by James Wood
One of the religious thinkers I had read instructed me that grief was not a properly religious emotion. All the world, except angels, must die, and to be distressed at the death of a person is merely to mourn the fact that your loved one was not born an angel. Certainly my father was no angel, but why should I not mourn him? I crossed the room to the dim corner where a table was set with many candles. I lit one and stood still for several minutes: I lit it for my father, for my mother, for my childhood, for my wife. The small flame flickered, retreated, and then remembered itself, filling out with light in a little golden rage.
The funeral was held two days later. Canon Palliser, who was taking the service, asked me to deliver a eulogy. My mother agreed with his idea, and I liked the notion very much. So on the eve of the funeral I stayed up, and spent all night madly writing: I had the idea of combining a farewell to Father with some of the material from my BAG, and was unsure if a proper fusion had been achieved. Deprived of sleep, oddly excited (I would share a little of my BAG with everyone for the first time), I kept on returning in my mind to the only other funeral I had attended, my grandmother’s, when I had disgraced myself in the cemetery and Father made me stand next to him at the graveside.
Jane had arrived the night before from London, and together with Karl we accompanied Mother at ten o’clock in the morning from the vicarage to the church. I clutched eight pages of densely handwritten paper. Mother gave out a little cry as we entered, because the church was completely full—the “census-gathering” had come early this year. It seemed that the entire village was there. Paul Deddum had come; he stood behind the pew as if he were going to serve drinks. Shy, reclusive Sam Spedding—pale, bespectacled, and dressed in a green bomber jacket—was standing next to his mother, who had probably forced him to appear. Terry Upsher was there; he looked very sad. Miss Ogilvie, with the three canes, was also there, and Tim Biffen from Durham, and Mr. Norrington, who had pompously donned a black armband. He had the look of a sinister invalid. Susan Perez-Temple was standing next to a man I did not know. At the front were Colin and Belinda Thurlow, with Max. Colin had the calm, neutral stare of someone attending a secondrate lecture. Belinda, I noticed angrily, was disgracefully untidy; she seemed to be wearing her poorest gardening shoes. While on the subject of shoes, I should say I was wearing brand-new ones at father’s funeral, as Socrates is at the beginning of the Symposium. They were a good Italian pair, bought in Knightsbridge with the last hundred pounds of my research grant, and saved for the right occasion—which had never come, since Jane and I had been going out less and less in the months before our separation in December.
Mother, Jane, Karl, and I took our seats. The coffin lay in the middle of the nave, at the front. Canon Palliser began:
“We are here to say goodbye to Peter, Peter who illuminated all our lives, who tended to his flock like no other priest I have ever known, and who was loved in return, not only in this village, or this county, but wherever he went. Everyone who met Peter loved him. I know that there are many friends and family here today, and that each of us was touched in some way by Peter’s faith, hope, and charity.” Palliser spoke of Peter’s “gift of simplicity,” and the “quiet certainty” of his faith, and I found myself resisting his pieties. Was Father’s faith so simple? I remembered the jokey notice stuck to his Bible: “This is an advance copy sent in lieu of a proof.” It surely hadn’t been just a joke, but some hint of anxiety, of complication, of philosophical sophistication. Yet at the Christmas gathering Tim Biffen had said that Peter was not “wily,” that he would certainly say, like Job, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” I was thinking these thoughts when Jane nudged me with her elbow. It was my turn to walk up the small church’s nave and deliver the eulogy.
I was a little shaky on my legs as I walked towards the pulpit; clearly the ghost of my old adolescent self-consciousness—that horrid era of being “born again”—was teasing me. I could feel a hundred faces appraising my back. Then I climbed the five steps, and turned, and saw Jane beautifully looking at me, and poor Mother with her eyes closed, and Max rubbing his glasses, and Colin Thurlow superciliously waiting, as if for a student’s viva voce.
I had decided to begin, as my teacher Mr. Duffy would have advised, “with a bang”—in this case, a joke:
“I feel, standing here, a little like a man I once read about in the newspaper who won a competition: he was given one minute to remove as much money as he could from a bank vault, money which he would be allowed to keep. Instead, the excitement caused him to hyperventilate, and he collapsed.” There was a rustling amongst the congregation—the sound of laughter anxiously displaced onto movement.
“Like that man, I don’t know if this is a moment of victory or defeat. I mean—for both my father, and for me. When I was a boy, I often dreamed of walking up into this pulpit and delivering a fiery sermon—the kind of sermon, thankfully, my father never gave—and here I am, standing in the pulpit of his very church, delivering, in effect, a sermon, and my father is not here to witness it. Like the man who won that competition, I have simultaneously lost the competition, too. I have the money, as it were, but I don’t get to keep it, and so it is worthless, ashes in my mouth.
“A great idol of mine, the free-spirited and freethinking Heinrich Heine, wrote that Martin Luther forgot that Christianity demands impossible things from those who follow it. But Catholicism did understand this, said Heine, and had worked out a comfortable contract between spirit and matter, between spiritualism and sensualism. In that sense, and that sense only, Father was a Catholic. No one in this parish ever felt that he was being judged by Peter Bunting. He used to joke about the Ten Commandments that it was not very impressive simply to observe the ten commonest elements of human nature and put ‘not’ in front of them. Can’t you hear him say that?”
