by Bel Mooney
At last the coroner was speaking. The journalists scribbled and curious strangers looked at Paul. ‘I record a verdict that Dr David Anthony Anderson, of Little Priors, Winterstoke in the county of Somerset, took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed, in the manner described by the pathologist Dr Michael Evans, that is to say by the ingestion of …’
Paul stopped listening; he stared in front of him, white-faced, as the voice continued, absorbed somehow by the warm wood of the walls, deadened and soporific. He felt accused, and imagined for a wild moment that he was in the dock at the Old Bailey, on trial for murder, for murdering his own father, with white, ballooning faces staring at him from the public gallery so that he felt their repugnance settle on his head; he wanted to scream that it was all a mistake. All a mistake … and in fantasy it was possible to rerun the tape, stepping down from the dock, greeting the father alive once more, shrinking back into childhood, and putting right from the beginning whatever it was that had gone wrong. ‘It must have been my fault,’ he thought.
As they drove away he repeated, ‘She should have come,’ and for once Daphne did not try to defend. ‘Yes, she should,’ came the reply, and they drove on in silence, united by relief that it was over.
‘I suppose I’ll have to make all the arrangements. She won’t – and there’s nobody else.’
‘Conrad and I will help, you know that, Paul.’
He glanced sideways, and thought again how like a popular image of a mother she was: large and plump and smelling of clean soap. He was surprised by the strength of his affection, but merely grunted, ‘It’s O.K. I can manage.’
‘But you hate things like that. You’ve never organised … I mean, how will you know what to do, dear?’
‘Oh, I’ll find out. It’s not beyond me, y’know, although I always seem so hopeless. I’ve rung them at work; I can take as long as it needs. They’re very good.’ He had a sudden vision of the theatre at night, the warmth and buzz of people, the latecomers hoping for returned tickets, the posters and leaflets giving details of future productions, and the sound of music students entertaining people in the foyer with jazz or chamber music. So great was the contrast between that life, his real life, and the misery of this present that still seemed unreal, that it gave Paul a physical pain in his stomach – a gripe of longing and discontent as powerful as any grief.
He had already made his plan, and drove off to put it into action as soon as he had dropped Daphne at her house. It was a whim. He remembered the place from a long time ago, and searching the Yellow Pages under the heading ‘Funeral Directors’ he had seen it once more, triggering the memory. Going there would be absurd somehow, in keeping with his mood. It was a mad place; Eleanor had disapproved, when they passed it years ago.
When he had tried to tell her about it yesterday, Eleanor had waved a hand and told him to do as he pleased. They had shouted at each other then, Paul furious at the pain he felt on his father’s behalf.
‘Why should I take an interest?’ she had asked coldly, turning the pages of Homes and Gardens with a shrug. ‘Of course, church is out of the question now, Paul, or if it’s not it should be. They might have changed the rules; the Church of England is always changing the rules these days and always for the worse.’ Flick, flick: a picture of an empty interior, ceiling swathed in pleated fabric, dinner table beneath set with gleaming glass, china, and silver in readiness for invisible guests. ‘You handle it, Paul. I really don’t want to discuss it.’ Flick, flick: a picture of food, side-lit, showing gleaming textures of aspic and fruit, and dark glistening sauce in a white bowl, like blood against alabaster flesh … Flick, flick, flick: the pages substituted their images like lantern lectures, unreal and surrounded by darkness.
‘Why can’t you stop reading that thing?’
She placed the magazine on the table beside her, and folded her hands in her lap like an obedient schoolgirl, but there was irony in the look of expectancy on her face. ‘Well?’
‘I wish you’d talk to me, Mum. You should; it would help.’
‘Ah, but help who?’
‘Both of us, of course.’
‘I would talk to you, Paul, but I don’t think you want to hear what I have to say.’
‘You don’t have to be so … so bitter.’
‘Don’t I?’
