The Lady in the Van

by Alan Bennett

  Unpleasant and arrogant though Carl had been, and with a manner seemingly designed to put people’s backs up, there were many in the congregation who felt that he was right. They longed passionately to believe in this Peruvian caterpillar and its death-dealing bite. South America was a dangerous place, everyone knew that; there were the pampas, gauchos and regular revolutions. The Maya had perished, so why not Clive? But what Carl had said made sense. Of course it was AIDS. No one could screw as much as he had done and go unpunished. So the sentence that had been all too briefly remitted was now reimposed and hopes momentarily raised were dashed once more. But to have been given a vision of peace of mind and then to see it snatched away made the burden even harder to bear.

  One couple held each other’s hands in mute misery. Which had slept with Clive—or both? What did it matter? Never had they been so close.

  Still, the couples who had shared Clive’s favours were better placed than husbands or wives who had known him singly. ‘What does it signify anyway,’ said a fierce-eyebrowed judge, who knew Clive only as someone who occasionally unfroze his shoulder. ‘He’s dead, that’s the essence of it.’ His wife, who was keeping very quiet, shifted in her seat slightly as she was suffering from thrush, or that was what she hoped.

  Symptoms were back generally. A pitiless quiz-show host found herself with a dry mouth. The suffragan bishop knew he had a rash. A stand-up comedian had a cold sore that didn’t seem to clear up and which was masked by make-up. Now it had suddenly begun to itch. He had a powder compact but dared not consult it. Those who were famous, though, knew better than to turn a hair. Their anxiety must be kept private and unshown for they were always under scrutiny. They must wait to share their worries discreetly with friends or, if with the general public, at a decent price from the newspapers concerned.

  Husbands who thought their wives didn’t know, put a face on it (though their wives did know very often). Wives who thought their husbands didn’t know (which they generally didn’t) masked their distraction in a show of concern for others, one, for instance, patting the shoulder of a man in front who, without looking, took the hand and held it to his cheek.

  The congregation had been given a glimpse of peace; the itch had gone, the cough had stilled, the linen was unsoiled; the pores had closed, the pus dried up and the stream ran clear and cool. But that was what it had been, a glimpse only. Now there was to be no healing. There was only faith.

  How to put this into prayer. Father Jolliffe clasped his hands and tried once more. ‘Shall we pray?’

  They settled and waited as he sought for the words.

  ‘May I speak?’

  Baulked for a second unbelievable time on the brink of intercession, Father Jolliffe nearly said ‘No’ (which is what the Archdeacon would have said, who has long since written down: ‘Hopeless. Lacks grip.’ And now inserts ‘totally’).

  Father Jolliffe searches the congregation to see who it is who has spoken and sees, standing at the back, a tall, distinguished-looking man. ‘I am a doctor,’ he says.

  This is unsurprising because it is just what he looks like. He is dry, kindly-faced and yet another one who doesn’t speak up. ‘I am a doctor,’ he repeats. ‘Mr Dunlop’s doctor, in fact. While his medical history must, of course, be confidential’—‘Must be what?’ somebody says. ‘Controversial,’ says someone else—‘I think I am not breaking any rules when I say that Mr Dunlop was a most … ah … responsible patient and came to me over a period of years for regular blood tests.’

  ‘Regular blood tests’ goes round the pews.

  ‘These were generally a propos HIV, the last one only a week before his departure for South America. It was negative. What this fever was that he died of I’m in no position to say, but contrary to the assertions made by the gentleman who spoke earlier’—he meant Carl—‘it seems to me most unlikely, in fact virtually impossible, that it was HIV-related. Still,’ he smiled sadly, ‘the fact remains that Clive is dead and I can only offer my condolences to his grieving friends and to his aunt. Whatever it was her nephew died of, her grief must be unchanged.’

  Miss Wishart is nudged by her neighbour and when the doctor is pointed out to her, smiles happily and gives him a little wave. She seldom got such a good ride as this.

