Alone

by Pip Granger

  Nicci didn’t cry. She didn’t ask any questions, nor utter a single word. She lay still in my arms, and appeared to be thinking, for a long time, before she pulled herself free to get up, wash, dress, clean her teeth, and go downstairs to the quiet kitchen to eat a bowl of cereal. Finally, still without a word, she went outside.

  I watched her through the window as she walked into the middle of the front lawn and just stood for a while, staring at nothing at all, as far as I could see. Eventually, her young friend Nigel, from across the road, approached her, and then, without speaking, she punched him in the nose. It would have been funny, apart from poor Nigel’s nose of course, if it hadn’t been so sad.

  ‘Why did my baby die?’ Gaby asked the neatly groomed, white-haired man with the insincere, film-star smile and the expensive suit. Her voice was pathetically childlike. I forget the man’s name, but he was the Christian Scientist who had been taking Gaby’s money and telling her that the power of prayer would save her daughter.

  ‘Perhaps because you didn’t believe strongly enough,’ he answered glibly.

  I was appalled at his callousness, his complete lack of empathy and simple humanity. I felt rage build up to boiling point and for the second time in my life, the red mist blurred my vision. I wanted to kill him, or, at the very least, spread his expensive capped teeth over a very wide area. I could not believe the cruelty of his remark. He was blaming Valerie’s death on her mother’s supposed lack of faith, as if his answer was self-evident. Well, it wasn’t evident to me. How could he say such a thing to a grief-stricken woman who had just lost her child? Where was the comfort that he was supposed to dish out? I looked hurriedly around and was relieved to realize that Father wasn’t within earshot – I may have felt like killing the bastard, but I think Father probably would have done it. Gaby seemed frozen to the spot in the hallway, a trembling hand to her mouth, dark eyes stricken with horror.

  I pushed her gently aside and confronted the so-called holy man.

  ‘Get out,’ I hissed. ‘Get out of here right now, before someone hurts you.’

  I may have only been eighteen years and three hundred and sixty-four days old, but something in my face told him to believe me. The swine stumbled on his way out, but sadly he did not fall flat on his face: I was fair aching to see those sparkling teeth shattered and that expensively perfect smile ruined, but it was not to be – yet more proof that there is often no justice in this world. He continued on up the drive to his car, with all the urgency of a burglar caught with his hand in a jewellery box. I think it was the first time that I ever felt such complete contempt for another human being. Any remote possibility that I would ever go against a lifetime’s indoctrination and embrace Christianity died in those few moments.

  I don’t remember much about the rest of that day. There were a lot of comings and goings and a great many phone calls both in and out. I had had so little sleep that delayed shock and exhaustion made me go about the business of providing tea and coffee for the constant stream of visitors as if I were in a trance, which I suppose I was, in a way.

  I know I called the undertaker, because he came to arrange the details of the funeral. ‘What music would you like?’ he asked, pen poised to take down any requests.

  ‘Nothing religious.’ Father was firm on that point. ‘I don’t want any hymns of any kind, or any sermons either.’

  ‘What, nothing at all?’ The undertaker looked shocked.

  ‘Some Mozart, maybe, or some opera, or “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from The Nutcracker, but no religious stuff at all,’ Father repeated, when it looked as if the undertaker was not believing his own ears.

  ‘I’m afraid the crematorium only supplies the “Dead March” and a fairly wide selection of hymns. For children and, er, young persons, “All Things Bright and Beautiful” is often the hymn of choice. I have a list of some others here.’ Flustered, he held out a sheet of paper, but Father flapped it away impatiently.

  ‘Then nothing,’ he said. A slight edge had crept into his voice.

  ‘If you don’t have a pastor of your own, the crematorium can supply you with one. If you give me details of what you would like said about Valerie, I can pass that on to him …’ The undertaker sounded a little desperate. Things were not going to plan.

  ‘I don’t want some priest who never knew my daughter going through the motions. I said, “No sermon” and I mean “No. Fucking. Sermon”.’ Father’s voice rose and his face took on a congested look as his fury began to build.