That was how it always was: her challenge and that calm, sterile look. Paul fled before it, turning sometimes to yelp defiance, but incapable of grappling with her implacable sense of injury. ‘Well, say something to me,’ he pleaded. She said, ‘Whenever you ask me to talk, to give in, or not to bottle up my feelings, or any of those cosy things Daphne says, I have one reply, Paul. It’s a question, really. I want you to tell me how David could do this to me. How could he? You can’t answer that, can you? The only answer I can give is one that drives any love, or pity, out of me.’
Tears of fury filled his eyes. ‘God, you’re so self-centred! How could he do this to me? (he mimicked her tone, parodying it into a whine) That’s all you care about, when the only question I’m interested in is how he could do it to himself. But you’re not interested in that, are you?’
That was why he loved being in his car, away from the house. He drove recklessly through empty country roads, cutting through narrow lanes, passing through villages built from identical Ham Hill stone. House, churches, pubs, village shops; Coombe Serly, Billford, North Pemberton, South Pemberton, Claytonford, Monkswick; gift shops, Victorian schools with dates on the gables, modern estates with well-tended lawns, Georgian rectories … Paul’s car passed through them all, and he looked around, it seemed, for the first time in years.
First of all he noticed the light, pale and soft from a hazy sky, illuminating without harshness and softening the deepest shadows to violet and mauve. This countryside was gentle; people came to it in summer from the harsh north and flat east, from London, Manchester and Birmingham, to exclaim over its curving fields and tall hedgerows still untouched by the bulldozer, so that wild flowers could grow undisturbed by human greed. ‘It’s beautiful,’ Paul thought, surprising himself. In that moment some of his tension eased, and his shoulders, hunched over the wheel, relaxed a little. Something had happened, and it had happened here. It was to this region his parents had moved – for his sake, they said: ‘London’s a dreadful place to bring up a child.’ His mother had wanted the move, he had learnt, but his father had been honest about his doubts. ‘I wish we’d stayed in London,’ Paul once told him, with adolescent discontent, ‘where there’s so much to do. Not like here. It’s dead round here.’ David had laughed. ‘Not dead but sometimes sleeping,’ he had said. ‘You know, Paul, I used to think that too. I thought that the city represented real life, with real problems, and that this was an escape. Now I know that people round here are born, fall in love, get married, have children, and die, just like people anywhere – in Nigeria, or in California, or in Glasgow, or in Paris. There isn’t very much difference, Paul, apart from the physical and material ones.’
Paul had protested that those are the differences that count, embarking on a passionate indictment of inequality, but his father had interrupted him, smiling gently. ‘Oh yes, I do know. And you’re quite right to be so aware of that. But beyond is what I’m talking about. Maybe it’s being a doctor … it makes you aware of the amazing sameness of people. Oh I think of all my patients as individuals, which they are of course. But honestly, if I was to set up the richest practice in Harley Street, it would be the sameness I’d notice. In the really important things – like their worries over their children, the slowing down in middle age, and wondering at night what will happen and why, and that awful fear of death which haunts people – in all that people are remarkably similar, no matter where they live. Have you ever seen – I know you have – a TV documentary showing an Asian or an African woman crying over her baby, dead from starvation or disease?’ Paul had nodded. ‘Well, believe me, there’s no difference in the quality of her tears, no difference betw
een her suffering and that of the most devoted American mother who has reared her children on Dr Spock. We always assume – or some of us do – that death isn’t so bad for them because they expect it. Well, twenty-three years as a GP has convinced me that nobody, not anybody, expects it. And that’s why they find it so terrifying.’
How many years ago was it, that conversation? Paul calculated; seven he guessed; he must have been about fifteen. It had impressed him at the time, because he had disagreed. Now he remembered his father’s remarks with astonishing vividness, and the sound, the near-presence of David with him in the car disturbed him, as if he had suddenly stumbled across something he had forgotten he had lost, recognising it in the instant as precious.
