She let the curtain fall. Might as well get dressed now. She had to start early if she were going to make the funeral. She hadn’t been invited—didn’t exist for David’s family except as an ugly rumour, a rude voice on the phone—but she had managed to discover all the details: time, place, date. First a Requiem Mass in a church called The Holy Redeemer in the faceless Midlands town where David’s parents lived, followed by cremation. The police had finally sent the body back, released it to the local undertaker who had shoved it in a transit coffin and driven it by van to a funeral parlour nearer David’s home. She could feel the bumping of the van in her wounded finger, the throbbing of the engine, the lurching of the coffin over uneven pitted roads.
She opened her wardrobe, took out a plain grey skirt. Her two black dresses were both too party-ish. She should be wearing widow’s weeds, tearing out her hair. Her hair was newly waved, glossy with conditioner. Chris had set it for her last night. She glanced in the mirror. She looked too spruce and healthy for a funeral. Outward mask covering a void. She sank down on the bed. Her bandage had come undone again. Impossible to fasten it, impossible to make the sun come up. Darkness would overwhelm her like someone going down down down under an anaesthetic. Whatever time the clock said, it was always the middle of the night; hours to go to morning which never came. ‘O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark …’
‘Mum …’
Morna jumped, sat up. Her daughter in blue-striped man’s pyjamas and bare feet was maneouvring through the door with a heavy tray. ‘I brought your breakfast up.’
‘Th … Thank you, darling.’ Mustn’t cry. What was so tragic about toast and marmalade? Chris had boiled an egg as well. No eggs on the island, or only one.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’
Morna nodded, then shook her head. The breakfast had confused her. Her daughter couldn’t talk about the death, but she boiled eggs, copied verses. She had forgotten to bring a spoon. Impotence again. How could you eat a runny egg without one? Yet she couldn’t leave it. The breakfast was an offering, like the card.
‘Have a piece of toast,’ she offered. She wanted Chris to stay. So long as her daughter stood there, blue-striped and tangible, she blocked out some of the darkness, filled the void.
Chris shook her head. ‘I couldn’t eat this early. It’s hardly light.’
‘You were sweet to get up at all.’
‘That’s okay.’
Silence. Morna cut her egg in half, dripped it on to the toast, sprinkled salt on top. Eggs for new life and resurrection, salt for immortality. She shook out more salt. Chris had put the two-pound carton on the tray instead of the dainty silver cruet. She watched the tiny granules pile and overflow, submerging egg and toast.
‘Stop, Mum. What you doing? You can’t eat it like that.’
‘Yes, I can.’ Morna forced a mouthful down. Had to eat, or Chris would think she was grieving too intensely. Must think that anyway. The mouthful tasted bitter. Too much salt. Salt for friendship, David had told her, salt to bond them. Salt tears seeping into the corners of her mouth. Salt sea dividing them again.
‘Listen, Mum.’ Chris squatted on the bed. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you? I mean, you haven’t changed your mind? I can easily take the day off. Work’s so dozy at the moment, they’d hardly even miss me.’
‘No, really …’
‘You’re not driving, are you? It’s dangerous, isn’t it, when you’re taking pills and things?’
Sleeping pills, round and shiny-bright like Smarties, except they tasted bitter underneath their coating. ‘No, I’ll go by train. Day return.’ Cars were too vulnerable. Empty shells which you sat in all alone. Trains were more substantial and someone else looked after you—solid men in uniform. Timetables. Routine.
She knew the timetable almost off by heart, had studied it for hours, working out trains and times, planning to go up earlier in the week. She owed it to David’s parents to introduce herself, apologise for her rudeness on the phone. In a way, she longed to become one of the family, part of the death, recognised and valued as his closest friend, his … That was the trouble, though. They wouldn’t want a mistress for their son, least of all one who called them liars, banged the receiver down. Anyway, she somehow feared to meet them, feared their weight of grief which, added to her own, might crush her altogether. Better, perhaps, to go back to the island, talk to Cormack, make an appointment to see the mainland police, ask all the questions festering in her mind.
The trains had left without her. She couldn’t face either island or police, didn’t trust herself. She might spring at Cormack, hit him, disfigure him for life for lending his dinghy to a man who couldn’t cope with riptides, sudden squalls; attack the pathologist for not calling her to lay out David’s body, save it the indignities. She had phoned the local newspapers, wormed the story out of them, pieced the bits together, pretending to one to be a journalist herself, telling another she was an old school friend of David’s. There were still gaps in the account, but she had got the gist of it. David had made an expedition to the lonely rockstack where St Abban had spent the last months of his life, wishing to include it in his book. It was almost impossible to land there, since the seas were even more treacherous than round the island proper. Abban had managed with a second miracle. David, less blessed, had foundered. Cormack’s boat was spotted the next morning, floating upside down without its oars; David discovered later, and further out, without his …
Morna put her toast down. She could never have made it to the mortuary. It hurt enough, for Christ’s sake, when the images were only in her mind, without fleshing them out in bloody mangled fact. The funeral would be kinder—flowers and hymns and hats; polished wood confining anything putrid or unpleasant. She had agonised about whether she should go at all. One part of her craved to stay safe at home, hands clamped over her ears and eyes, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, denying not just the death, but the whole relationship. She was just a woman living quietly on her own, living for her mother and her daughter, someone stolid and sedate who had never experienced ecstasy or passion or that terrible despair which clawed you into pieces. The other part knew she would go, had to go, alone.