There were some awkward laughs—I heard Max’s slow chuckle—and I felt, now, that I “had” my audience. At UCL I was never important enough to give a lecture, but had always imagined doing so in the big lecture room there. But here everyone was four feet below me, sitting like willing babies. Colin, Belinda, and Max Thurlow were staring up at me. The prospect of all those babyish tilted faces went to my head.
“Nevertheless, he and I did not agree about everything. Fundamentally, we were opposed. I am a very theological philosopher—as some of you may know!—and he was a somewhat philosophical theologian, and yet the width of our overlap was small. Yes, I must be honest here: it was small and grey. Did we ever talk about our differences? Only once, about two months ago, and it was frankly too little, too late. My father was an optimist, as many of you gratefully recall, but I am not an optimist. Schopenhauer said, towards the end of his life, that a philosophy where you do not hear between the pages the tears, the wailing and gnashing of teeth and the fearful tumult of general mutual murder, is no philosophy. I agree with that statement. My father by contrast believed in the calming grace of God, as well he should. I apologize, by the way, for all these necessary allusions, something that I have inherited from Peter Bunting, of course. We both of us at various times resembled the fabled scribe, Denys the Alexandrian, mentioned in various ancient texts, who is said to have received orders from heaven to read all the books in the world. Obviously, I am still following those orders, even though I don’t believe in heaven; my father, some of you may choose to believe, is now catching up by reading all those books in heaven.”
But now there was complete silence in the church. I looked around, for ballast. But Max would not let me catch his eye, and Jane was fiddling in her handbag, and both Belinda and Colin were looking down at the floor. Tim Biffen was overcome by a convenient coughing fit. I sensed that my audience had turned against me, that I had alienated them. Why? I was being frank, for sure, but wasn’t that a virtue? It seemed essential, at that moment, to speak the truth, to tell my father certain things I had not been able to say to him. Holding my sheets of paper with a sweating grip, I continued:
“Anyway, I ha
ve spent the last year writing something which I have provisionally entitled ‘The Book Against God.’ A big project. In recent months, up here alone and without a wife, I have had a lot more time than usual! Too much time. One of the arguments I make in my Book Against God is that life is essentially what I call a bowl of tears. In some people the bowl overflows; in others, it seems hardly full at all. Yet all suffer. Now, my father did suffer, I think, even though he used to joke that he was absurdly happy, that unlike most men he was seeking for the key to unhappiness. It may surprise you, but my father was no angel, that’s for sure—”
But I stopped because Jane had left her pew and was walking towards the pulpit. Her tightly persuaded ponytail swayed ominously. At the same moment, Canon Palliser left his seat and moved towards me. He and Jane converged at the foot of the pulpit steps. It was Granny’s funeral all over again! Jane beckoned to me, and I descended reluctantly.
“Tommy, darling, you’re overwrought,” she whispered. “You can’t go on with this. Please make it stop.”
Canon Palliser added more pacifically that there were several parishioners who wanted to say a word, and that time should be given to them, as well as to me. Perhaps I could finish my remarks at the graveside, or in the vicarage at lunch?
I was dumbstruck. I thought my eulogy had been going well; it balanced respect for my father with respect for the truth. I glanced from Jane and Canon Palliser to the congregation. Some were now whispering. Max had his head in his hands. My mother’s eyes found mine, and she gently summoned me with her little finger to return to the pew. She looked very sad, and I knew I had to obey her. But I was furious with Jane for initiating this humiliating course of events. Turning to the congregation, I said: “I think I am being told by various … organizers here that I have gone on too long—that’s what years of academic seminars will do to you! Please forgive me. All of you know how much my father meant to me.” And I returned, boiling with rage, to my pew. My mother took my hand and held it throughout the rest of the service, and I was grateful to her. It felt oddly familiar; the touch of her hand reminded me of something I could not quite recall.
Once the service was over, I learned, outside, that Jane’s version of the events inside had taken hold. I was apparently “overwrought”—Jane’s word was repeated by Mother—and this explained my rambling, unfinished speech. Everyone assumed that I had been forced to make the speech. Susan Perez-Temple approached, and quietly said:
“We all understand why you couldn’t go on there in the church. Personally, I disapprove of this modern tradition of children giving so-called ‘eulogies’ for their parents. It asks far too much of them at a very vulnerable moment. But don’t get me started. You should be allowed the privacy of your grief.”
I was most struck by Terry’s sadness. For once, his high voice was quiet, almost averagely pitched. He, too, felt sorry for me.
“It’s not proper that you had to make that speech. You cannat control yourself when yor da’s just gone. Remember me at my da’s own service?”
“Thanks, Terry. But, you know, I wanted to make that speech. No one forced me.”
“Aye, but it’s not right that you had to make it, still.”
I didn’t argue with him, but again thanked him. Terry lingered.