That’s why it terrifies them. And Eleanor sat rigidly in her armchair at home, turning over magazine pages with that sharp twist of the wrist, unyielding in her own terror, and drawing anger as well as compassion on her head. Even old Daphne, the loyal, the meek, had begun to worry, which was her way of saying that her friend’s cold intransigence had started to test even her devotion. It was that untying of the centre knot, that loneliness surely, which made her afraid. That’s why it terrifies them. All of them the same, drawing back from each other in fear, not simply of vulnerability, but mainly of the enormous chasm David had opened up before them. ‘That’s why …
He saw the sign saying Tunneford, and slowed down. The sun was stronger now, the haze dispelled, the light clearer, so that the signpost, dry stone walls and hedges were thrown into crisp focus. A magpie darted across the road with a flash of sharp black and white, making Paul jump. The scarlet of a postbox in an ivy-covered wall caught his eye; everything seemed illuminated, almost glittering, and he gazed around like someone in a new land: astonished and awestruck.
What was wrong with her should have been obvious, but it shocked him too much to see it clearly. Now it lay in a pool of light, smaller and more pathetic than her anger, her rage at being betrayed or deceived or humiliated, or any of the other words she had spat at him when he asked where the photograph of his father had gone. (The silver frame stood empty like a disquieting blank page.) For beyond the anger, what was there? ‘She’s hurt, Paul,’ Daphne had said, perspiring from her walk, with a curious smell of lemon soap, sweat and sex, as if at last her generosity of flesh and spirit could not be contained within the nervous bounds she set. Hurt, yes; he had nodded, for it made sense. Daphne understood that, because it was how she would react. But would she show the same terror as well? Eleanor, he realised, was furious with David simply because she was left behind, and her tiny terror scuttled around desperately in its bright spotlight, like a small blind creature trying to find its way back into the dark.
The place was just as he remembered it; if anything, slightly more bizarre. He pulled his car under the shadow of a cedar, and got out. The thud of his door made no echo; the birdsong and surrounding quietness enveloped its small sound, closing again around the disturbance. He looked across the road, and could not stop the automatic smile at what he saw.
It was a converted cottage, with a small garden shop immediately adjoining, outside which empty plant pots and rustic ornaments and gnomes stood in rows. As if in rivalry to these a large scarlet notice proclaimed ‘Garden of Delights’ in yellow fairground lettering; it was fixed squarely in the centre of the wall of the building, above an array of ancient tomb-stones, cemented in place. Each headstone had been scrubbed clean, and its lettering and carved ornamentation picked out in bright gloss paint so that lily borders stood out in vivid yellow, white and green, and a death’s head stone bright white, with gleaming black eye sockets. The conventional, pious phrases … ‘Sacred to the Memory’, and ‘Here lyeth the Remains’, were delicatedly traced in orange and purple and bright blue, and the names of the dead gleamed crimson. Someone had taken hours doing it, Paul thought, though it must have been years ago; they had passed here once or twice when he was still living at home. Eleanor had pursed her lips and said that the display was tasteless.
Another sign – this one sticking out like a pub sign over the little gate at the side – bore the words ‘Freeman and Sons – Stonemasons and Funeral Directors’ in golden flourishes on a rich blue background. Paul was looking at it when a middle-aged woman emerged from the garden shop with a wooden nesting box in her hands, and placed it on top of a pile of flowerpots. She saw him as she straightened, and said ‘Good afternoon,’ in a tone that made it a question. He crossed the road, and mumbled a greeting, still staring at the tombstones on Freemans’ wall. The woman looked at him curiously. ‘Are you lost?’ she asked.
‘No, I want … I mean, I’ve come here.’ He pointed at the wall. She sniffed and looked disapproving; ‘Oh, you want Mr Freeman. What do you think of his little display, then?’
‘It’s crazy.’ Paul could not help grinning again, at the sight of vivid paint where there should be lichen, ivy, and mould.
‘Hmm,’ she said, folding her arms and following his gaze. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘Does it put people off?’
‘Well, it should, but he says it’s good for trade.’ She jerked a thumb at the Funeral Director’s sign. ‘People come here and take photographs. A lot of them like it, but I must say it leaves me cold.’
