Only

by Caroline Baum

  ‘I’ll wait for you downstairs,’ she said, making her escape to avoid the sympathy of carers she was not ready to face. They, too, were grieving: some had gone on rostered leave and returned to find Mr Baum gone forever and were dealing with their own shock after six years of his dominant presence. Each came and hugged me as I emptied out the flimsy drawers and cupboards.

  Someone went to find the key to the memory box. I took his car keys, passport, Michelin guide and photographs from the perspex shelves. His presence was wiped from the place. All that remained as proof of his existence was a pencil portrait in a hallway as part of a series commissioned by the home. Mournful, haggard, his eyes baleful and vacant, his cheeks sagging. It was not a likeness I wanted to own.

  Downstairs, my mother was sitting on the terrace, having a cup of tea and watching a group of residents, most of them in wheelchairs, being led through a class in flower arranging.

  ‘It’s so nice here,’ she said with a wistful little smile. ‘I wish I were Jewish.’

  I took that to mean: I wish I belonged here. Or somewhere. The implied question, too frightening to utter—What will happen to me if I need care?—remained unasked, hovering over us like small puffs of cloud above an active volcano.

  Perhaps, she ventured, if we had to have some kind of reception or wake after the funeral, we could have it here? We were shown to a function room, round, bright, chintzily intimate and overlooking the garden. More importantly, it was offered free of charge.

  I worried that the setting might be too grim and put some people off.

  ‘Fine,’ retorted my mother.

  We were introduced to a young black woman from catering whose name tag announced her as Efficiency. She lived up to it, making notes about smoked salmon sandwiches and suggesting chocolate brownies. Perfect. My father adored them.

  Exhausted by decision-making and negotiation, we were in bed by eight o’clock. Jet lag and anxiety make terrible bedfellows.

  The morning brought mail, which my mother opened but did not read: she checked the condolences cards to see who they were from but ignored the messages.

  ‘Ha!’ she would say when she received one from someone she despised.

  As more and more former colleagues made it clear they would like to attend the funeral, she grew increasingly hostile to the whole occasion.

  There was a brief reprieve when I chose music for the service. Part of me wanted to give my father the rousing flamboyant send-off he would have relished with the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in all its spirited grandeur. To my surprise, my mother, who detests Wagner, agreed that it was a suitable choice and did not leave the room as she usually did when I played the opening of Act III of Die Walküre to check the time cues.

  But then, scanning his CD collection I had an inspired and irreverent idea to close proceedings with something unexpected and humorous that would cause a ripple of initial shock but send everyone out with a smile. My father adored the satirical brilliance of Tom Lehrer. His lyrics made my father’s shoulders shake with laughter, even when he knew them by heart. On a compilation album that included family favourites like ‘New Math’ and ‘The Vatican Rag’ we found a darkly apocalyptic ditty called ‘We Will All Go Together When We Go’. Some might consider it tasteless, but that only pleased my mother more. Asked to choose between Lehrer and Wagner, she opted for Lehrer as a way of provoking the congregation.

  But her satisfaction proved short-lived. With every hour that passed I watched my mother decline into taciturn numbness. She did The Times crossword with a cup of black coffee and then retreated to bed for the rest of the day. She was not sure she would come to the funeral at all, and no amount of cajoling, or suggesting that it might be cathartic, would sway her. I would not force her, could not, but with each hour that passed my confusion grew: who was she to defy a tradition that had endured for centuries? What was this really about? What was she grieving for at this point? A man she had lost six years ago? A sense of purpose wrenched from her and now casting her adrift? Why did this have to manifest in such an extreme form?

  By the middle of the week I was at breaking point. Exhausted from sleepless strain I decided to defuse the situation and take some of the pressure off. I had to admit to myself that this funeral was not like my father-in-law’s and was not the same as hosting an engagement, however stressful, at the Sydney Opera House. I understood in my core than I could not get through the ambitious production I had choreographed and be a caring daughter to my surviving parent while honouring the one who had just died. My mother needed my support more than any fine words or carefully curated images and sounds. Against my nature, I did a total U-turn and decided the funeral should be a private, family-only affair. I could not put her through the ordeal of having to greet people she loathed in such a charged and painful setting.

