The Anderson Question

by Bel Mooney

  ‘But why do you do it? Why was it done in the first place?’

  ‘Why did you come in here?’ the other man countered.

  ‘Because I saw it, ages ago.’

  ‘That’s it then, isn’t it?’

  It was not good enough for Paul, and he frowned, refusing to believe that he had been caught by an advertising trick. ‘Yes, but, isn’t there a reason? Do you agree with it all?’

  Sam Freeman laughed, with an openness, a joy, Paul found hard to understand. ‘Look,’ he said in a voice that was almost cajoling, ‘people like this place! They come here, some of them, really miserable because someone’s died, and they see all the headstones and the paint and the bright colours, and it makes them smile, sometimes for the first time. We’re saying something, just by being here.’

  ‘That death’s funny?’

  ‘No … well, yes! In a way. In the old days there was more of a sense of humour about it than now. Do you know the old inscription – it’s a real one somewhere?:

  ‘Here lies the wife of Roger Martin,

  She was a good wife to roger – that’s sartin.

  “Roger” meant “make love to”. I wish we had that one on our wall. See, though? Old Roger Martin probably missed her but he wanted the world to know she was good in bed! That seems to me to be a healthy attitude towards the whole business.’

  ‘Healthy?’

  ‘Sorry, the jokes are everywhere. You can’t help it.’

  Paul looked at him quizzically. ‘But isn’t it all a bit desperate?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, that too, in a way. As the man said, it’s not that I’m afraid of death, it’s just that I don’t want to be around when it happens!’

  Paul felt the laughter rise within him, bubbling to the surface like a hidden spring. He opened his mouth, and tittered; the small sound swelling, fatter and rounder like a balloon blown up by a child, until at last it burst in a rush of air, a guffaw he could not stop. Tears filled his eyes; he laughed with a hiccoughing sound that made Sam Freeman join him, so that they both stood laughing helplessly in the small, dusty office.

  ‘Hey,’ Sam said at last, spluttering slightly. ‘What did the hurrying smoker say to the undertaker?’ Unable to speak, Paul just shook his head. ‘Can’t stop, Coffin!’ came the wheezy reply, so that they started again, snickering together like schoolboys.

  ‘Oh God,’ Paul said at last, breathlessly, ‘and it wasn’t even funny.’

  Sam Freeman thrust his hands into his waistcoat pocket and surveyed Paul with curiosity. ‘I’ve just realised. You didn’t tell me what you came here for.’

  ‘You’re not going to believe it.’

  ‘You want to choose your own headstone? Well I warn you, they won’t allow any weeping angels in the church yards nowadays. It’s just a square of shiny marble and a bag of green glass chippings, and God help you if you want to have anything funny written up. None of that “Under this sod lies another’’, today!’

  ‘I want to arrange a funeral … er, a cremation.’

  He expected the smile to fade, and it did, just a fraction. But Sam Freeman’s light did not die at all, and Paul was relieved. ‘Is it somebody close to you?’

  ‘My father.’

  ‘I’m glad you were laughing then. You know I heard of an old man who died, and he’d always loved jazz, so at his funeral they had a band playing “When the Saints go Marching In”. I think that’s fantastic, don’t you? I mean, why not?’

  ‘Why not?’ Paul echoed, thinking of the cancelled memorial service, and his mother’s tasteful reading from Wordsworth, and the tight-mouthed talk of Winterstoke people, and that wild grey hair around a white face, and suddenly all those images were bound together incongruously by the image of a jazz band, whose syncopated rhythms danced across his brain. ‘Lord, I wanna be in that number, When the Saints go marching in…’ Maybe that was it. Perhaps he had believed something none of us knew about and wanted to go on, ahead of us all. Maybe he was really happy, and nobody realised.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. I was just thinking about him, that’s all.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d miss mine. But there you are.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want to give me all the details?’

  ‘It’s a few miles away, does that matter? Newtonstowe.’

  The other man looked at him with some surprise. ‘It makes no difference to us, really. But there are people nearer, loads of undertakers in Newtonstowe. Why …?’

  Paul ran his hand through his hair, feeling it spring up, then he rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment. ‘I don’t know really. It was a feeling I had, something I remembered. We passed here years ago, and my mother thought all that outside was really bad taste. But Dad and I laughed. I remember him laughing, a nice laugh, like a giggle. You know what he said? He said, the one thing you can’t do with death is bury it. I remember him saying it. And we read out one of the inscriptions outside, the one about pigs. So anyway … that’s why I came.’

