Father looked at his watch often. That the hearse might be late was a disaster so terrible that Angela could not bear to contemplate it. But Father was looking at the time for another reason—he was awaiting the arrival of Sadie. Angela dreaded it. Sadie had telephoned the night before from her friend’s house and though she had obeyed instructions and agreed to come up there had been nothing in her voice to indicate that she appreciated the importance of behaving well. To everything Angela had said she had replied ‘Yeah, okay, okay,’ and what kind of guarantee could that be regarded as? Any distress she might have been feeling was not in evidence—curiosity about the details of Mother’s death yes, but concern no. But Sadie was to be the sole representative of the next generation and was needed as a symbol by Father.
‘She’s cutting it close,’ Father said, inspecting his watch yet again, holding it near to his eyes though he was not in the least short-sighted. ‘Very close,’ and he pursed his thin cracked lips and shook his head. ‘No need for it,’ he said.
‘She can hardly help the train being late,’ Angela murmured, smiling at Mother’s cousin who had come from Truro and was standing between Father and her, uncertain what the conversation was about and afraid to ask.
‘Could have caught an earlier train,’ Father growled.
‘There isn’t an earlier train,’ Angela said quietly, feeling that she ought not to contradict Father however wrong he was, ‘this was the first train of the day with the right connection.’ If Father said anything else she must let it go however provocative it turned out to be. But he said nothing, only clicked his tongue with annoyance, and she turned to doing her duty by the Truro cousin.
None of it seemed to have anything to do with Mother. The longer she stood there making fatuous remarks the more Angela was seized by an insane and almost irresistible desire to go into the little downstairs bedroom to sit with the coffin. It would make more sense to sit quietly beside it than it did going through with this pointless ritual. And yet to Father it was clearly not pointless. He gave the lie to her every thought on the subject, demonstrating as he did the way in which an obsession with the details of the funeral could successfully opiate grief. There he stood, implacable, working himself into a rage over times and clothes and expressions in voices, unable to let loose his anguish except in complaint. Watching him Angela saw bow vital Sadie’s presence was becoming. He was building it up into a big thing. If she did not arrive in time to go to the church in the family car, or if she arrived wearing her dirty jeans and torn shirt and with black nail varnish on her nails, then she would deflect the whole course of Father’s grief until it poured down upon her in an avalanche of abuse.
But any chance of that happening—and she could not decide whether it would have been a good or bad thing—was averted by the arrival of Sadie a quarter of an hour before the procession was due to leave. ‘Taxi,’ Father shouted, and everyone crowded to the window as though none of them had themselves arrived by taxi. Angela found herself shrinking back instead of moving forward as all the relatives craned to see who Father was getting so excited about. ‘It’s my grand-daughter,’ Father said loudly, with the most obvious satisfaction. ‘I’ll get the door,’ and he pushed past Valerie, whom he had left to open it all the other times. Angela was unable to hear or see how Sadie was greeted. She stayed at the other side of the crowded room and was the last to see her daughter. ‘Isn’t she like her grandmother,’ she heard someone say, and as Sadie’s face emerged from between so many others Angela saw that this was true. It was the first time in fifteen years of studying her daughter’s face minutely that she had ever seen it, but then it was the first time she had ever seen Sadie with her hair severely drawn back from her forehead and tied into a tight bunch at the back of her neck. It was the first time she had ever seen that thick tangled mess smooth and shining after what must have been hours of brushing. The transformation was startlingly complete. Sadie was wearing a plain, dark-grey dress that had been bought for her by Angela and shoved immediately to the back of a cupboard. Until she saw her in this dress Angela realized she had never known Sadie’s shape. That was Mother’s too—slim, but broad-hipped and long-legged with a softness about her whole outline that was normally entirely concealed by her masculine clothing. She did not recognize the shoes, nor the necklace, nor the cameo brooch worn as Mother would have worn it on the collar of the dress.
Ben went over and kissed Sadie but Angela still stayed where she was, nodding a greeting that Sadie acknowledged with the faintest of smiles and a slightly mocking gesture of her hand. Angela wondered if they were being offered a parody—Sadie was pleased to be doing it their way and might later guy her own performance. But even if that were so there was no hint of it for anyone else to see. Sadie stayed beside Father those last few minutes, her radiance casting some light over him so that he seemed less gnarled and grey beside her. She spoke gravely and with deference to all who addressed her and by doing so lifted from everyone that sense of oppression created by Father’s unyielding mood. They were all almost light-hearted by the time the cars came and they got into them in a way which Father, before Sadie’s arrival, would have condemned as being offensively jolly.
Angela had expected the journey to be made in complete silence but to her surprise Father began straight away to question Sadie about her Youth Hostelling. Sadie gave an exact itinerary, which pleased him, and added details about the weather and the journey by train there and back which normally it would have been quite impossible to get from her. Only as they swung through the gates of the church did Father say ‘No talking now,’ very severely and they all sat up straight and still. The tears began to flow down Valerie’s face at the sight of Mother’s beloved church and the deepest gloom settled upon Angela. The church was so personal—it had meant so much to Mother all through her life. She hated any Sunday when she could not go to church and there had been too many of them in the last few years. Father raged against what ‘that place’ did to her. He swore that it was all that damned sitting and standing and kneeling, forever bobbing up and down, that exhausted her and was even responsible for her illness. Sometimes he went with her to supervise her actions and as he forced Mother to sit throughout the singing of any hymn that had more than two verses he would mouth ‘She’s disabled’ at the congregation around him. They would smile with embarrassment and nod and bury themselves in their hymn books.