  The undertaker, experienced in the vagaries of grief, finally got the point. ‘Right,’ he said hastily, ‘no music, no sermon. Perhaps one of you would like to say a few words?’

  We looked at one another, but none of us felt equal to the task. If there had been more time before the death and the funeral, one of us could have managed it, but the ceremony had been arranged to take place on the day following Valerie’s death: on my birthday, in fact. Speed was of the essence, both doctors and the undertaker were agreed on that.

  ‘Flowers?’ the poor man asked, and, to his relief, my father and Gaby agreed that flowers were a good idea – but no wreaths, nor crosses either. A coffin was chosen from photographs of a selection usually reserved for children and, eventually, the undertaker and his attendants went upstairs to prepare Valerie’s body to be taken away.

  Gaby asked me to place a posy of roses that she had picked in her dead daughter’s hands, but I could not face going back into the sick-room and seeing her again, so I knocked on the door and asked the undertaker to do it for me.

  It was only when everything quieted down, late that night, that it occurred to me that, for the first time ever, Grandma and I would not be spending the birthday that we shared together. In past years, I had either gone to France after our birthday, or returned before it, but we had always, always shared our day.

  It was then, when I lay beside the sleeping Nicci, that I began to cry. I cried for Valerie, I cried for Father, Gaby and Nicci, and I cried because I would be attending my little sister’s funeral instead of a birthday tea with my grandma. I cried for everything and everybody and I thought that I would never stop.

  ‘Bye, bye Val-Val.xxxx’ read the note on the little posy.

  ‘Val-Val’ was the nickname that Nicci had given her sister almost as soon as she could speak. It was the nearest that her infant tongue could get to saying ‘Valerie’. It was what she had always called her sister, and the rest of us often followed suit. A lump formed in my throat and tears threatened again as I read the little note, so carefully written in dark blue crayon.

  Nicci had walked around the garden all by herself, choosing the flowers she wanted. She had carefully selected the summer blooms, pink Elizabeth roses, white, yellow and rusty-coloured snapdragons, pink and white cosmos, blue love-in-a-mist, blood-red geraniums, orange marigolds and the last of the blue Canterbury bells. She had wrapped the flowers very carefully in a white, lacy paper doily, tied it with pink ribbon, and, to finish off, had tucked her note between two rosebuds.

  ‘Will you give them to Val-Val, please?’ Nicci’s large blue eyes glistened with the tears she still could not shed. I nodded and smiled wanly down at her, speechless. I put the posy in a cool place, ready for Valerie’s last journey.

  The big, black hearse proceeded at a stately pace, as hearses are wont to do, but it didn’t take Father long to get fed up with our slow progress behind it. Finally, in a fit of irritation, he put his foot down and sped past the hearse, which dwindled, very rapidly, to a black dot behind us. I had just enough time to note the shocked expressions on the faces of the black-clad, frock-coated figures that accompanied my sister’s coffin as we purred alongside the hearse, then left the funeral procession in our dust.

  Naturally, we arrived at the crematorium long before the hearse and the more reverent members of the funeral party, but others had followed Father’s example and arrived shortly after us, so that when the coffin finally got there, we had all been waiting
for it for some considerable time. One of the things I remember most clearly was the strained laughter at something Father had said as the hearse drew up. Even at the time, I recognized Father’s compulsive need to entertain as a reaction to intolerable misery and strain, but it was still a little shocking. People were not supposed to be rocking with mirth at a funeral. It just wasn’t done. Even with my limited experience, I knew that.

  We all lined up and filed into the building to be met with absolute silence. It was forty years ago; crematoriums just didn’t run to anything but religious music in those bygone days, and, as the undertaker had warned us, it was hymns or nothing. So there was nothing to muffle the sound of our footsteps and the shuffling as the congregation found their places.

