration of the human spirit with no reference to its possible continuing existence. Striding to the station, his long coat flapping open, he amused himself selecting passages of prose and verse which might be included. De la Mare’s ‘Look thy last on all things lovely’, for a touch of nostalgic melancholy. Perhaps Oliver Gogarty’s ‘Non Dolet’, Keats’s ‘Ode to Autum
n’ if the dead person were old, and Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ if he were young. Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’ for the nature worshipper. There could be songs instead of hymns and the slow movement from Beethoven’s ‘Emperor Concerto’ would be an appropriate funeral march. And there was, of course, always the third chapter of Ecclesiastes:
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up.
He could have concocted something suitable for Sonia, perhaps including extracts from books she had commissioned and edited, a commemoration of twenty-four years of service to the firm which the living Sonia would have thought appropriate. It was odd, he thought, how important were these rites of passage, designed surely to comfort and minister to the needs of the living since they could never touch the dead.
He stopped to buy two cartons of semi-skimmed milk and a container of washing-up liquid at the supermarket at Notting Hill Gate before letting himself quietly into the house. It was apparent that Rupert had company, the sound of voices and of music came clearly down the stairs. He had hoped that Rupert would have been alone and wondered, as he so often did, that a man so ill could stand so much noise. But it was, after all, cheerful noise and Rupert stood it only for a limited period. It was he, James, who coped afterwards with the inevitable reaction. Suddenly he felt that he couldn’t face any of them. Instead he went into the kitchen and, without taking off his coat, made himself a mug of tea then opened the back door and carried it out with him into the quietness and darkness of the garden and sat down on the wooden bench by the back door. It was a warm evening for late September and, sitting there as the darkness deepened, distanced from the racket and bright lights of Notting Hill Gate by no more than eighty yards, it seemed to him that this small garden held suspended in its quiet air all the remembered sweetness of summer and the loamy richness of autumn.
For ten years, ever since his godmother had left it to him, the house had been a source of unfailing pleasure and contentment. He hadn’t expected to enjoy such a keen or self-indulgent satisfaction in ownership, having deceived himself since boyhood with the conviction that, except for his pictures, material possessions were unimportant to him. He knew now that one possession, and that the most solid and permanent, had become central to his life. He liked its unassuming Regency façade, the shuttered windows, the double drawing-room on the first floor looking out over the street at the front and with a conservatory built out at the back, giving a view of his own small garden and those of his neighbours. He liked the eighteenth-century furniture which his godmother had brought with her to the house when comparative poverty had driven her to this then humble street, not yet gentrified, still a little shabby. She had left him everything but her pictures, and here their tastes differed and he didn’t repine. The drawing-room was fitted with bookshelves four feet high on every wall, and above them he had hung his own prints and watercolours. The house still retained an air of discriminating femininity but he had no wish to impose upon it a more masculine taste. He came back to it each evening, into the small but elegant hall with its faded wallpaper and its gently curved staircase, with a sense of entering a private, secure and wholly pleasing world. But that was before he took in Rupert.
Rupert Farlow had published his first novel with the Peverell Press fifteen years previously and James could still remember the mixture of excitement and awe with which he had read the manuscript, submitted not through an agent, but to the Press direct, badly typed on unsuitable paper and accompanied by no explanatory letter but merely with Rupert’s name and address, as if he challenged the as yet unknown reader to recognize its quality. His second novel, two years later, had been less generously received, as second novels often are after a spectacular initial success, but James hadn’t been disappointed. Here, confirmed, was a major talent. And then silence. Rupert was no longer seen in London and letters and telephone calls went unanswered. It was rumoured that he was in North Africa, California, India. And then, briefly, he had reappeared but he had brought no new work with him. There had never been another novel and now there never would be. It was Frances Peverell who mentioned to James that she had heard that Rupert was dying of AIDS and was in a west London hospice. She didn’t visit but James did, and continued to visit. Rupert was in remission but the hospice staff were in difficulty about what to do with him. His flat was unsuitable, his landlord unsympathetic, he hated the camaraderie of the hospice. These things emerged without complaint. Rupert never complained except about the trivia of life. He seemed to regard his illness not as a cruel and unjust affliction but as an end ordained and inescapable, to be endured not resented. Rupert was dying with courage and grace, but he was still the old Rupert, malicious or mischievous, tricky or temperamental, as you chose to describe him. Tentatively, afraid that the offer might be resented or misunderstood, James had suggested that Rupert should join him in Hillgate Village. The offer had been accepted and four months earlier Rupert had moved in.
