by Louise Dean
She hasn’t called him in years.
‘When you think of the smell of your homeland,’ his ex-girlfriend Natasha asked him once, sentimental for the Ukraine one Christmas, ‘what does it smell like? For me it smells like our black round bread, warm from the oven.’
‘Dirt,’ he’d said. ‘The soil.’
When they were in their teens and their mother had nursed back to life the antique roses, established her cottage-garden wilderness of hollyhocks and foxgloves, and had infant fruit trees still on their leading reins, the gamekeeper’s granddaughter came to gaze at it all from over the fields. She was more than ninety years old. Standing up, sniffing the intruder, short-haired and fierce, their mother must have seemed formidable, and she’d have called after the dog in such a way that the reproach fell on the trespasser rather than the dog. But she’d softened as she strode forth, seeing at last the tiny lost eyes under the grey perm.
First Davie, then Nick, came home that afternoon to find the old lady in the dining-room side of the front room. The one concession their mother had made to ‘change’ was to take down the wall between the two downstairs rooms, on account of the terrible cold in the dining room, but there was still a distinct chill to that side. The old lady explained that it was in that room that the gamekeeper’s youngest daughter died of TB, when she was only twelve years old. She showed them how the other children lined up outside and waved goodbye to her through the window.
The house was full of ghosts. If you listened at night, you could hear them, moving about the house.
‘It’s bigger than us, the past,’ their mother told them. Certainly it was bigger than Ken and Pearl. It was a jealous house; it loved her and kept her. The rest were mere lodgers. They left.
Property was Ken’s thing in the late eighties, and he kept costs down by living in the properties as he renovated them after they separated, and by having Dave do the work with him. Every dwelling place was a ‘digs’, developed, then sold or let. He had no home until he begrudgingly bought ‘Perchance’ when he was seventy.
The door to the gamekeeper’s cottage had been closed to all of them for twenty years. The path across the fields had gone, according to Dave. The long grass had reclaimed it, the stile had been knocked down, the orchard of fruit trees now fully obscured the house. It was concealed. The gate at the end of the track was padlocked. There was no mailbox, no house name. It was as if the drawbridge had been pulled up. As Nick had said to Astrid in Sicily, there wasn’t a way home.
Chapter 25
On her weekend off, in lieu of a laugh, since she’s over forty and more than seventeen stone, Audrey chooses a numbing. These are strange times, she considered that Saturday morning, on her way to The Fat Ox in Icklesfield. It was muggy and fly-ridden in the winter and in the summer there was hail. It was a time of turmoil. Maybe it did portend some greater crisis coming: first the recession, next the pandemic.
Since she gave the business a marketing overhaul and made it more sympathetic to modern ‘tastes’, they’d become the funeral directors of choice in the area. She and Roger were full time, round the clock, and they had on the books another eight working in shifts.
She consulted with them all when it came to the new slogan.
‘The dead – it’s a living.’ This was Roger’s suggestion. The others agreed it was fair. No one could think of anything else.
So, she decided to go with her own idea: ‘When the worst thing happens, we will be there.’ It was on all the stationery and on the front window in appealing soft italics.
‘All right,’ Roger had said warily. ‘If you think so.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No, go on, what?’
‘It’s a bit soft.’
‘Soft?’
‘American.’
‘In a good way, though?’
‘No.’
‘What – you think it’s dodging the subject?’
‘There could be plenty of other worse things and we won’t be there.’ Roger was reliably cautious.
‘I think the clue is in the subtitle: funeral directors. I don’t think we’ll be getting called out when the teenage daughter’s up the duff or the cellar’s flooded.’
‘Sounds like we’ll clean up the mess, or get rid of the evidence.’
‘When the worst thing happens we will be there,’ she said, trying it with a new emphasis, like a woman in a changing room giving a skirt a bit of flounce.
‘It’s like being the Grim Reaper.’
‘Oh no!’
‘Sort of like being Keith Chegwin.’