  This was no small change of heart. By now people had booked airfares to come from overseas and word had gone out via industry websites. I had to send around urgent emails notifying as many as possible of changed circumstances without going into too much detail as to the reasons. There would be a wake, to which friends and associates were welcome, but the cremation would be behind closed doors. The blowback was immediate and fierce. Some expressed open hostility, others protested in stony silence.

  My mother’s immediate relief and gratitude were countered by my searing awareness of having displeased and disappointed others. After twenty-four hours, remorse had built up tension in my body like a poison. I remembered this sensation of toxins flooding my veins from when the fibromyalgia first appeared six years earlier. I did not want to encourage a recurrence. Taking a long walk in the nearby park to give myself courage, I rang those I knew would be most upset by my decision and allowed them to vent. It was unpleasant and deeply uncomfortable. Did people honestly feel they had a greater claim to pain than my mother? And if they did, how had they demonstrated that in my father’s final years?

  Caught between two factions, I felt I could do nothing right and had failed everyone. The hours dragged on with not enough to do. Now there was no order of service for which to select passages. The photo montage would be screened at afternoon tea instead of at the crematorium. The music choices would be reduced to just one simple short piece without a farewell fanfare of pomp or subversion. Day after day was a limbo of misery.

  ‘Can you get rid of his clothes?’ my mother asked suddenly one morning. When I had offered to do this six years before and every year since, she had refused. Now she wanted all trace of him gone. Relieved to be given a task to pass the time, David and I began the process of emptying my father’s extensive wardrobe. We bagged up more than forty suits (some of them almost gangsterish in their cut and swagger: what was my father thinking when he ordered an off-white silk suit with wide lapels fit only for Bugsy Malone?) together with tuxedos, dinner and sports jackets, a handful of casual brushed-cotton shirts, gaudily printed silk summer shirts brought back from Indonesian conferences that only Nelson Mandela could get away with and V-neck cashmere sweaters. Alongside his handstitched, monogrammed pure cotton business shirts I found a collection of dozens of spare collars and cuffs, as stiff and pristine as index cards in a stationery cupboard. Everything wearable went to a Jewish charity for the homeless. There must be some pretty nattily dressed people sleeping rough on the streets of London.

  Drawers spilled with cashmere-lined scarves, soft leather gloves, belts with Gucci buckles, opera glasses in snakeskin cases, gold shirt studs, boxes of collar stiffeners. A tooled leather case container a silver shoe horn and bootlace hook, precious mementos from his Viennese childhood. The trappings and accessories of external finery and display, of vanity and status. And the Hermès ties, of course, ribbons of colour like medieval pennants. I chose one for David to wear at the funeral: the only time I have ever seen him in one. And set another aside as a gift to the director of my father’s care home.

  Finally, the day that could not be put off arrived. I had rehearsed my eulogy, trying to take
the sting out of the most emotionally risky passages and marking the pages up with stage directions: Breathe and Slow Down … I had delegated the job of finishing its delivery to David if I broke down too badly to recover. I resolved to bring no expectation and pressure to how my mother chose to play it. By mid-morning she came out to consult me about which black dress to wear given the unpredictable weather, and asked me to show her how to tie a scarf in the current fashion. When it was time to go, I took a Valium and half-filled a water bottle with vodka tonic, nestling it in my bag.

  We got to the crematorium early, as we do everywhere we go. I turned on the radio. It was playing one of my father’s favourite pieces of music, Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, the stirring fourth movement he liked to conduct, brandishing one of my mother’s fine flexible metal knitting needles. The memory too fresh, I turned it off. Moments later, the hearse arrived, drawing up level with us so that we were looking straight at the coffin.