Paul could not control his mouth. ‘Already?’ he said with exaggerated concern. ‘Well, it certainly leaves them cold, doesn’t it?’ And with a cavalier wave of his arm in the direction of the painted headstones, he pushed open the little wooden gate.
The ‘garden of delights’ was a cross between a sculptor’s workshop and an Italian graveyard, a long yard crammed with pieces of marble, urns, carved angels holding books, sundials, and stone benches with prices chalked on them. A sound of chinking came from a long workshop at the end, and against this rested new, blank headstones, some plain rectangles of York stone, others pale marble carved in the form of a closed book, waiting for the name on the cover. Here too were the jokes. Tacked on the wall near these ‘books’ a little wooden notice said, ‘Don’t wait for your family’s judgement! Buy your own stone and write your own epitaph today!’ A carved sundial had a little placard wedged into the soil at its base, saying, ‘Why not put one on your plot? Time passes, and so do you.’ Just inside the gate, where Paul stood, was a large, elaborately decorated object as tall as Paul’s chest, rather like a square stone font. It had a small lid on its top surface: stone carved in the shape of a swathe of lilies, a curving stalk forming a handle. It was hideous, yet magnificent. The notice at its foot proclaimed:
The Cinerarium
DO AS THEY DO IN GREECE
HAVE ONE IN YOUR GARDEN
NOT SO FAR FOR THE FAMILY
TO WALK.
Paul went as if to lift the lid then changed his mind; in this place there might well be real ashes inside.
He pushed open the door marked ‘Office’, and a bell rang. Nobody came at first; he waited in a small old-fashioned room in front of a polished mahogany counter, noticing the low ceiling, the murky portraits on the walls, and an ancient wooden filing cabinet in the corner of the room, with scraps of paper protruding from all its drawers as if they had been closed in a hurry.
‘Hallo, can I help you?’
Paul stared at the young man, a few years older than himself, who emerged from the door at the back of the shop. He wore jeans, an open-necked shirt, and a waistcoat, with no jacket. Paul realised that his imagination had already written an eccentric, Dickensian old man into the scene, someone wearing an old black suit and certainly with a watch-chain across his front … and so he blinked in surprise at this intruder. ‘Er, … I was looking for Mr Freeman.’
‘Which one?’
‘I’m sorry?
‘There are three Mr Freemans. I’m Sam Freeman, my father is John, and my grandfather is James – just about. I’m the fourth generation, actually. We’ve been in Tunneford for yonks.’ He was impossibly cheerful, and completely out of place. As if reading Paul’s thought, he je
rked a thumb at the large portrait over the fireplace, of a gaunt-faced man, with grey hair, whose face peered wanly from a gloomy background. ‘He looks the part, doesn’t he? My great-grandfather.’ Paul narrowed his eyes, and made out the name ‘Robert Michael Freeman’ on the small brass plate in the gilt frame.
‘Have you always had the same, er, business?’ Paul asked.
‘Oh yeah, but we’re running down the funeral side now. That was my Dad’s main interest. I’m more for the stone work myself.’
Paul was interested. ‘Did your father teach you?’
‘Yes, and his Dad taught him. Angels, cherubs, inscriptions, books closed or open, garden benches and tables, and repairs to the noses of disciples on the outsides of abbeys and cathedrals – you name it, Freeman’s does it. You go to one of those posh garden centres and see a design you like – table, round stone bench round a tree, anything – and draw it for me, I’ll copy it at half the price!’ He grinned with such pride that Paul had no choice but to grin back.
‘Sounds good, I’ll remember it. Er, if you don’t mind me asking, whose idea was all that outside?’
‘Oh, you mean all the painted gravestones?’ Paul nodded.
‘It was my grandfather who started it, and my Dad added a lot more. All the signs around the yard are his. I’ve started adding my own bits by copying gargoyles from churches in my spare time, and putting them under our roof. Some of them are unbelievably funny.’