The Vicar was waiting on the steps. Father detested him as he detested all clerics. The very sight of a dog collar enraged him. He thought clerics were hypocrites and soft and above themselves and he scorned them—yet Angela noticed how quickly he hid his scorn in subservient gestures. ‘A true servant of our Lord,’ the Vicar murmured, ‘a real Christian.’ Father merely nodded and busied himself organizing his little party into a procession to follow the coffin. Mother had said there were to be no flowers but Angela had disobeyed her. She watched Father’s face closely. The coffin had gone into the hearse with nothing on top of the dark wood. It came out with a dozen white roses on top. ‘Right,’ Father said impatiently, ‘come on—let’s after it.’
The church was packed, every row full almost to the end. When they sang Mother’s favourite hymn—or the one she and Valerie had chosen to remember as her favourite—the singing rose and swelled and filled the church gloriously with a rich, vibrant sound—nothing thin or reedy but a full-bodied chorus so vigorous that Angela looked about her in awe. Father must surely be gratified. He would dwell upon it afterwards and say ‘She would have been pleased’ without admitting he was also pleased. She noted the awkward way in which he was standing—the way that had always irritated Mother—clutching at the back of the pew in front not for support but because he did not know what to do with his hands. Valerie, in a state of near convulsion at his side, clearly annoyed him, but even as she saw this Angela also saw him frowning at her too and knew that her calmness and detachment annoyed him no less. Only Sadie succeeded in combining dignity with a slightly tremulous air, which
was how Mother would have borne herself.
The Vicar’s talk was flatteringly long. He dwelt at length on the service Mother had given to the church. He spoke of how she had once run Bible Class and of her work for the Women’s Guild and the Sunday School and her long association with the League of Friends and the help she had given to support missionaries and of her steady contributions to the Parish Magazine and he thanked her for the thousands of flowers she had regularly donated from her garden to fill the church Sunday after Sunday. (Father flinched slightly at that. He had begrudged every bloom.) The Vicar said nobody would ever forget Mother’s kindness and willingness to help others. He said she left a devoted husband and family and many, many friends, all of whom admired the courage with which she had faced a long series of illnesses. Valerie had to sit down. Father looked surreptitiously at his watch. At last it was all over and they prepared themselves to go to the cemetery. Angela caught Sadie’s eye and was surprised to see how shaken her daughter was.
They once took Mother shopping to Biba, the South Kensington department store that at the time offered a kind of theatre of shopping, a place where the look of the interior, all purple and black and silver, matched the absurdity of most of the things for sale. Sadie, aged eight, loved it. She ran across the acres of thick carpet and up and down the staircases exclaiming at the wonderful treasures she saw, heaped up in brilliant piles of colour on the floor. Mother, who thought it all silly, and could not for the life of her see that it evoked any nineteen-thirties that she had known, worried that Sadie might get lost. They had lunch in the restaurant, Mother tense with disapproval. ‘It’s just fun Mother,’ Angela said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with that.’ ‘The waste,’ Mother muttered, ‘you can’t buy anything real—it isn’t a real shop at all.’ They went down in the lift. At the ground floor when they all got out Sadie got left behind—they turned just in time to see Sadie trapped at the back behind some people who were not getting out. The doors closed. Mother panicked. Angela was nonchalant. ‘She’ll just go up and come down again,’ she said. But the lift reappeared without Sadie. Mother became hysterical. ‘Sadie is perfectly sensible,’ Angela said, ‘she’s simply got out at the wrong floor and she’ll realize in a minute and come down. She won’t be in the least bothered.’ Five minutes went by and at last out came Sadie—but trembling, tearful with fright. ‘For goodness sake,’ Angela said as Sadie catapulted into her arms and clung to her, ‘I wouldn’t have thought a little thing like that would upset you.’ ‘Oh you,’ was all Mother said, but she made a great fuss of Sadie and throughout the rest of the day referred frequently to her ordeal. That night, relating the incident to Ben when he came home, Mother said, ‘And of course Angela would have it that Sadie would be enjoying herself—the idea—she doesn’t know the half that poor child suffers.’
The crematorium, a new building up at the top of the old cemetery, was hideous. Angela could not understand why anyone could prefer cremation if these were the circumstances in which it had to take place. She wished, as they all packed into the soulless chapel that was not even remotely like a chapel, that they were instead winding their way up through the cypress trees in the adjoining cemetery. She wished, as Mother’s coffin glided silently through two open velvet curtains, that it was instead being lowered into a dark and deep hole. She wished that in place of central heating fumes—gusts of warm, cloying air that rose up from the floor—she could feel the wind on her face. She wished the words ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes’ could be given some meaning, as would have happened if they had been surrounded by the evidence of it. She wished most of all that this was not Sadie’s first funeral, inevitably imprinted on her mind forever more as what a funeral was—two parts, church and crematorium, not coming together in any grand emotional finale but staying forever separate, the one real and moving, the other false and tawdry.