  As the doctor sat down there was a ripple of applause and as the news filtered to the acoustically disadvantaged areas of the church it grew and grew. People at the front stood up and began applauding louder and those further back followed suit until the whole church was on its feet clapping.

  ‘Good old Clive!’ someone shouted.

  ‘Trust Clive,’ said someone else and there was even some of that overhead clapping and wild whoops that nowadays characterises audiences in a TV studio or at a fashionable first night.

  Seldom even at a wedding had the vicar seen so many happy faces, some openly laughing, some weeping even and many of them embracing one another as they were called on to do in the Communion Service, but never with a fervour or a fellow-feeling so unembarrassed as this. It was, thought Father Jolliffe, just as it should be.

  Still, it was hard to say what it was they were applauding: Clive for having died of the right thing (or not having died of the wrong one) and for having been so sensible about his blood tests; the young student for having brought home the news; or the urbane-looking doctor for having confirmed it. Father Jolliffe was glad to see that God came in for some of the credit and mindful of the setting one woman sank to her knees in prayer, and both genders got onto their mobiles to relay the news to partners and friends whose concern for themselves (and for Clive, of course) was as keen as those present in the congregation.

  Some wept and, seeing the tears, wondering partners took them as tears for Clive. But funeral tears seldom flow for anyone other than the person crying them and so it was here. They cried for Clive, it is true, but they cried for themselves without Clive, particularly now that his clean and uncomplicated death meant that he had thankfully left them with nothing to remember him by.

  Amid the general rejoicing even Carl looked a little more cheerful, though it was hard for him to be altogether wholehearted, the dead man just having been dropped from a club of which Carl was still a life member and from which he stood no chance of exclusion. There were one or two others in the same boat and knew it, but they clapped too, and tried to rejoice.

  Though his companion the novelist was gratefully weeping, the publisher’s thanksgiving was less wholehearted. AIDS never did sales any harm and gave a tragic momentum even to the silliest of lives, whereas it was hard not to think that there was only bathos in a death that resulted from being bitten by a caterpillar. Still, the geology student seemed naive and possibly suggestible, so Clive’s death could be made—and moralistically speaking ought to be made—more ambiguous than it really was. Nobody liked someone who had had as much sex as Clive to get off scot free and that included the idle reader. No, there was a book here even so; the absurd death was just a hiccup and smiling too, the publisher joined in the clapping.

  But clapping whom? Father Jolliffe decided it might as well be God and raising his voice above the tumult he said: ‘Now [and for the third time of asking], shall we pray?’ This even got a laugh and there was a last whoop before the congregation settled down. ‘Let us in the silence remember our friend Clive, who is dead but is alive again.’

  This, however hallowed, was not just a phrase. Clive’s imagined death had been baneful and fraught with far-reaching implications so that, devoid of these, his real (and more salubrious) demise did seem almost a resurrection. And in that cumbrous silence, laden with prayers unmouthed, loosed from anxiety and recrimination many do now try and remember him, some frowning as they pray with eyes closed but seeing him still, some open-eyed but unseeing of the present, lost in recollection. In the nature of things, these memories are often inappropriate. Some think, for instance, of what Clive felt like, smelled like, recalling his tenderness and his tact. There was the diligence of his applicati
on and pictured in more than one mind’s eye was that stern and labouring face rising and falling in the conscientious performance of his professional duties.

  ‘I sing his body,’ prayed Geoffrey to himself. ‘I sing his marble back, his heavy legs’—he had been reading Whitman—‘I sing the absence of preliminaries, the curtness of desire. Dead, but not ominously so, now I extol him.’

  ‘I elevate him,’ thought a choreographer (for whom he had also made some shelves), ‘a son of Job dancing before the Lord.’

  ‘I dine him,’ prayed one of the cooks, ‘on quails stuffed with pears in a redcurrant coulis.’

  ‘I adorn him,’ imagined a fashion designer. ‘I send him down the catwalk in chest-revealing tartan tunic and trews and sporting a tam o’shanter.’

  ‘I appropriate him,’ planned the publisher, ‘a young man eaten alive by celebrity’ (the dust-jacket Prometheus on the rock).