‘No. Not at all.’ She’d laughed, but she’d felt a bit annoyed with him. ‘Bugger me, Roger, you’re like the Reaper yourself sometimes. It’s like pushing water uphill, getting you to show a bit of enthusiasm.’
He took it badly. He stood there for a moment with his mouth open – just as if the worst thing had happened – and then he dashed off. She’d never seen Roger dash.
He kept himself busy in the coffin room and they didn’t exchange more than a few words for several days. He was quiet, even for Roger, and there was no eye contact whatsoever. If she came up, he was sitting there doing the crossword; the question was a particularly complicated one that required him to press his forehead upon the newspaper.
So, they stuck to business. She gave directions, and he went. There was no chat, nothing in the way of their usual laughs. The body appeared in the mortuary, she attended to it, he gave her a hand to get it in the fridge, to put the waste bins into the street, and then he went off to plane coffins or polish the hearse. And he left on time. It was then she realized that his normal routine was to hang about with her, having a coffee, having a chat and, on the odd occasion they went to the pub, she’d have a glass of wine, and he’d have a juice.
He went to AA meetings. She’d seen him waiting outside, grinning shyly while the big boys and girls smoked, waiting to go in. He only grinned when he was terribly afraid, she knew.
He was heavy and lonely. So what? Who wasn’t?
She was on the board for the National Association of Funeral Directors and went occasionally to speak at conventions. When she did, she left Roger in charge. She kept it to a minimum. He was so pithy when it came to phone conversation that the caller was treated to something only just short of silence.
‘Hello, hello?’ the long pauses caused the caller to say. Eventually they’d get this much: ‘Name? . . . No, of the deceased . . . Thank you.’
It seemed to put him too much on the spot, the phone ringing. He went red. He dithered and let it ring too many times, hoping she’d take it if she were there. Interpersonal skills were not among his talents. Lugging bodies, lugging coffins, lugging spare wheels; these were his talents. And turning up. Not to mention the placid demeanour that supplied his response to even the good things in life – such as when he won a tenner on the lottery, or she treated them to a fish and chip lunch – as much as the worst things, such as his wife leaving him.
The customers liked him. He was a shoulder to cry on – and they did, and he just stood there, immobile, but with a touch of spare pride in his cheeks. There was something consoling in his stoic presence.
Before this little upset between them, she’d gone away to Birmingham for a few days to speak at a convention on pandemics, and his pleasure at having her back seemed to be more than was warranted by being relieved of phone duties. He went to meet her at the station and joked and larked about as he took her case from her, swinging it about as if it were light as a feather. He was like something out of a musical, she’d thought, gay as a lad.
‘Pandemics are becoming your special subject,’ he’d ventured.
‘So it seems!’
‘There’s one coming then, is there?’ he’d chuckled.
She’d done a double take. Roger had become an extrovert in her absence.
‘Sure as eggs is eggs, Roger. We’ve got a contingency plan that will be the gold standard of the south-
east.’
‘It’s me, isn’t it?’ he’d laughed. She’d confirmed it.
‘Righto,’ was all he said, but he whistled all the way up the steps from Warrior Square.
When the hospital called day and night, as they had last year with the MRSA crisis, it was Roger who unfailingly went. There were so many of them in there from the funeral companies, he said, that they were obliged to tip the stretcher up and hold it vertical in order to pass each other in the corridors.
‘When this here pandemonium comes,’ he’d quipped as they turned into Norman Road, ‘I’ll be nose to nose with the corpses in corridors.’
If any town succumbed to a pandemic, it would be this one. It was an already weakened population on the brink of collapse. Nearly everyone in Hastings was a full-time alcoholic. She wondered what it was in him that kept Roger off the bottle now. It wasn’t the pay, it wasn’t responsibility to a family, it wasn’t a sense of Christian duty, but he just showed up – every time he was needed – without much to say but with ready hands.