Peace, the old order, the old security, had all vanished. Rupert found difficulty in managing stairs so James had installed a bed for him in the drawing-room and he spent most of the day there or in the conservatory when it was sunny. There was a lavatory and shower on the first floor and a room little bigger than a cupboard which James had made into a kitchen fitted with an electric kettle and a double burner where he could make coffee or toasted sandwiches. The first floor had become, in effect, a small self-contained flat which Rupert had taken over and on which he had imposed his untidy, iconoclastic, mischievous personality. Ironically the house had become less peaceful now that it was home to a dying man. There was a constant stream of callers, Rupert’s present and old buddies, his reflexologist, the masseuse who left behind her a smell of exotic oils, Father Michael who came, so Rupert said, to hear his confession but whose ministrations seemed to be regarded by him with the same amused indulgence with which he accepted those concerned with his bodily needs. The friends were seldom there when James was home, except at weekends, although the evidence of their visits met him every evening; flowers, magazines, fruit, bottles of sweet-smelling oils. They gossiped, made coffee, were given drinks. Once he said to Rupert, ‘Does Father Michael enjoy his wine?’
‘He certainly knows which bottles to bring up.’
‘That’s all right then.’
James didn’t grudge Father Michael his claret as long as the man knew what he was drinking.
He had provided Rupert with a brass hand-bell, strident as a school bell, which he had found in the Portobello Market, so that Rupert could summon him from his bedroom above if he needed help in the night. He now slept badly, half expecting to hear that clamorous summons, imagining, half-awake, the rumble of death-carts in plague-ridden London, the wailing call, ‘Bring out your dead.’
He could remember every word of that conversation two months ago, Rupert’s watchful ironic eyes, his smiling face daring him to disbelieve.
‘I’m just telling you the facts. Gerard Etienne knew that Eric had AIDS, and he made sure that we met each other. I’m not complaining, far from it. I had some choice in the matter. Gerard didn’t actually tuck us up in bed together.’
‘It’s a pity you didn’t exercise it, the choice.’
‘But I did. I don’t pretend that I gave it much thought. You never knew Eric, did you? He was beautiful. Very few people are. Attractive, handsome, sexy, good-looking, all the usual adjectives, but not beautiful. But Eric was. I’ve always found beauty irresistible.’
‘And that’s all you required in a lover, physical beauty?’
Rupert had mimicked him, eyes and voice gently mocking.
‘And that’s all you required in a lover? My dear James, what sort of world do you live in, what sort of person are you? No, that wasn’t all I required.
Required. Past tense, I notice. It would have been a bit more sensitive to watch your grammar. No it wasn’t all. I wanted someone who fancied me too and had certain skills in bed. I didn’t ask Eric whether he preferred jazz to chamber music, or opera to ballet, or, more important, what wine he preferred. I’m talking about desire, I’m talking about love. Christ, it’s like explaining Mozart to the tone-deaf. Look, let’s leave it at this: Gerard Etienne deliberately threw us together. At the time he knew that Eric had AIDS. He might have hoped we’d become lovers, he might have intended us to become lovers, he might not have cared a damn either way. Perhaps he was amusing himself. I don’t know what he had in mind. I don’t much care. I know what I had in mind.’
‘And Eric, knowing he had an infectious disease, didn’t tell you? What in God’s name was he thinking of?’
‘Well, not at first. He told me later. I’m not blaming him, and if I don’t you can keep your moral judgements. And I don’t know what he was thinking of. I don’t pry into my friends’ minds. Perhaps he wanted a companion for the last mile or so before he set off to explore that long silence.’ He had added: ‘Don’t you forgive your friends?’
‘Forgiveness is hardly a word to use between friends. But then, none of my friends has infected me with a fatal disease.’
‘But my dear James, you don’t exactly give them the chance, do you?’