  ‘Come round here, and I’ll make you a coffee, and we’ll arrange it all, OK?’

  So he lifted the flap and went to the other side of the counter. And when, half an hour later he walked out into the sunlight, knowing that now his father was someone else’s responsibility, he stopped outside Freeman’s and turned back, reading the words aloud:

  Here lies John Higgs

  A famous man for killing pigs

  For killing pigs was his delight

  Both morning afternoon and night

  Both heat and cold did he endure

  Which no physician ere could cure

  His knife is laid his work is done

  I hope to heaven his soule has gone.

  He nodded at the headstone, as garishly painted as the rest, and smiled as if it were an old friend.

  I try to fix my mind on you, Eleanor, and Paul too, yet always my mind escapes. It has been like that for a long time now. I want to open my mouth and call to you, talk to you, although you will never hear. But maybe you will know one day, through blood and bone, when you listen to the faint wind I can hear now, and feel on my skin, and you remember that I came away. I came here. At home, in the village, it would be impossible. I need the freedom of this place, to talk to you.

  Eleanor, you must know me now at last, in this. I am not the same man who called on you, all those years ago, and dreaded your father’s questions about my career. I can picture you more vividly than any photograph: you had a stateliness even then, in those skimpy dresses with padded shoulders, and your hair dressed in a curious sausage-like roll round your head, like a renaissance page. I said to myself once, as I got off the bus and headed for your house in Pimlico, that if you didn’t say that you would marry me, I should never speak to anyone again – literally, never open my mouth. It was a challenge, a dare to myself, like the ones we made up as children – if you tread on a black line there will be a bear around the next corner … daring you to test it, to come face to face with the reality. I believed in the bear, and I believed in my own capacity for silence, but it was never tested: I always managed to miss the black lines, and you said Yes to me. A short reprieve, only temporary. I wanted some certainty; I wanted it to be true that you and I had to be together, a fixed point in the flux; and that any violation of that truth would mean the end of all things as I had known them. You used to call me romantic, with a note of tolerant disapproval in your voice, but you did not know how precise you were. You meant something soft and clinging, but the truth was blacker and more selfish. You told me you had to hide my letters in case your parents found them; ‘too romantic’ you said. Perhaps it was because I knew you were anchored in the earth that I loved you. I needed that tie; I needed the mysterious antidote to my vertigo, and only you could provide it.

  Oh, but married people stop looking at each other, and each new item of joint possession – a dining room table, a double bed, a set of kn
ives and forks, a child – adds to the glass mountain between them. It isn’t a complaint, Eleanor; it is just to say what you do not suspect – how very ordinary we were. Looking outwards, like everyone else; but rarely inwards together. Still, my certainty was you, and the only one I had. A good marriage is what everyone would say, and I echo it here with a passion you will never know. You handed me my raincoat and I refused it. Will you go on handing it to me forever, in an endless repetition of absent-minded concern? Will you, Eleanor? I want you to. I want you to be tender to me, although you will find it hard. A good marriage, good, good, good … I used to imagine being old with you. When we were both in our twenties it seemed centuries away, and yet I used to cultivate the thought – melancholic, you called me. The vision held out contentment to me, and for the sake of its promise I could believe in the present, and not mind the disappointments. But don’t allow me to talk of contentment now, because I stopped seeing the possibility, Eleanor, for me. Yet it is still there for you, and that is one of the things that spurs me now; though I have left my self with nothing, lean still see you in a white-haired future by the side of a fire – though the image glows in the distance from the other side of a chasm.

  When I try to think of Paul, my mind flits to my father, and I must try to make sense of that. I search for him, and the strange thing about this seeking is its motivation … so hard to express it … but an indescribable pity overwhelms me as I picture him in his old raincoat, carrying this shabby case and going about his business of healing. The firelight and my mother’s knee … all his happiness was obvious to me for years, and I came to resent it, because it shut me out. He was so obviously better than I, and a doctor, a proper doctor, not an actor who had long ago learnt all the lines and all the actions too well. His duty was real to him, his life force, and she understood it. Yet I cannot hold that goodness, that faith in my mind and at the same time picture its ending: the shrunken figure in a white hospital robe, face to face at last with the horror he had so often witnessed, and gasping out requests at the end, messages for his patients, wanting to tie up the ends – so good – and clutching in spirit his old stethoscope, until he dissolved into the mess of his own blood, faeces and vomit. Gone, my father, leaving me his legacy, and proud of me until the end; handing on to me his case. His death was far worse for me than hers, although he assured me that he had the comfort of joining her, and said I must not grieve. Remembering him I want to reach out my arms and fold him into me, and beg him to tell me how he could believe in them and love them in the face of his own decay; and I want to ask his forgiveness and his mercy too. Never. You never do that, and so I know that in my memory my father is diminished, for want of me. I left him alone, because sons can never retrieve their fathers … Perhaps he would not have liked it …? In any case, it is the flesh, always, which gets in the way.