They talked about how things were going: people dying fatter, younger, done in with drugs and booze, suicides, old people neglected, with no families to call on, funerals unattended. How it was unusual to pick someone up from their home. It wore you down; you had to speak about it, but you couldn’t go bandying it about. Drink helped in her case. She’d have a few glasses back home, on her own more often than not. Unlike Roger.
And unlike Roger she had been brought up to it, the job. She was fourteen years old when she first went with her mum and dad to pick up a body. An old girl, it was, and her nightdress kept coming up as they put her on the stretcher. Her old dad kept shouting out, ‘That’s your job, Audrey, to keep her bleeding nightie down!’ To give her some respect.
She couldn’t go much more than five miles away on her days off, so here she was at The Fat Ox, under a set of dirty great pylons in a little village where no one knew her and she could sit and get properly drunk, far too drunk to drive, and have a room for the night for thirty quid. She’d sit outside from lunchtime onwards with the pylons buzzing and humming and doing God knows what to her head, and sometimes she’d pass out at a picnic table after ham, egg and chips. Sometimes she’d go inside and have a big dinner, and she’d sit there straight-backed like a bloke, fists on the table, looking like a long-distance lorry driver, assuming masculinity to avoid interest. She’d drink to the end of the bottle and then she’d go up the backstairs to the bed where the pillows smelt of head sweat – and that was good, because that was how a man smelt – and she’d sleep until breakfast time.
The only thing she wanted, really wanted, was to be kissed and loved and told ‘You’re a good person’ by someone she could believe.
In the morning light she lay on that bed with an arm out, palm open. She couldn’t imagine how Roger did it – what kept him at the job, and sober too. It was heroic. It didn’t make sense. There was no logic to it.
Chapter 26
The crematorium attendants have a little side room from which they control the music and lights and she, Roger and Ken, all suited and booted, have a quick chat with another funeral director in there about the good weather being a surprise that April.
Andy, the lay preacher of burnished hair and baby face, is inside the chapel – their zealous sergeant major, who can speak without embarrassment about the fire in his heart for the Lord. When he is not paging away the funeral procession, he rides the East Sussex hills on his tractor. He could be a corporate man, so clean and regular-looking is he, were it not for the radiance of his smile. He has spoken well of the deceased, on few notes, then gone on to push the envelope of faith and presented the mourners with an opportunity to meet Jesus Christ. Most pass. They’d rather not meet Him or his Old Man a minute sooner than they have to.
The Hickmott family, amounting to six people, have shuffled in to sit side by side on the same bench and bear with bowed heads the admonition of death. The services run every half-hour to the same format. From the side room they can hear that it’s only Andy who’s actually singing along to ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’.
‘People don’t sing these days,’ says the attendant, a tall bald man with clouds of hair above each ear. ‘You never hear them singing, do you?’
There is a unison of disapproval.
‘It’s the committal now,’ Audrey says, and on the monitor they see the curtains coming round the coffin.
‘That it?’ says Ken, aghast. ‘That the lot?’
They can hear Andy saying, ‘I am the resurrection,’ as the doors open and the farmer comes towards them, eyes electric.
The family follows his lead and assembles in the courtyard next to the racking for the flowers and each of them takes a turn to squint at the messages on the bouquets. The widow traces the writing on the cards with her fingertips and her daughter says at each one, ‘That’s nice.’
‘Where’s Audrey?’ Ken whispers to Roger, startling when he realizes she’s not there.
‘Off with the Two Ronnies,’ Roger whispers out of the side of his mouth.
Ken gives him a sharp look. ‘Pull yourself together, fella,’ he says.
Casually, Roger ambles off, hands in his pockets. He goes down past the Book of Remembrance Chapel into what looks for all the world like a school canteen, with great big waste containers on wheels outside, and he glances up to see the big steel chimney smoking.
Audrey pops down there from time to time to see the chaps who load the furnaces; they’re so often forgotten. At Christmas she tips them. They are both called Ron.