  ‘Is that it?’ my mother whispered. When I nodded she rolled her eyes. ‘Quelle comédie,’ she muttered, using one of her favourite expressions of dismay.

  I turned the car to face the other way, parking under a willow tree looking onto a bed of wilting roses, and got out to greet the funeral director and give him the CD of Vladimir Horowitz playing Liszt’s Consolation No. 3.

  I took a swig of vodka to steel myself. Mum pretended to be shocked. Each taking an elbow, David and I led her forward, bearing her weight as though she were an invalid, her face to the ground, never looking up. When the coffin was brought in and placed on the dais, she bent further forward, like someone about to vomit. A moment that would normally be solemn and silent was punctuated by her constant murmurings of ‘Jesus Christ, can we go now, is it over?’ while we each stroked an arm trying to reassure and calm her. After an agonising minute attempting to find enough stillness to listen to the shimmering music while saying a final goodbye, I gave up.

  I nodded to the director to close the curtains. Before they completed their automated beige glide, we rose to leave the way we came in from a space all of us agreed was perfectly vile. Where was the usual side exit into a prettier tended garden suggesting life’s continuity and nature’s eternal renewal? Certainly not at the Lambeth Crematorium in Tooting, where I defy anyone to find any solace or grace. Instead of bodies, they should burn the place down.

  CHAPTER 30

  Three women (Part two)

  There is a famous photograph, taken in 1953 at the state funeral of King George VI, of three present and future queens of England in mourning: Queen Mary, wearing a severe wimple that frames her stern face and grey curls and in an old-fashioned floor-length dress, looking as if she has stepped out of a portrait by Rembrandt; Elizabeth, the Queen Mother in profile, her eyes closed mid-blink; and her shy young daughter Elizabeth: all veiled and huddled together. The two younger women wear dresses that are more modern, exposing pale calves and high heels. They are glamorously austere in their solemnity, potent icons of power and mystery: majesty in grief, three inscrutable women embodying the past, present and future, facing their destiny through the fine gauze of their veils.

  After my father’s funeral we drove from the crematorium to the nursing home in a heightened state, a potent adrenalin of indignation coursing through our veins at the ugliness of it all. The green plastic cushions, the nasty pleats in the synthetic curtains, the absurdly high plinth on which the coffin rested, all provoked a uniting scorn and dismay.

  At Nightingale House I fortified myself in the car park with another nip of vodka to meet many people I did not know at all, and others I had not seen for more than thirty-five years, including one who had been the subject of a teenage crush.

  Mixed in with the men in suits, most of whom wore Hermès ties in tribute to my father, were the three equivalents of those queenly royal personages, like figures in a triptych.

  My mother, firmly in David’s vigilant but tender grasp, enthroned in a high-backed front row chair from which she did not move, receiving condolences as guests leaned forward to acknowledge her status as mourner-in-chief and first lady of sorrow, as if paying homage to their sovereign.

  Slipping in discreetly, my father’s earlier love, Moira, arrived from the country, smart in black velvet, her blue eyes finding me instantly and putting me at immediate ease. We had a kind of familiarity that bypassed all formal introductions and small talk. She walked towards my mother with no-nonsense British backbone.

  Red-eyed and a little late, Helena, his colleague-turned-mistress, came in disarray from a gathering of colleagues at the pub. Denied access to the funeral, they had mounted an alternative protest/tribute down the road (which my father, who loathed pubs, would have hated). She was wearing a colour she thought of as my father’s signature blue, which he used in his company logo and promotional material—a cool clear electric cobalt. To my eyes, her palette was a little off-key. The anger of her phone conversation with me just days earlier, full of bitterness, had abated into more considered and accepting sorrow. Too distracted, I did not introduce her to Moira. Later, she revealed that my father had told her about Moira and I regretted not facilitating their encounter. But I was not the hostess at a cocktail party, I was the daughter at my father’s funeral, and had other concerns and priorities.