They stood at the door afterwards waiting for their cars while the next party unpacked themselves from theirs. ‘Damn,’ Father said, ‘hanging about like this,’ and before anyone could restrain him he had set off down the main path, head bent, arms flaying his sides. They all watched, obediently continuing to wait for the cars Father had spurned, knowing that they would have to endure his contempt later. Before he was at the gates that led onto the main road, the cars had arrived and they all piled hurriedly in. ‘If you could stop just past the gates,’ Angela said, ‘to pick up my Father.’ But she knew he would not be picked up. As their car slowed down he waved it on, his arms working agitatedly like a bookie’s on a racecourse, and crossed defiantly to the other side of the street. ‘Wait,’ Sadie said, ‘stop.’ ‘It’s no good,’ Angela said, ‘he won’t come.’ But she had misunderstood. Sadie did not want to persuade Father to join them—she wanted to join him. Out she jumped and ran after him leaving them all open-mouthed.
They were home in two minutes. For the first time in three days Valerie stopped crying and hurled herself into the kitchen, expecting Angela to do likewise. An amazing array of food was put on the table in a short time but nobody would touch it until Father appeared. The sight of so much pastry—pies and tarts and vol-au-vents galore—nauseated Angela but everyone else eyed the spread hungrily including Ben, whom she would have liked to be above such things. She positioned herself at the window to watch her Father and Sadie, who could not be long. She knew she could not have got out, as her daughter had done, to walk with Father. She would have been too afraid. Why had Sadie done it? Sadie, who did nothing out of pity, or not for her mother at least. Again, thinking about it as she craned to see Father and Sadie turn the corner, Angela was forcibly reminded that her daughter was not her, and she was not to her daughter as Mother had been unto her. It seemed to her as she stood there that to think otherwise had been the source of all her confusion. Relationships did not repeat themselves and she had deluded herself that they must and that she therefore had a duty to prevent this happening.
Leaning listlessly against the window frame—Father would tell her off for creasing the curtains—Angela listened to the conversations around her. There was not much talk of Mother. There had somehow not been any talk of Mother since her death. She had imagined endless reminiscing, had even looked forward to it, but none was forthcoming. She looked towards Aunt Frances, the sister closest to Mother, and wished she would speak openly and tenderly of Mother but Frances talked to everyone about her sciatica and nothing else. Listening to all the drivel around her disgust rose like bile in Angela’s throat—a thick phlegm of disgust that they could all be so callous and insensitive. Though she knew it was Father’s theme she found herself thinking ‘nobody appreciated her’ and the maudlin thought carried her away until an image of Mother’s sweet face filled her vision and brought the first tears of the day to her eyes.
She wiped them away quickly as Father and Sadie came in at the gate. Father stopped on the garden path and pointed out something growing to Sadie, who stooped obligingly to look at it. Then, as though the house were empty, Father took out his key and opened the door. Loudly, he scraped his feet on the mat. There was a trailing off of words—sentences were left suspended in mid-air while Father made his entrance. A few people decided they had trains to catch, trains never mentioned before as leaving so early. ‘Nobody eating?’ Father said, perfectly amiable, and a relieved crowd thronged round the food. For half an hour the company was solid and convivial and then it began to melt away. ‘Going already?’ Father said to each departing coward, staring straight at them. None dared prevaricate. They nodded and he said with emphasis, ‘Well, thanks for sparing the time. All the best now.’ Within less than an hour there were only five of them left. Sadie sat at the table eating cake after cake while Valerie trudged backwards and forwards clearing plates. The noise she made ostentatiously gathering together knives and teaspoons seemed ear splitting. Father stood, arms folded across his chest, looking into the garden. Angela wished he would put on his gardening clothes and get out there but according to his own invented code that was impossible
. He would not work in the garden for a week, nor would he put on the television though the radio was permissible.
‘I was thinking,’ Angela said, ‘why don’t you come back with us tomorrow—it would take your mind off things.’ She knew even before Father said ‘No, no, no,’ that it was a stupid thing to have said. Trewicks did not want their minds taken off things—they approved of minds clinging to whatever tragedy was in hand and distraction from it was not something they desired. Father would sit it out. He would wilfully remove from his daily existence any crumbs of comfort. There could be no possibility of helping him.
They sat in a circle round the fireplace drinking cups of tea. At nine o’clock Angela said, ‘I’m going to bed early.’
‘Oh you’ll do that,’ Father said sarcastically, ‘oh yes, you’ll do that.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? I’m tired. It’s been a long hard day.’
‘For some,’ Father said.
‘For all of us.’
‘Some more than others.’
‘All right then—some more than others. But I’m tired. I can’t see what’s wrong in going to bed early.’
‘You never could,’ Father said bitterly, ‘you’d never sit, always going off. Mother used to be very hurt by it, very hurt.’
Angela said nothing. She knew better. She sat very still and started to count to a hundred in her head.
Mother Can You Hear Me? Page 29