“Mary and I wanted him to marry us, now we have to get someone else.” Then he added, mysteriously: “I’m ganna push on with that shed, anyways.”
I was still angry with Jane for marching up to the pulpit in her most imperious manner. I was determined to reproach her, but first we had to bury my father. We stood in the northwest corner of the churchyard, where three closely planted cherry trees form a mesh and shade the grass. It was a clear, sunny day, the best kind of May weather. The trees were at the end of their brief bloom, but still full enough to frisk the sunlight before its entrance, which dappled us. The coffin was lowered, and as it hit the ground I thought of how many hundreds of unredeemed corpses lay around us. Terrible to contemplate: hundreds of dead souls, all or most of them believing in the prospect of heaven, and none of them getting any nearer to heaven, as far as I could see, than this piece of dead ground. Canon Palliser began to speak. Suddenly a mild wind blew, and hundreds of little white cherry blossoms, wingless white cloths, fell. They were missionaries sent to convert the ground to white. My mind wandered as the words sounded: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another … We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord … O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? …”
The coffin was docked, the earth was shovelled in. This would not be a bad place for Buntings to rot. Peter had a favourite Sundershall anecdote about this graveyard. In the middle of the nineteenth century a Sundershall farmer, Enoch Stott, was courting a local girl. But he was shy and had not yet put the question to her. So he took her for a walk in the churchyard, and said to her, “My folks lie here, Mary; would you like to lie there with them someday?” She took the hint and married him, said Peter. And indeed, the Stotts had a cluster of graves at the back, behind the church. I smiled through my angry tears as I remembered Father’s pleasure at this story.
I cornered Jane at the funeral lunch. She looked at me defiantly with enormous dark eyes.
“What were you playing at?”
“What were you playing at? What was that speech?” she asked.
“I’m … I’m furious,” I said impotently.
“There’s no monopoly on anger, you know. Why can’t we be furious with you?”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Well, Max said to me just now, ‘Did Tom come to praise or to bury his father?’ So I’m not the only one to think that speech a total disgrace.”
“Well, well, Max agrees with you, how very nice. You and Max. That explains why he’s been avoiding me since the end of the service.”
“Max agrees with me, and I’m sure your poor mother does, too.”
“Actually, she has been very sweet to me, unlike you,” I said.
“Don’t be such a baby.” Guests were glancing around at the frozen intensity of our postures and our fierce whispering.
“Come here,” said Jane. We walked out of the dining room. “Come upstairs.”
We entered the double bedroom we had shared at Christmas. “No, not this one,” insisted Jane, and so we went to my childhood room.
“Tommy, I stopped you speaking because you were embarrassing yourself. You were ranting. And then, when you mentioned our marriage, and got onto how Peter was no angel—”
“That was the beginning of a reference to a lovely sentence by a seventeenth-century theologian, but you stopped me before I could finish it! It’s all about how we shouldn’t mourn people, because their death proves only that they are not angels. The point is that none of us is an angel.”
“I don’t care if it was a reference to Gandhi, Einstein, and Mother Teresa rolled into one. It sounded as if you were picking a fight with the coffin. People were laughing.”
“I wanted them to laugh,” I protested.
“Laughing at you. Did you want that? Well, I don’t.”
“Janey, maybe you’ll find this odd, but I spoke those words because I wanted to be truthful. Don’t you understand that everything else in my life is a lie? The Book Against God isn’t a lie. I wanted to tell the truth to my father about my lack of faith. I was speaking to him, not to anyone else.”
“But, Tommy darling”—she was softening—“you, of all people, believe that your father is dead and gone. He couldn’t hear you, and we could. And your speech was awful, awful. You mentioned our marriage. You lie at the wrong times, and then you tell the truth at the wrong times, and it’s all such a terrible mess.”
I sat down on th
e bed and looked at Jane.
“Do you love me?”
“I love you very much.”
“What do I have to do to make you want to live with me again?” I asked.
Jane sighed; her thin chest rose and fell.
“I can’t live with a liar.”
“Of course not.”
“I can’t live with a liar, and you are a liar. Admit that.”
“I am a liar.”
“Furthermore, you would have to be honest with me about Christmas, about that disgusting incident. And you would have to be honest with me about children. Do you want them?”
“Well, I can tell you—”
Jane stopped me.
“I don’t want to hear it now, and now is not the place. I don’t want suspiciously easy fluency. Now everything has changed. Now you have to think a bit before you spout words. Yes, I want you to think, and then prove to me over the next few months that you can be honest with me, honest about absolutely everything, from the highest matter to the lowest. Above all about children. I’m not interested in philosophical truth—all that Schopenhauer mush you were quoting in the church. I want daily, practical, ordinary, living truth.”
“And over these next few months, however long this process takes, will I live with you or not?” I asked.
There was a long silence.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea, do you?” said Jane, gently.
“So when do I get the chance to be honest with you if I don’t live with you?”
“We’ll meet regularly, we’ll have lunch and dinner, we’ll go to concerts, we’ll do most things except actually live together. Think of it as several months of probation.”