  In the gloom, Valerie’s white coffin stood out, so small and lonely on the dais. The sight made me begin to cry, and I was not alone. Soon, quiet sobbing, sniffles and blown noses joined the shuffling of feet as the only sounds to be heard. As there was no service, we just had time to get in, find our places and to stand, heads bowed, for a few moments, before there was a whirr of hidden machinery and the coffin began its slow, steady descent into the bowels of the building. Dark red, velvet curtains swished closed just before the white casket finally disappeared from view. The funeral was over almost before it had begun. Nobody spoke and there was a stunned pause before everyone began the slow shuffle out into the sunlight once again. It was a beautiful day.

  The silent ceremony, if it could be called that, was both incredibly moving and somehow wrong, all at the same time. It was as if Valerie’s life had been so short and so filled with sickness and pain that there was little more to say about it, but that wasn’t true. Valerie had been a gifted artist, and had been interested in so many things that she had made herself a small museum, with each exhibit carefully labelled and displayed in such a way as to bear witness to her sense and need for order. She was funny, sensitive, secretive, very bright and, occasionally, very difficult, in an arch and curiously adult way. Before her illness really took hold, her dark, delicate, elfin looks made her striking and beautiful rather than pretty. There had been, in fact, a great deal that could have been said about Valerie at her funeral, if only one of us could have borne to say it.

  There was a gathering at the house afterwards. Father, Gaby, me, Father’s friends Frank and Ron the artist, and a few neighbours were there, plus one of Valerie’s teachers from the days when she had been able to attend school. Towards the end, she was so liable to catch infections that school had become impossible, but her teachers remembered her; they had sent flowers, a note of condolence and a representative.

  My mother and Don had elected to spend the day with my grandma, partly to make up for me not being there, but also because there was no real place for them at the funeral, except, perhaps, as a comforting presence for me. As it was, I busied myself pouring teas, coffees and drinks and handing around plates of sandwiches, which was comfort of a sort.

  22

  All My Fault

  ‘He says to tell you that he couldn’t help it. He fell in love. He couldn’t help himself,’ my ex-boyfriend’s pal explained, not even trying to keep the smile from her broad, freckly face. She had always been a funny one, but not in a ha-ha kind of a way.

  It seemed that while I had been away in Surrey, burying my sister, I had been dumped by my boyfriend with absolutely no ceremony at all.

  Mother had been both delighted and appalled when I had finally found myself a boyfriend. She was delighted because I was showing signs of growing up at last and she was looking forward to passing responsibility for my well-being on to some husband or other; as far as she was concerned, a proper boyfriend was the first real step on that desirable route. She was, however, appalled at my choice of man. He was a singer with a folk band, and he led an itinerant kind of life. He was a good deal older than me – a father figure, some might say, and I expect they would be right. That would explain why my mother was so wary, of course: he was far too much like my father for comfort, and certainly not good husband material.

  After Valerie’s funeral, I had tried really hard to return to my everyday life, but I found it impossible. My boyfriend had upped and gone in a particularly lame and pathetic fashion. I thought I loved him and was desperately hurt. I also felt, in some obscure way, that he had been right. That I wasn’t lovable, and that it was all my fault. Of course, a swift, and very large, boot up the bum would seem a more appropriate response to my ex’s profound shabbiness, but I was too young and inexperienced either to know that, or to have the nerve to apply the giant footwear.

  More painful, in a way, was that the small gang of friends that I had hung around with, in that claustrophobic way that teenagers have, began to avoid me. They were uncertain what to say or to do in the face of such a huge loss, so they decided to say and do nothing at all. Nobody had had the experiences that I had had, and they simply did not know how to handle them, or how to handle me. It was so very hurtful not to have my calls returned, to see familiar eyes slide away from my face when we met by accident in the street, to be told that their social calendars were too full to fit me in. It was a very lonely time. It taught me something, though – two things, in fact: never, ever to trust a silver-tongued charmer, and never to ignore or avoid the recently bereaved.