The train was late. Strong winds and sheeting rain had brought trees down on the line. Morna sat in the crowded carriage—windows steaming up from hot bodies and wet macs—watched children arguing, clambering on and off the seats, a toddler struggling with the wrappings on a tube of Polos, a woman knitting a huge hairy sweater, stopping every few minutes to puff at her cigarette, dropping ash and stitches. They had been delayed about an hour now. A few people were fidgeting and tutting; one man kept checking his watch and muttering to himself, but most of the other passengers merely slouched or dozed, accepting a cloudburst and a hold-up as simply bad luck. Only she was missing a funeral, the man she loved gliding through a trap-door in a crematorium and she not there to witness it.
She walked along to the toilet, paced to and fro in the tiny space outside it, wrinkling her nose at the smell which wafted out. Delays and children had made it foul, clogged it up. She almost lost her balance as the train lurched suddenly, started to move on again. She let out a brief prayer of relief, remained standing between the doors, thrown from side to side as it gathered speed. She couldn’t return to the carriage and face those chatting yawning clods who were behaving as if nobody had died, as if the world was just the same as it had been a week ago. She had felt irrationally angry with them, especially those in couples, furious with the way they took everything for granted—their lives, their happiness, their living breathing partners.
She slumped against the door, stared out through the glass. The train was streaking past a lake. Water again—but still and glassy water, not the seething boiling currents which lashed around the rockstack. How could David have dared to make that journey? Had he been seeking a hermit’s life himself, regarding the bare necessities of the spartan cottage as still too soft, too cushy? Or testing himself, pun
ishing himself—a perilous crossing as a penance for the sex? Or simply following the demands of scholarship? If he were writing about Abban, then he had to experience all the saint had known—or all that was remotely possible. David always stretched the possible. He had told her once that one must give everything one had to work, hold nothing back at all.
She rubbed roughly at her eyes, slapped the tears away. They were almost there, thank God; the train slowing down again, but this time at a station, her station—David’s. She leapt out, sprinted past the barrier, cursed when she saw the queue for taxis. She was tempted to jump it, dodge past that line of bumbling dodderers and nip into the first cab she could find. She could be at the church by the time they had struggled with their umbrellas and their pushchairs or given their slow laborious instructions to the drivers.
‘There’s a queue,’ someone said, stepping out of it to confront her, a large bossy woman loaded down with bags.
Morna slunk back to the tail end of the line, glancing round at the dingy station forecourt. This was David’s country—grimy buildings, wet and weeping roofs, a factory chimney pointing like a dirty finger on the skyline. Her own finger was neatly bandaged, tied and pinned by Chris; Kleenex in her pocket, aspirin in her handbag. Everything under control except the time.
‘Can you drive as fast as possible?’ she asked the driver fifteen minutes later, as she climbed into a cab, sat on the very edge of the seat as if trying to urge it on.
He didn’t answer. His radio was blaring, a phone-in problem programme. Someone’s son refused to pay towards his keep, although he was twenty-five and took all his meals at home. Morna checked her watch again. Wait until he’s drowned, she thought. You’ll save on food bills then. She rubbed a hole in the blurred and dripping window, peered out on a street of shops—Tesco, Woolworth’s, Fine Fare, Boots—all the familiar names, yet looking alien and foreign here; rain beating at the windows of a travel agent plastered with posters of the sun.
‘Is it far?’ she shouted, over a commercial break for Berni Inns.
‘Depends on the traffic.’ The driver coughed his fag end out, pulped it in the ashtray, lit another.
The shops petered out, replaced by mean and close-packed houses, then a strip of wasteland overgrown with weeds; next to that a garage with a ‘closed’ sign. The cab pulled up just beyond it. Morna grabbed her bag, jumped out. The church was thirties’ yellow brick facing directly on to the street as if no one could spare the room for a garden or a graveyard. No tree, no blade of grass.
‘Can you wait, please.’ She was so late now, the Requiem Mass must be almost at an end. She would need transport to the crematorium.
‘Okay. It’ll cost you, though.’
‘That’s all right.’
Morna slammed the door, stood motionless a moment. Now she was here, she could hardly bring herself to enter the church at all. It looked so ugly. No spire, no soaring arches, but everything cramped and skimped; black streaks on the brick as if the church had been weeping, a child with a dirty face which no one had time to wipe.
She pushed the heavy door, heard it grumble open, stared in shock at the empty interior. No one there at all. Nothing but plain wood pews, a simple altar. Perhaps this was the wrong church, even the wrong town. Had she somehow missed her station, got out too early or too late, muddled up the day? No—there were traces of a recent service, the smell of sweaty bodies and hot wax, the candles on the altar only recently extinguished, one still exhaling a thin blue wisp of smoke.