  He handed on his bag to me; I am not handing it on to Paul. Is that why I link them, or because they look alike, or because I sense the gulf between us now, handed on as surely as a genetic disorder? Paul, I concentrate my mind on you now. I will not superimpose his face on yours, unfairly. I think you might understand in the end. You never wanted to be a doctor, so you’ll know what it is to be brave enough to strike out along a different path – like this one. Paul, you will be all right, I know that. Yet you always made the terrible mistake of thinking me disappointed in you. Gawky schoolboy, sticking out your lower lip when I rebuked you for your abysmal maths results. Skinny teenager, always arguing and knocking things off shelves, and sliding the comb through your bleached yellow hair with a grin, knowing that Eleanor’s reaction would be the same as that of the rest of the village. Ill-fitting young man at last, throwing the bags into the back of your car and hardly waiting to say goodbye because of the pain of it. Your mother was hurt, Paul, but I knew why you were going, and I wanted you to escape as I had never been able to escape. No battered case for you. She was regretful; she always wanted you to ‘follow’ me, and to follow her own father and mine … poor boy. I didn’t wish it on you: the hopelessness and helplessness in the face of it all. The monotony of human misery. How could I possibly want you to follow me into that? No, I actually admire your guts, Paul, did I tell you?

  I know everybody will say I am depressed, and they will pity me as I pity my father, who had no choice. Maybe some of them will say I am mad. But I am not mad, Paul. It’s years since I felt so clear, and sane. It was will that I lacked, as well as honour … I think I have them both now. Conrad might understand me, I think. If I could summon up his spirit now and address it directly, I would apologise more to him than to anybody for not being honest. I think he knew. Never sad, never self-indulgent, Conrad has a boundless joy in past, present and future, and he cannot know how much it sustained me – me skulking in my darkness around its pool of light. But he hasn’t long now, by all reasonable expectations. He asked me once, and I evaded, but he knew. Heart and kidneys, not to mention the arthritis and the winding-down of old age … he knows what to expect. But he must finish Alice’s family tree, and he will, I think. There will be time for that, at least. ‘Looking for missing links,’ he once said, ‘that’s all my life’s work amounts to: solving little unimportant private mysteries so that people can know where they came from and gradually start to discover who they are.’ I can see his face now, round and pink and smiling; wise, Conrad is, beyond anything anyone around him can approach. Once I thought that made him lonely; now I know that such wisdom released you into a permanent communion with all living things, and with the dead too.

  Look at the sky and concentrate. It is done, and now I have to wait, that’s all. So easy; much more than I expected, but then we are lucky in our knowledge. It is so much harder for those who come to me day after day, wanting death, yet fearing it too; wanting release, but lacking the courage to give it, like a gift, to themselves.

  What is it I would say to them? Is it accepting at last that your fellow human beings, even the ones you love, are powerless to remedy your condition?

  Looking at them across an abyss, like illuminated puppets on the other side, waving to you and opening their mouths, calling loving things maybe, the words whirled away by the howling wind. I read about it all, you know, Paul. Lack of love was the phrase Freud and his friends made up. They said that if a man takes his own life it is because he has given up all hope of being loved by others. By others. No, it is too glib, too simple.

  Yet they will feel it is a sin, this lack of love. Once it was a crime, you know, and death did not protect you from the law, so you were prosecuted, and your dead body was ejected from the cemetery. In France, I read, there were places reserved for us, special Cemeteries for the likes of me where the coffin was passed over a wall that had no opening, none at all. Imagine the high brick wall, with no way in and no way out, and the wailing of the disgraced ones outside, the ones left behind. So the dead were punished for their sin, the monstrous temerity of assuming control over their own destinies. Impious arrogance of it, they must have said, those priests; whilst the family crept away to their shame.