  I made frequent visits to the Surrey house in the weeks, months and years that followed Valerie’s death, largely to keep an eye on my surviving sister and to try to offer some sort of comfort to Father and Gaby, but I don’t think I succeeded very well in any of that. Although Father was grateful that his little girl had not died alone. I always felt that Gaby was never able to forgive me either, because I was their when Valerie died. She was never able to acknowledge my birthday again, for example, and I think that’s an indication of just how hard it always was for her. Me too. Ever since, even after all these years, my birthday has been tinged with an awful sadness.

  Meanwhile, Gaby and Father seemed unable to help one another or their remaining little girl. It was a truly dark, bleak time for everyone. I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to do and there was absolutely no one to tell me.

  Mother and Don also avoided talking about Valerie. My mother was a stoic, one of the war generation, who had learned to ‘put up and shut up’, and she did this very well. Instead of unseemly outbursts of emotion, Mother expressed herself in a dry, often caustic way. When the situation was too serious for graveyard humour, she kept quiet, but busy. She expected everyone else to do the same, and was nonplussed and rather shocked when they didn’t. Mother was more inclined to offer little acts of kindness as support, rather than the lend of an ear, so the only indication I had that she was sympathetic to my plight was that I enjoyed quite a lot more of my favourite meals for a while and, for a few weeks, she stopped reminding me that it was high time I found somewhere to live other than her spare room. As for Don, the whole thing must have been a very sad reminder of his own lost little girl, Diana.

  I reasoned that, if I felt so isolated and lonely in grief, then Nicci must have felt herself virtually abandoned, which is why, despite the wretchedness of it, I tried to visit her as often as possible. I felt sorry and worried for her; she was only a scrap after all, just about school age.

  Apart from my worries about Nicci, I think that I visited so often because I needed to touch base with others who had been present when we had all lost Valerie. Although I don’t think I was aware of that aspect at the time, it was more of an instinct than anything. There was always this underlying anxiety about the family, particularly Nicci, that nagged away in the back of my mind, however hard I tried to dodge it – and I often tried very hard indeed.

  Because I had been the one who was with Valerie when she died, I felt responsible – even, in some obscure way, as if I was to blame. For a long time afterwards, I felt guilty that I had made no attempt to resuscitate her, even though I knew that all the oxygen in the world would be useless when her blood could no longer car
ry it to where it was needed. But I felt I should have tried, that I had given up too easily, that all I wanted was for her suffering – and ours – to end. In fact, in a way, it had been a relief when Valerie’s terrible, rasping breathing had finally stopped. It took many years before I could forgive myself for that.

  23

  Dr Kingdom’s Special Trial No.13

  The interviewing panel at the teachers’ training college decided to take a punt on me, and I was duly enrolled in the History Department of the Polytechnic of North London. I had got tired of the dead-end and very boring jobs that punctuated my much more interesting travels around Europe and North Africa, and had finally decided to try to get to grips with a proper, grown-up life by entering into one of the family professions – well, the respectable side of the family, anyway: Mother’s lot. They were all teachers and headteachers on Grandma’s side, and Methodist ministers on Grandfather’s. Working on the theory that the Church – any church – was not for me, I plumped for teaching.

  By the time I started college, I was living in a flat in Kilburn and had two new flatmates. Peter had followed his marriage by becoming a father – twice – then moving to Canada in very rapid succession. And I moved out to Kilburn. It may be a bit of a stretch of the imagination to suggest that Mother and Don’s next move, to the Outer Hebrides, was meant to ensure that once I was fully fledged, I ‘stayed bloody fledged’, but let’s just say that distance lent a good deal of enchantment to my mother’s view of me.

  At first, I enjoyed the teaching course. There were elements that I found difficult and stressful, but I turned out better at it than I would ever have imagined possible. I also made some new friends while I revelled in the student life. I had had enough experience of the real world to know what a privilege higher education was for me. I had never expected to get any, and I was both incredulous and grateful when I did. There was nothing I liked better than lounging about in a North London greasy spoon, drinking strong tea, eating artery-clogging nosh and chatting with pals about Life and the meaning of everything. I can’t remember what conclusions we came to, if any, but I really enjoyed trying to reach them.