When Roger comes in, he finds the three of them standing in front of four cremators – ovens, steel and glass fronted, with little steel trays underneath their doors. The shorter Ron brings forth a steel bucket for inspection, and Audrey pokes her head in to see the charred metal hip-bone replacements. He shakes it as if he wants a contribution. ‘Raised a thousand pounds for the hospice recycling these last year.’
‘Good for you, Ronnie. How’s the missus?’ Audrey asks him.
‘Don’t ask,’ says the other Ron, coming forward and wiping his forearms. ‘She give me this ’ere cookbook for my birthday and she said, I haven’t wrapped it because you only tear the paper off.’
The other Ron shakes his head.
‘When did it all start? I thought. When did it all start going wrong . . .?’
An electronic alarm bell sounds. One of the Rons opens the hatch and pulls John Hickmott in his £299 veneered chipboard coffin on to a trolley and the two Rons wheel him across to oven number four, still talking to Audrey in a friendly way. When they open the oven, there’s a big raging orange heat and they load John Hickmott’s coffin into it and close the door, and fix it to, turning the big iron handle.
‘All she does is watch the telly. Why would anyone spend their time doing that?’
‘Do you like watching the telly, Roger?’ The taller Ron addresses Roger, knitting his brow and folding his arms.
Roger lifts his shoulders briefly. He glances warily at the oven door.
‘Want to see where we are with the hospice bucket, Roger?’
‘No.’
‘Man of few words, ’im. Innie, Audrey?’ The Ronnies grin.
‘He is.’
‘Solid, he looks.’
‘That’s right.’
Under such attention, Roger is visibly awkward, ready to be brave, ready to be amused, ready to be whatever he’s called, ready for praise, ready for abuse, and all of these considerations show themselves in a slight parting of his lips.
‘Come on then, sweet’eart,’ she says to him. ‘Best get back.’ Ron sticks the bucket back on the shelf to the side. ‘Ta-da then, you two. Nice to see you. ’Ere, Audrey, you’re the only one of the funeral directors who does come and see us, you know.’
‘We’re the untouchables, us two,’ says the other Ronnie with a grin, leaning against the wall above the computer.
On the concrete concourse, behind the fencing, w
ith the clouds passing over the sun, in the new grey chill, she stops for a moment. It has come to her. There is no logical reason to do this work. She turns round and faces Roger.
‘Why don’t you do what you really want to do, Roger?’
She sees in the shadows of his eyes the vestiges of other shamings. She holds his head and kisses him on the mouth.
Chapter 27
They go with the family to the pub on the Ridge, The Harrow, where the son orders sherries and bags of nuts, and raises his glass to the ten or so of them at the bar. Andy steps in with his orange juice aloft. ‘To John Hickmott!’ The family give him grateful looks.
‘May he rest in peace,’ adds Ken, swallowing his thimble of sherry back as though it’s a whiskey that burns. ‘Your health.’
Roger and Audrey exchange looks.
Andy takes his opportunity to continue where he left off in the crem about how when Jesus broke the bread with the men on their way to Emmaus, he was really breaking Himself and how in that moment they knew Him and it was when they knew Him that he disappeared. He has the mourners in the palm of his hand, hemmed in as they are between bar and bar stools. There’s a lot to the passage but he hopes one point will fall hard and true.
‘Jesus comes to us in our hour of need in many guises to comfort us. We may not recognize Him. He may come as a friend or a stranger.’
He inhales the yolk-like line of orange juice from the bottom of his glass, swallows, licks his lips and smiles down at the short-legged Hickmott family. Furtively, the family exchange appalled looks.
Ken’s cheeks glow after the third sherry and he says to Audrey,
‘Nice in ’ere. Nice, innit?’ He looks about himself and sniffs with satisfaction.
There are brass horseplates and dusty bunches of hops about the place, and a horror of a carpet with a geometric pattern worn into being less of a visual nuisance than it once was. Taxi cards are stapled to the beams. These cards bring to mind June, so he accepts another sherry when it’s offered, and repeats himself.