  Father, mother, wife, son, my family … and I only have to explain this to two of them. But everything: the light, the wind, the clouds, the smell of the earth, the sounds of the birds, conspires against the telling. You will not be disgraced, Eleanor, because I shall make myself tell you, now whilst there is still time (and I have been careful that there will be time for this). I’ll tell you that it is not your fault, nor Paul’s, nor anybody’s. I am no longer tired, or sad, or angry with anyone or anything; instead I feel enormous with the joy of being able, at last, to act out what is true. But I must set it down, or else you will take the blame; you’ll spend the rest of your life thinking that I did this because you failed me. You will think I left you because you did not make me happy, when you did, oh yes, as much as it is ever possible.

  It’s harder to think now. I could have made a mistake. And what if, after all, I’m not fully in control? I must concentrate. That’s much bet
ter …

  Yet in the relief of this, the loosening, I think I shall fail; unable to unravel the whole truth of it, the truth which lies in my blood as deep as the infection within Jack’s thumb. I could not draw it out. Too deep; I palpated and could even see the tiny black head of it, buried deep in his flesh, but it was beyond my reach. Cellulitis … a simple thing, and common, and I told him to come back in two days. The penicillin would control the infection, but it had to come out, the foreign body must come out, Jack. You know that …

  Careful hands probing the splinter in my finger, and I cry out, afraid of pain. ‘Be brave, old man, be brave, David, I won‘t hurt you … there, there he is, see what it was that was hurting you?’ Tiny piece of wood in his tweezers, held up for me to see, and I squint at it, crying childishly because it has gone, and with the relief of not being hurt. ‘All over now, old man, run along now …’ and the gentle hand ruffles my hair and I go to find mother to show her the little hole where it was. No infection; clean; he made sure of that.

  Yet there all the same, from somewhere, despite his care. If I could run back now through great empty curves of time, and bury my face in the tweed jacket and smell the curious disinfected perfume of his flesh, could it be stopped, before the build-up of pus? Or was it there in the beginning, as now, and ever shall be … the truth in the blood which looked out at me from those dazed eyes on the pillow, when he smelt his own humiliation: the victim, the afraid … my father?

  Part Four

  Eleanor is by her dressing table. She sits down and looks in the mirror for a long time, and then takes her brush and starts, slowly and deliberately, to tidy her hair. Increasing the force of her strokes she pulls her head back, stretching her neck and arm, enjoying the rhythm of her own movement, like a ritual of beating. At last her hair, electrified, stands out around her head, waving, like a strange sea creature pulled by deep currents. She puts down the silver brush (‘to E with love from D’) and rests her elbows on the glass top, pulling the skin of her cheeks taut with outstretched fingers. It looks better, younger; she can see in that parody of a face, almost Chinese from the stretching, her own self at twenty, and she contemplates it with satisfaction. When she relaxes her fingers it falls back into its normal tracery of lines and minute folds, yet it is still not unsatisfactory to her. Handsome, she thinks. Her eyes, staring into the mirror, are glazed, as if stunned with the effort of sealing off their memories. A good complexion cream, and then beige foundation; a dusting of loose powder, followed by grey eyeshadow and brown mascara … she looks at herself critically. Some eyebrow pencil is needed, but first, her hair. She takes it and winds it and twists it tightly up to the back of her head, with such force that tears come to her eyes. The hairpins stab her, but she does not notice, for she is doing this to herself. Then she stops and stares again, frowning at the mirror. She bares her teeth, horrified at the hideous wolf-like creature who suddenly peers back at her from that pale land inside the glass, making its judgement on the untidy bedroom, the dressing-gown thrown on the floor, the bed unmade for days, and the poseur at the dressing table. She relaxes her face, but the monster is still there, watching her. She will humanise it, she will make it pretty so that it can be made welcome. Eleanor takes the eyebrow pencil and draws enormous curving eyebrows above her own, arching with mild surprise on to her forehead like those of a clown. Lipstick now; she opens her drawer and pulls out the scarlet one she wore but rarely for dinner parties, the one David said was too bright. She smears it on her mouth in great glistening sweeps, going outside its narrow outline to create something fuller and more generous. She bares her teeth again, but this time it is a smile she sees on that creature’s face, not a snarl. But it is pale; it has lived too long in the dark. Two large coins of colour on the cheeks with the too-bright lipstick, then a vigorous rubbing, and at last the reflection is warmed. It looks at her, garish and absurd, but not frightening any more. Because she is no longer frightened of it, Eleanor wants revenge. She looks around and picks up the eyebrow pencil, then drags it viciously across the skin of her upper lip, scoring in a moustache.