  None, though, thought of words and how the bedroom had been Clive’s education. It was there that he learned that words mattered, once having been in bed with an etymologist whose ejaculation had been indefinitely postponed when Clive (on being asked if he was about to come too) had murmured, ‘Hopefully.’ In lieu of discharge, the etymologist had poured his frustrated energy into a short lecture on neologisms which Clive had taken so much to heart he had never said ‘hopefully’ again.

  Nothing surprised him, nothing shocked him. He was not—the word nowadays would be judgmental, but Clive knew that there were some who disliked this word, too, and preferred censorious, but he was not judgmental of that either.

  Words mattered and so did names. He knew if someone disliked their name and did not want it said, still less called out, during lovemaking. He knew, too, his clients’ various names for the private parts and what he or she preferred to call them and what they preferred him to call them (which was not always the same thing). He knew, too, in the heightened atmosphere of the bedroom how swiftly a misappellation in this regard could puncture desire and shrivel its manifestation.

  He brought to the bedroom a power of recall and a grasp of detail that would have taken him to the top of any profession he had chosen to enter. A man who could after several months’ interval recall which breast his client preferred caressed could have run the National Theatre or reformed the Stock Exchange. He knew what stories to whisper and when not to tell stories at all and knew, too, when the business was over, never to make reference to what had been said.

  Put simply this was a man who had learned never to strike a false note. He was a professional.

  Aloud Geoffrey said: ‘Let us magnify him before the Lord. O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him forever.’

  Geoffrey rose to his feet. ‘And now we end this service of thanksgiving with John Keble’s hymn.’

  New every morning is the love …

  Our waking and uprising prove

  Through sleep and darkness safely brought

  Restored to life and power and thought.

  How glumly they had come into the church and how happily now, their burden laid down, do they prepare to go forth. So they sing this mild little hymn as the chorus sings their deliverance in Fidelio, or the crowd sings at Elland Road. They sing, distasteful though that spectacle often is, as they sing at the Last Night of the Proms. And singing they are full of new resolve.

  Since the news of Clive’s death a shadow had fallen across sexual intercourse. Coming together had become wary, the whole business perfunctory and self-serving, and even new relationships had been entered on gingerly. As one wife, not in the know, had complained, ‘There is no giving anymore.’ In some bedrooms where intercourse had not been wholly discontinued prophylactics had appeared for the first time, variously explained by a trivial infection or a sudden sensitivity, but in all cases made out to the unknowing partner as just a minor precaution not the membrane between life and death.

  Now that time of sexual austerity was over. This was the liberation, and many of the couples pressing out of the door looked forward to resuming all those sexually sophisticated manoeuvres that Clive’s death and its presumed cause had seen discontinued.

  Partners not in the know were taken aback by the gusto with which their long-diffident opposites now went to it, and some, to put it plainly, could scarcely wait to get home in order to have a fuck. And indeed some didn’t, one couple sneaking round behind the church to the alcove outside the vestry that sheltered the dustbins and doing it there. They happened both to be friends of Clive and so of the same mind, but several husbands, ignorant of their wives’ connection with the dead man, were startled to find themselves unexpectedly fingered and fondled (evidence of the strong tide of relief that was sweeping their partners along) and one, made to park on a double yellow line in the Goswell Road, had to spread a copy of the Financial Times over his knees while beneath it his wife gave vent to her euphoria.

  For some, though, deliverance would be all too brief. A TV designer, a particular friend of Clive and thus feeling himself more enshadowed than most, was so rapturous at the news of Clive’s unportentous death that he celebrated by picking up a dubious young man in Covent Garden, spending a delightful evening and an unprotected night, waking the next morning as anxious as he had been before and in much the same boat.

  Still, others thought they had learned their lesson and crowding up the aisles they saw the West door open on a churchyard now bathed in sunlight. The bells were ringing out; the vicar was there shaking hands; truly this had been a thanksgiving and an ending and now the portals were flung open on a new life.

  ‘I presume he had us all on his computer somewhere,’ someone said.

  ‘Who cares?’ said someone else.