  After the eulogy, Helena came to me, slightly tipsy, tearful and unexpectedly needy. ‘Give me something of his, won’t you?’ she begged, causing me to lose my composure. I assured her that I had already selected one of his favourite silk scarves for her, with its luxuriously tasselled fringing. Moira asked for nothing, prompting me to make a note to send her a keepsake.

  Hours later, sorting through my father’s seemingly endless files and papers, in an attempt to make space physically and emotionally, I found notes he made under the heading ‘If I survive’, with a list of people to notify following his operation. Half of them were now dead. On the back was a second heading: ‘If I had two hundred and fifty thousand pounds (plus)’. Itemised with costings were objects of desire and demonstrations of largesse. They included spending almost half that amount on the newest Jaguar. And a generous gift to Amber, his secret lover in South Africa, proving that he had not truly severed the relationship. All of this presumably was to be funded by lottery wins. In the stationery drawer where he kept labels already printed out for regular correspondence, I found her address. Cheating bastard, I thought. I winced as if physically wounded. Should I tell her it was all over? Did I owe her anything? She had not heard from my father now for several years and would perhaps assume he was already dead. What do to?

  Night and day the question gnawed and gnawed at me. What was my duty to him? What was decent? Considerate? Why was I even thinking of letting her know? I worried away at this as though trying to untie a frayed piece of rope with ragged fingernails. I fantasised about using my best stationery, stiff card embossed with a small gold pineapple just like the one on the charm bracelet my father had assembled for me, to write her just one line: ‘My father Harry Baum died on September 16, 2014. No further correspondence will be entered into.’

  Formal, official, officious, forbidding. Final. And that’s when I understood my motive. It was not pure or honourable, it was dark and dirty and filled with righteousness and rage. I wanted to hurt her as she had hurt us. I wanted revenge, I wanted to exact agony, I wanted to send her a letter that would blow up in her face like a grenade. That little golden pineapple looked almost exactly like an exploding missile. Once I recognised the impulse, I felt ashamed. But with time came a kind of freedom. The note remained unwritten.

  CHAPTER 31

  Trio

  In the weeks after the funeral, my mother found no solace, closure or strength. She retreated from the world into the cave of her bed, lying there for up to twenty-three hours out of twenty-four, dozing on Valium, then medicated with antidepressants and sleeping tablets. She did not answer the phone and could only occasionally be coaxed out for half an hour to have a cup of coffee, or visit the
library or, on the day before my departure, go to the cinema—our favourite form of escapism.

  She wanted my father’s ashes hidden somewhere she would not find them, outside the apartment. Surprised by the weight of his remains, I stashed him in a basement locker until I could take him to Paris and sprinkle him as close to his hero Napoleon as possible. On this we agreed.

  Ever practical, Maman said, ‘You’ll have to do it at night, into the Seine.’ But she was adamant that she did not want to be part of it. He would want us to go and have a good meal somewhere, I said. But the tyranny of the Michelin Guide was over and my mother shook her head in emphatic refusal. There would be no final pilgrimage and no sentimental adieux.

  Marooned on a sea of sadness and loneliness, my mother was unsure where she belonged or wanted to be. With us in Australia, or by herself in England, where her modest rituals and routes are embedded and ingrained? The short straight drive to Sainsbury’s, the direct bus to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the library and its half-hearted book club, the monthly French conversation group. And who knows, perhaps when her equilibrium is restored, a return to Nightingale House one day, as a volunteer, as they suggested. It was too soon for decisions. All questions, choices and options were deferred until signs of recovery appeared like spring buds on bare branches.

  It was not safe to leave her so David stayed on while I came back to Australia to fulfil work commitments. He made a list of all the handyman jobs that needed doing around the place and took my father’s extensive library to a second-hand dealer. My mother found David’s practical skill and quiet presence soothing. When he devised an elaborate truss system of pulleys to take a heavy recliner over the handrail of the apartment’s mezzanine, she watched with eyes like saucers, muttering, ‘It’s like having a circus act at home … Incroyable …’ clearly enjoying this demonstration of his strength and ingenuity.