A glove was lying in the aisle, a woman’s glove in brown wool, without its fellow. She picked it up, felt it damp and limp, stood there with it dangling from her fingers. She ought to hurry. The taxi was waiting. She could still make the crematorium if she didn’t hang around. She took a step towards the door, stopped, swung back again. She felt sick, faint, hot and chilled at once. David had been here. His coffin had rested on those trestles, his friends and family gathered in the pews. Almost in a daze, she walked slowly up the aisle, knelt in the front row, the one reserved for closest kin, chief mourners. A Mass book was lying on the bench, still open at the funeral service, and on top of it, a pale pink handkerchief edged with lace, sodden and screwed up. Morna smoothed it out, found an ‘M’ embroidered on one corner. ‘M’ for Mother—relic of David’s mother’s grief? What was her name? Had David even told her? A Catholic name for certain. Margaret, perhaps, or Marion, or Mary. Morna held the hankie in her hand, tried to weigh the sorrow in it. How could such a flimsy scrap of fabric ever staunch such grief? ‘M’ for Morna. She dropped it in her handbag with the glove. Bits of David’s funeral—the nearest she could get to bits of David.
She glanced down at the Mass book. Paper thin as airmail, print so small it hurt your eyes. ‘May perpetual light shine upon him …’
Perpetual light, perpetual light. What did it mean? She had never known at Junior School, thought it was a technical term describing the type of light—paraffin lamp, electric light, perpetual light. Now it was simply lies. David was in the dark beneath the sea. Even this church was dark, rain drumming on its narrow grudging windows, shadows furled in corners like old rags. She went on reading, ‘The Lord is compassion and love …’ Why did they keep fibbing? Eternal life. Eternal rest. Impossible to rest on a raging sea with only the wind as lullaby and the cruel white fingers of the waves rocking you awake again every time you closed your eyes. Eternal rest. Eternal pain. She squeezed her septic finger, went on pressing, hard. Must localise the pain.
She longed to be a Bea so that the words should have some meaning and she could pray, beseech a merciful God to turn death to sleep, death to victory. When she was a child, God had lived in churches, answered prayers, or at least referred the problems to His saints. The saints were all around her—the same standard ugly statues she had known at school. There was St Anthony, who shared a name with David, complacent on his pedestal with the Christchild and a lily. He was the patron saint of finding things, had often helped at school, bringing to light mislaid history books or sweeping gloves and fountain pens into the safety of Lost Property. Could he not assist again, bring David back, locate his missing pieces?
She closed her eyes, saw Cormack’s dinghy, still wrong way up, but nailed down like a coffin. Too late now. She stumbled to her feet. No time to pray in any case. That meter in the taxi was ticking over, counting out every wasted minute. There would be nothing left at all of David if she didn’t rush to the crematorium, catch the last part of the service.
She slid out of the pew, genuflected, remained on one knee, staring at the small dark circles soaking into the floor. Her own tears staining it. She tried to disperse them with her shoe. Nothing left of David anyway—only scars and tears. Empty rituals couldn’t bring him back. She stared at the Paschal candle with its dead black wick. It would have been alight throughout the Mass, three foot of white wax sham, blazing by the coffin—the symbol of resurrection now itself extinguished. David had lit candles on the island as emblems of the sun, representing the victory of light over darkness, spring over winter, life over death. Spring had come—daffodils and catkins flaunting in soft Weybridge, the convalescent sun growing stronger every day—but he himself had perished, making mock of his own ritual, confusing all the seasons as she, uprooted, sank back into winter dark and cold again.
‘David,’ she said, aloud. She had to try her voice out, make sure it was still working. Nothing was certain any more. Things could disappear, disintegrate, simply drift away. There was an echo in the church which pounced on the word, distorted it, turned it into a booming like the sea. ‘D … aaa … v … i … d.’ Empty endless sound.
She got up from her knees, walked right up to the altar. You could never pass that barrier at school, not if you were a woman and a secular. The little gilded rail kept you back, kept you humble and unsanctified. No rails now, though. Only wooden trestles for a coffin. She stared at them in shock. They had supported David’s body. David dead. Dead body. Had he wanted to die, perhap
s? She clutched at the wood, mouth dry. The thought was horrifying. She had suspected it of Abban himself, but never ever of David. Yet wasn’t he the same intensely spiritual type who might weary of this mundane imperfect life, long for transition to some higher state? Her legs seemed shaky under her. She crouched down with her head between her knees, frightened she might faint. Better rest a moment, try and calm herself. She stretched out her legs, let her head fall back, lay flat on the floor between the trestles. Her breathing quietened. She was lying where David had lain only moments before, occupying his space, soaking up the last dregs and crumbs of him. She closed her eyes, saw dark again, dark ocean. Perpetual dark. She could feel herself sinking back and down, returning to the dark womb of the sea, the troubled self snuffed out. Merging. Nothingness. End of grief and striving. ‘Their land-longings shall be sea-longings …’ Is that what David had craved—to lose his restlessness, the sharp and jagged corners of his individuality, his impatience with himself, his frustration with his gross unruly body?
The Stillness the Dancing Page 54