  Slowly they shuffled towards the light.

  * * *

  It was now well past lunchtime and the Archdeacon had stomach ache. Anxious to get away before the crowd and unobserved by the vicar, who would surely be shaking all those famous hands, Canon Treacher had got up smartly after the blessing only to find his exit from the pew blocked by a woman doing what she (and Canon Treacher) had been brought up to do, namely, on entering or leaving a church to say a private prayer. It was all Treacher could do not to step over her, but instead waited there fuming while she placidly prayed. She took her time with God, and then, her devotions ended, more time assembling her umbrella, gloves and what she called apologetically ‘my bits and bobs’ and then when she was finally ready, had to turn back to retrieve her Order of Service, which she held up at Canon Treacher with a brave smile as if to signify that this had been a job well done. By which time, of course, the aisle was clogged with people and Treacher found himself carried slowly but inexorably towards the door where, as he had feared, Father Jolliffe was now busy shaking hands.

  Even so, the priest was so deep in conversation with a leading chat-show host that Treacher thought he was going to manage to sidle by unnoticed. Except that then the priest saw him and the chat-show host, used to calling the shots with regard to when conversations began and ended, was startled to find this chat abruptly wound up as Jolliffe hastened across to shake Treacher’s cold, withdrawing hand.

  ‘Archdeacon. What a pleasure to see you. Did you know Clive?’

  ‘Who? Certainly not. How should I know him?’

  ‘He touched life at many points.’

  It was a joke but Treacher did not smile.

  ‘Not at this one.’

  ‘And did you enjoy the service?’ Father Jolliffe’s plump face was full of pathetic hope.

  Treacher smiled thinly but did not yield. ‘It was … interesting.’

  With Father Jolliffe cringing under the archidiaconal disapproval it ought to have been a chilling moment and, by Treacher at least, savoured and briefly enjoyed, but it was muffed when the hostess of a rapid response TV cookery show, whom the vicar did not know, suddenly flung her arms round his neck saying, ‘Oh, pumpkin!’

  Firm in the culinary grasp, Father Jolliffe gazed helpl
essly as the Archdeacon was borne away on the slow-moving tide and out into the chattering churchyard where, holy ground notwithstanding, Treacher noted that many of the congregation were already feverishly lighting up.

  When, a few days later, Treacher delivered his report, it was not favourable, which saddened the Bishop (who had, though it’s of no relevance, been a great hurdler in his day). Rather mischievously he asked Treacher if he had nevertheless managed to enjoy the service.

  ‘I thought it,’ said Treacher, ‘a useful lesson in the necessity for ritual. Or at any rate, form. Ritual is a road, a path between hedges, a track along which the priest leads his congregation.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Bishop, who had been here before.

  ‘Leave the gate open, nay tell them it’s open as this foolish young man did, and straightaway they’re through it, trampling everything underfoot.’

  ‘You make the congregation sound like cattle, Arthur.’

  ‘No, not cattle, Bishop. Sheep, a metaphor for which there is some well-known authority in Scripture. It was a scrum. A free-for-all.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Bishop. ‘Still,’ he smiled wistfully, ‘that gardening girl, the footballer who’s always so polite—I quite wish I’d been there.’

  Treacher, feeling unwell, now passes out of this narrative, though with more sympathy and indeed regret than his acerbities might seem to warrant. Though he had disapproved of the memorial service and its altogether too heartfelt antics he is not entirely to be deplored, standing in this tale for dignity, formality and self-restraint.

  Less feeling was what Treacher wanted, the services of the church, as he saw it, a refuge from the prevailing sloppiness. As opportunities multiplied for the display of sentiment in public and on television—confessing, grieving and giving way to anger, and always with a ready access to tears—so it seemed to Treacher that there was needed a place for dryness and self-control and this was the church. It was not a popular view and he sometimes felt that he had much in common with a Jesuit priest on the run in Elizabethan England—clandestine, subversive and holding to the old faith, even though the tenets of that faith, discretion, understatement and respect for tradition, might seem more suited to tailoring than they did to religion.